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Neo-Conservatives, Foreign Policy Establishment Push to Keep U.S. Military Involvement in Afghan War Going

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Neo-conservatives and foreign policy establishment figures unsurprisingly blasted the Biden Administration for its plans to continue the Trump administration’s drawdown of American forces from Afghanistan, and they issued dire warnings if President Joe Biden were to go through with it.

House GOP Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) released a statement Tuesday that said the decision “abandons our global leadership position, and plays into our adversaries’ hands.”

“President Biden’s decision hands the Taliban and al Qaeda a propaganda victory, abandons our global leadership position, and plays into our adversaries’ hands,” said Cheney, a critic of former President Donald Trump and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.

Cheney — along with House Democrat Rep. Jason Crow (CO) — fought to prevent the Trump Administration from drawing down U.S. forces from Afghanistan, sponsoring legislation to make a drawdown more difficult.

Max Boot, a Never Trumper and champion of the 2003 Iraq War, penned an op-ed in the Washington Post that warned of a fall-of-Saigon scenario. “If Biden pulls out as planned in September absent a binding peace settlement, he will be consigning them to the same fate as our abandoned South Vietnamese allies. The fall of Kabul could be as ugly as the fall of Saigon,” he wrote.

He also warned of a “massive civil war” if U.S. troops leave, despite Afghanistan being involved in a civil war at least since 2001, if not since 1979. According to the Brown University’s Watson Institute, about 157,000 have been killed in the war since 2001, including more than 43,000 civilians. The war has cost the U.S. more than an estimated $2.2 trillion, according to the Institute.

Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who served as CIA director and commander of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, also slammed the decision. “Ending U.S. involvement in an endless war doesn’t end the endless war. It just ends our involvement. And I fear that this war is going to get worse,” he said at a recent event, according to Defense One.

A number of Republican senators also criticized the decision. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) echoed Cheney, calling the decision an “abdication” of American leadership, in a Senate floor speech Tuesday:

New reporting suggests the Biden administration plans to turn tail and abandon the fight in Afghanistan. Precipitously withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan is a grave mistake. It is a retreat in the face of an enemy that has not yet been vanquished, an abdication of American leadership.

Leaders in both parties, including me, offered criticism when the prior administration floated the concept of a reckless withdrawal from Syria and  Afghanistan. Those same voices in both parties should be equally concerned about the Biden administration’s announcement today.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), one of the Senate’s leading hawks, called the decision “a disaster in the making” and “dumber than dirt.”

“A full withdrawal from Afghanistan is dumber than dirt and devilishly dangerous. President Biden will have, in essence, cancelled an insurance policy against another 9/11,” he said in a statement, pushing for a residual counterterrorism force as an “insurance policy.”

At least one Republican issued a statement in support of Biden’s decision — libertarian Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY):

It’s great when we can find places to agree. I’m grateful President Biden is keeping President Trump’s plan to leave Afghanistan, even with a delay until fall. The time to bring our troops home is now or as soon as possible. Enough endless wars.

Democrats refrained from criticizing Biden’s decision, with only those in support of it issuing statements, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (NY), Dick Durbin (IL), Chris Coons (DE), Christopher Murphy (CT), Elizabeth Warren (MA), and Bernie Sanders (I-VT).

Coons criticized former President Donald Trump for trying to negotiate a U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan almost two years ago exactly.

“I agree that we should not fully withdraw from Afghanistan until we’ve got with conditions on the ground that would prevent it from becoming once again a haven for terrorists who might attack us as happened on 9/11,” he said on CBS News’ Face the Nation on April 9, 2019.

Although it seemed unclear whether Biden would adopt Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan, he ended up doing so after a few months of deliberation.

A Biden senior administration official said Tuesday the withdrawal would be completed by September 11, 2021 — the 20th anniversary of the war. Trump negotiated a May 1 withdrawal with the Taliban, but Biden officials suggested in recent weeks that deadline would not be met largely due to logistical reasons.

There are approximately 3,500 U.S. troops currently in Afghanistan. At the height of the war, which began in late 2001, there were more than 100,000 U.S. troops in the country.

U.S. troops first went into Afghanistan after al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden planned and masterminded the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from a safe haven in the mountainous border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan. U.S. forces succeeded in quickly toppling the Taliban leadership in Afghanistan that granted bin Laden safe haven. However, as then-President George W. Bush turned the U.S.’s attention to the Iraq War, the Taliban regained strength and mounted an insurgency that has lasted over the last 20 years.

In an effort to end the war with a victory, the Obama administration ordered a troop surge to Afghanistan in 2009, but simultaneously announced a withdrawal by 2011 — which many experts argued undercut the surge by incentivizing the Taliban to wait the U.S. out. Obama ended up reversing his decision, leaving office in 2016 with 8,600 troops in the country.

Trump temporarily bumped up the number to 14,600, but by the end of his term, left office with approximately 3,500 in the country and a peace agreement with the Taliban to withdraw the remaining forces by May 1.

Experts from Defense Priorities who support ending the war pushed back against criticism that withdrawing U.S. forces from Afghanistan meant that the U.S. was abdicating its global leadership role.

“The opposite is true. It just increases our global commitment to our security and that of our allies,” said Retired Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis, senior fellow and military expert. Davis added:

Most people around the world recognize we should have been out Afghanistan a long time ago. They’re scratching their heads and wondering why would we continue year after year in a failing process that has no prospect of success…[Now] we’re going to be able to pay more attention to other things around the world.

Will Ruger, Trump’s nominee for U.S. ambassador of Afghanistan, said:

The goal of American foreign policy is not leadership…it’s to secure [U.S.] vital interests. You don’t aim towards leadership, you aim towards making us safer, providing for the conditions of our prosperity, and protecting our liberal democratic system at home.

George Washington University adjunct lecturer and Defense Priorities Policy Director Ben Friedman said, “Really I think these are just arguments made as a last ditch attempt to extend wars that people are afraid will end.”

Marine veteran Gil Barndollar added: “I don’t think we’re inspiring any admiration or even respect from most of our allies and partners by continuing a fruitless and intractable war in Afghanistan.”

Follow Breitbart News’s Kristina Wong on Twitter or on Facebook. 

Fact Check: Joe Biden Claims, Falsely, He Vowed to Pursue Osama bin Laden to 'Gates of Hell'

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CLAIM: President Joe Biden claimed that he would pursue Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to the “gates of Hell.”

VERDICT: MOSTLY FALSE. John McCain said that, not Biden, who opposed the bin Laden raid. Biden used the phrase for ISIS.

In a nationally-televised address from the White House on Wednesday, President Biden announced that the U.S. would pull all troops out of Afghanistan by Sep. 11, 2021 — twenty years after the 9/11 terror attacks planned by bin Laden from the country, then under Taliban control. (It was also a goal President Donald Trump had committed to achieve by May 1, 2021, the tenth anniversary of the mission that killed bin Laden.)

Biden’s remarks, billed by the White House (without irony) as the “way forward in Afghanistan,” said (emphasis added):

I believed that our presence in Afghanistan should be focused on the reason we went in the first place: to ensure Afghanistan would not be used as a base from which to attack our homeland again.  We did that.  We accomplished that objective.

I said, among — with others, we’d follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell if need be.  That’s exactly what we did, and we got him.  It took us close to 10 years to put President Obama’s commitment to — into form.  And that’s exactly what happened; Osama bin Laden was gone.

That was 10 years ago.  Think about that.  We delivered justice to bin Laden a decade ago, and we’ve stayed in Afghanistan for a decade since.  Since then, our reasons for remaining in Afghanistan are becoming increasingly unclear, even as the terrorist threat that we went to fight evolved.

It was McCain, who ran against Obama and Biden in 2008, who was well-known for his “gates of Hell” promise:

Biden, notably, opposed the daring raid by Navy Seals that succeeded in taking out the Al Qaeda leader in 2011.

He later recalled telling Obama: “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there.”

Biden then used — or copied — the phrase in 2014, when vowing to pursue the so-called “Islamic State,” or ISIS (referred to, doggedly, as ISIL by the Obama administration.

“When people harm Americans we don’t retreat, we don’t forget. We take care of those who are grieving and when that’s finished, they should know we will follow them to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice. Because hell is where they will reside,” Biden said in New Hampshire.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

China Hints Its Military Activity near Taiwan a 'Rehearsal' for Invasion

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China’s latest military exercise near Taiwan on Monday “could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation,” China’s state-run Global Times suggested Tuesday.

“The Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) conducted an exercise near the island of Taiwan on Monday with the largest number of warplanes ever recorded, which could be a rehearsal of a reunification-by-force operation,” the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) mouthpiece wrote on April 13.

China’s PLA deployed 25 aircraft to fly over Taiwan, breaching its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), on April 12, Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense (MND) said in a statement.

The PLA’s exercise included “14 J-16 and four J-10 multirole fighters, four H-6K strategic bombers, two KQ-200 anti-submarine warfare (ASW)-capable aircraft, as well as one KJ-500 airborne early warning and control (AEW&C) platform,” the military website Janes reported Monday, citing the MND’s statement.

The air sortie was the PLA’s largest near Taiwan since the sovereign nation began publicly reporting PLA aircraft movements over the island in September 2020.

“The number of PLA warplanes featured in the [April 12] exercise was a record since Taiwan’s defense authorities began to release information about PLA aircraft activities in the region on September 17, 2020, surpassing the previous record of 20 on March 26. The number of J-16s, a powerful fighter jet, was also the biggest of all exercises,” the Global Times boasted on Tuesday.

“The exercise could be a rehearsal of its [the PLA’s] combat plan over the Taiwan island, and it could feature air superiority seizure, and attack on land and maritime targets, including warships of interfering foreign countries,” Song Zhongping, a Chinese military expert and TV commentator, told the newspaper.

The PLA’s record-breaking exercise near Taiwan on April 12 was a direct response to the U.S. issuing new guidelines meant to “deepen” its unofficial support of Taiwan nation two days earlier on April 10.

“The exercise conducted by the PLA served as a warning to Taiwan secessionists and the US after the two had made a series of provocative moves,” the Global Times wrote on Monday.

“On Saturday [April 10], the US Department of State announced new guidelines to encourage US government engagement with the island that reflects their ‘deepening unofficial relationship.’ Officials on the island recently also claimed that the island is drawing a line 30 nautical miles away from the island, attempting to deny PLA aircraft approaches,” the newspaper noted.

Beijing considers Taiwan a renegade province and has vowed to reunify the island, located off China’s southeast coast, with mainland China by force if necessary.

100+ Chibok Girls Still Missing 7 Years After Boko Haram Kidnapping

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More than 100 schoolgirls abducted by the Nigerian Islamic terror group Boko Haram in April 2014 remain missing, Amnesty International said Wednesday in a statement commemorating the seventh anniversary of the kidnapping in northeastern Nigeria’s Chibok village.

“Today marks seven years since 279 schoolgirls were abducted by the armed group Boko Haram in Chibok,” the human rights organization wrote on April 14. “Although most escaped or were later released, more than 100 girls remain in captivity.”

The exact number of schoolgirls still missing remains unclear. Nigeria’s Sahara Reporters news site on Tuesday wrote that 112 Chibok girls remain unaccounted for, while Christian Today reported Wednesday that the whereabouts of 111 girls remain unknown.

Boko Haram members stormed Chibok’s Government Girls Secondary School on April 14, 2014, forcibly seizing 276 mostly Christian girls aged 12-17. The terrorists loaded the schoolgirls onto trucks outside the school and drove them to the nearby Sambisa Forest, Boko Haram’s historic hideout. Some of the girls escaped during the drive to the forest, while others managed to slip away from their kidnappers after enduring weeks, months, and even years of captivity.

Boko Haram is a jihadist terror group based in northeastern Nigeria’s Borno State, home to Chibok village and the Sambisa Forest. The group has waged an Islamist insurgency across northern Nigeria and the neighboring countries of Chad, Cameroon, and Niger since the early 2000s with the goal of establishing an Islamic caliphate in the region. Boko Haram translates loosely to “Western education is forbidden” and the group has particularly targeted schools as part of an effort to eradicate Western culture from Nigeria. Boko Haram vowed to kill any escaped Chibok girls if they dared to return to school. A select number of the escaped Chibok girls did just that, bravely pursuing a Western education through a program sponsored by the Nigerian government at the American University of Nigeria (AUN) in the eastern city of Yola.

Open Doors, a mission supporting persecuted Christians, reported on April 14 that “39 of the girls so far released remain in school at the American University of Nigeria, 17 are studying in the US, two have graduated, and one has become a pilot there.”

“We thank God [for this news] after all that they have been through. However, some of the girls are still dealing with serious trauma, and have been unable to face returning to school,” Yakubu Nkeki Maina, chairman of the Chibok Parents’ Association, told Open Doors.

Sahara Reporters published an open letter by the Chibok Parents’ Association on April 13 in which the group urged the Nigerian federal government to “report on the whereabouts of Halima Ali, a captive Chibok girl who was recently able to speak to her father and other family members on the phone and who was allegedly in the hands of the Nigerian authorities but has not been heard from again.”

The parents’ group referred to Halima Ali Maiyanga, now 23 years old. Halima phoned her father on January 28 and “told him she had been rescued by the Nigerian army, but [her father] Maiyanga said he did not know her exact whereabouts or if she was alone or with more of her kidnapped former classmates,” the Thomson Reuters Foundation reported on February 1.

A Nigerian army spokesman denied that Halima had been “rescued” from Boko Haram by Nigerian soldiers in a February 1 press statement.

“We do not have any of the Chibok girls in our custody, so if they are not with us we have nothing to confirm again,” Nigerian Chief of Defense Staff Lucky Irabor told reporters on January 31 according to Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper.

China Suggests Japan Should Ship Fukushima Nuclear Waste to America

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The Chinese Foreign Ministry on Wednesday opposed Japan’s proposed release of contaminated wastewater from the Fukushima reactor and suggested shipping the radioactive waste to the United States instead.

“Japan and the U.S. claim that the treated nuclear wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant is in accordance with international safety standards and even drinkable, then why don’t they keep the water for themselves? Or maybe ship it to the U.S.?” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying sneered on Twitter.

Hua said in lengthy remarks Tuesday that Japan’s plan for releasing Fukushima wastewater was “highly irresponsible” and demanded international supervision:

Despite doubts and opposition from home and abroad, Japan has unilaterally decided to release the Fukushima nuclear wastewater into the sea before exhausting all safe ways of disposal and without fully consulting with neighboring countries and the international community. This is highly irresponsible and will severely affect human health and the immediate interests of people in neighboring countries.

The oceans are mankind’s shared property. How the wastewater from the Fukushima nuclear power plant is handled is not merely a domestic issue for Japan. We strongly urge the Japanese side to face up to its responsibility, follow the science, fulfill its international obligations and duly respond to the serious concerns of the international community, neighboring countries and its own people. It should reevaluate the issue and refrain from wantonly discharging the wastewater before reaching consensus with all stakeholders and the IAEA through full consultations. 

China will continue to watch closely the developments of the matter together with the international community and reserves the right to make further reactions.

Japan announced Tuesday that it plans to begin releasing over a million metric tons of treated radioactive water from the Fukushima Daiichi plant in two years.

The plant was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami in 2011. Wastewater has been accumulating in gigantic tanks on the site for the past decade, and the tanks are projected to be full sometime in late 2022.

“Before the discharge, the water in tanks will also be sufficiently diluted so that the concentration of tritium will be much lower than Japan’s national regulatory standards, which is compliant with international standards,” the office of Japanese Prime Minister Suga Yoshihide stated Tuesday, adding that the tritium in the water “emits weak radiation” and presents a “very low” risk to health.

Other Japanese officials said all chemicals employed in the treatment process would fall within international standards, and the release would be supervised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which said there has been no adverse environmental impact from comparable previous releases.

Despite these reassurances, the release plan is reportedly unpopular in both Fukushima and Japan at large. South Korea, which has strained diplomatic relations with Japan at the moment, has also objected to the release; Japanese officials pushed back by accusing the South Koreans of hypocrisy because they routinely release treated wastewater with much higher levels of tritium from their four heavy-water nuclear reactors.

Chinese state media lashed out at Japan on Tuesday, calling the Fukushima plan a “shameful decision,” accusing the IAEA of having “no experience” that qualified it to approve of the plan and jeering the United States for supporting the allegedly untrustworthy government in Tokyo.

The state-run Global Times on Tuesday said the U.S. has “indulged” Japan in a “wicked geopolitical performance” because, unlike Japan’s immediate neighbors, it doesn’t care about environmental damage to the Pacific Rim.

“But the US may have miscalculated. With the world’s strongest currents along the coast of Fukushima, radioactive materials could spread to the entire Pacific Ocean. It is purely illusionary and shortsighted for the US to think it could detach itself from the possible crisis,” the Global Times warned.

Another Global Times editorial cited South Korea’s opposition, and criticism from some Japanese commentators, to encourage other Asia-Pacific nations to “work together to make sure the release is under international supervision, and reserve the right to sue Japan according to relevant international laws once Tokyo’s act causes damages and pollution.”

The Chinese Communist paper claimed U.S. support for Tokyo proves the American concept of a “rules-based international order” is “actually a lie which only serves US strategic interests but ignores the concern of other countries, even US allies like South Korea.”

“Japan dares to make a deal with the US on the nuclear matter which will impact the marine environment shared by the world, so Tokyo is unqualified to ask the international community for trust, and its ‘transparency’ is not convincing,” the Global Times huffed.