It goes without saying the United States never should have tried to turn Afghanistan into a South-Central Asian San Francisco. Yet the effort did leave Americans with the most indelible symbol of the Deep State’s latest foreign policy failure: a photo of the “Rainbow Pride” flag over the U.S. embassy in Kabul. So after 20 years and $2 trillion in direct costs as of July, the only things Americans have to show for the war are more than 2,000 war dead — and a banner that celebrates homosexual sodomy that flapped in the zephyrs from the Hindu Kush.

Be that as it may, President Biden was right to withdraw U.S. troops. The hemorrhaging had to be stopped. When he said not another American fighting man should die in that God-forsaken wasteland, he sounded like Pat Buchanan or Ron Paul. The problem is that the mentally handicapped Biden fumbled the operation. He not only gave the Taliban a high-tech arsenal worth between $50 billion and $90 billion, but also saddled Americans with up to 80,000 unvetted Afghan refugees who are unfit to live here temporarily, much less become citizens. Already, some have been discovered to be terrorists.

So despite Biden’s being the proverbial stopped clock that’s right twice a day — meaning right about the pull-out — he and his Rainbow Flaggers blew the operation. Now, Americans are stuck with the consequences of yet another Deep State globalist failure, and a planned one at that.

Weapons Bonanza

A principal reason for that failure is where the priorities of top U.S. officials lie. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General Mark Milley, spent much of June burbling about “diversity” and Critical Race Theory in the armed forces. Meanwhile, the Taliban readied to capture Kabul. Two months after the State Department proudly tweeted a photo of the Rainbow Flag unfurled over the city, the Taliban marched in.

But at least 23 diplomats took time from pushing homosexual and “transgender” ideology on the Afghans to cable Secretary of State Tony Blinken with the warning: The Taliban are coming — we’re doomed.

“The cable, sent via the State Department’s confidential dissent channel, warned of rapid territorial gains by the Taliban and the subsequent collapse of Afghan security forces, and offered recommendations on ways to mitigate the crisis and speed up an evacuation,” two sources told the Wall Street Journal:

U.S. military and intelligence officials, struggling with the fallout from the rapid collapse of Afghanistan’s government and armed forces, have sparred over U.S. intelligence assessments regarding the country’s stability.

President Biden in July had said that a collapse of the government and a Taliban takeover were “highly unlikely,” pointing to the large numbers of Afghan National Security Force members, their U.S. training and modern equipment, including an air force.…

Gen. Mark Milley … has said that a speedy demise of the U.S.-supported government and army was unanticipated.

“There was nothing that I or anyone else saw that indicated a collapse of this army and this government in 11 days.”

Maybe if Milley had been less worried about shoving CRT down the throats of American fighting men he would have seen what was coming, and at least tried to prevent billions of dollars of U.S. weapons, including Black Hawk helicopters, from falling into Taliban hands.

“Putting price tags on American military equipment still in Afghanistan isn’t an easy task,” Adam Andrzejewski wrote for Forbes. “In the fog of war — or withdrawal — Afghanistan has always been a black box with little sunshine.”

Of course, Biden and his incompetent gang are trying to hide the foul-up, Andrzejewski reported:

Not helping transparency, the Biden Administration is now hiding key audits on Afghan military equipment. This week, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reposted two key reports on the U.S. war chest of military gear in Afghanistan that had disappeared from federal websites.

The loss of equipment is almost beyond comprehension.

“Between 2003 and 2016, the U.S. purchased and provided 75,898 vehicles and 208 aircraft,” Andrzejewski reported. They include 42,604 light tactical vehicles, 22,174 Humvees, and 8,998 medium tactical vehicles. More than 900 mine-resistant vehicles alone cost some $711 million.

We also provided 110 helicopters, including the Black Hawk ($21 million each) and A-29 Super Tucano attack aircraft ($427 million each), along with 60 cargo planes and 20 light attack aircraft.

Small arms included these:

• 358,530 M-16s, M-4s, and other rifles;

• 126,296 pistols;

• 64,363 machine guns;

• 25,327 grenade launchers;

• 12,692 shotguns;

• 9,877 rocket-propelled weapons; and 

• 2,606 mortars and cannons

“In 2017, the U.S. military lost $174 million in drones that were part of the attempt to help the Afghan National Army (ANA) defend itself,” Andrzejewski wrote. “But the ANA didn’t immediately use the drones and then lost track of them.”

No, in fact, it was the U.S. military that “lost track of them.” Having tried to train and otherwise educate Afghans in modern policing and warfare — an almost impossible task, Marines on the ground told reporters — the bright lights in the Pentagon should have known what would happen. Biden’s bureaucrats, by the way, scrubbed that second report from the website, too. Did Deep State war racketeers order the losses hidden?

“We don’t have a complete picture, obviously, of where every article of defense materials has gone, but certainly a fair amount of it has fallen into the hands of the Taliban,” White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan said. “And obviously, we don’t have a sense that they are going to readily hand it over to us at the airport.”

The Daily Mail put the price tag for the lost materiel at $62 billion.

One last number from the balance sheet: By 2050, the war with interest on the debt will have cost the United States $6.5 trillion. That’s about $20,000 for each of the country’s 331.4 million people. Counting taxpayers alone raises the per-capita cost. 

But money and equipment, which we can replace, aren’t all we lost in the Graveyard of Empires. Thousands of Americans died there: 2,218 total, with 1,833 killed in action, as of August 23. On August 26, 10 Marines and several other service members died in a suicide bombing during Biden’s botched evacuation from the Kabul airport. They can’t be replaced, and those fatalities don’t count another cost: tens of thousands of Americans mentally or physically wounded, or both — the amputees, the traumatically brain-injured, the 35-year-old fathers who dive for cover when they hear a late-night bottle rocket explode on Independence Day.

Treachery and Treason?

Team Biden’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence experts were, apparently, clueless, unaware that the puppet government in Kabul would collapse so quickly, and that the Taliban would turn the U.S. withdrawal into a frantic retreat, then a deadly rout, and then utter mayhem. But the humiliation in Kabul revealed more than bumbling ineptitude, irresponsible negligence, arrogance, and willful blindness, and instead pulled back the sheets on something far worse. One can’t look squarely at Biden’s Afghan debacle and not see careful design in the chaos. The failure is a recurring pattern. American blood and treasure are squandered in foreign lands, and and one nation after another is betrayed into some form of brutal despotism, in this case, an Islamic tyranny determined to pretend its mullahs are reincarnations of The Prophet and his scimitar-wielding footsoldiers.

The scenes of desperate Afghans swarming into Kabul to escape the Taliban and desperately clinging to American aircraft — before plunging to their deaths — predictably invited comparisons to Saigon in 1975, as Vietnamese sought to escape the communist bloodbath. But Vietnam is not the only example; we’ve seen this movie many times before and since: China (1949), Cuba (1959), Cambodia (1975), Laos (1975), Rhodesia (1979), Iran (1979), Nicaragua (1979), and Iraq (2009). 

Over and over again, U.S. government officials have undermined any genuine reformers. The “best and the brightest” have promoted and installed corrupt and duplicitous “allies,” lavished them them with money and arms, then betrayed them. And at the end, our enemies received supplies, weapons, and infrastructure of almost incalculable value. Here are few events that suggest a deliberate plan to create havoc in Afghanistan:

• Surrendering Bagram Air Base: In addition to the facilities and supplies we handed to the Taliban, we abandoned Bagram Air Base. Its strategic, defensible location and its multiple runways guaranteed that the evacuation would be restricted to the smaller, more vulnerable, congested Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. Bagram was the only viable option for safely extricating the thousands of Americans still in Afghanistan. Our precipitous departure was an egregious tactical error. The base should only have been abandoned after all Americans were rescued, and all armaments and sensitive data were removed or destroyed. 

• Sending signals to demoralize allies and embolden enemies: The manner in which we abandoned Bagram — sneaking out in the dead of night, without informing our allies — could not have been more destructive. It told the Taliban: “Afghanistan is yours.” It told our allies: “So long, suckers!” It told the region and the world: America is a disloyal weakling.

• Putting Taliban-Haqqani terrorists in charge of security: Unbelievably, the Biden administration agreed to continue working with the Taliban even though reports this year from both the Pentagon and the Treasury Department pointed to continuing ties between the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and the Haqqani terrorist network. In fact, after taking control of Kabul, the Taliban put the Haqqani Network in charge of security.

• Giving the Taliban-Haqqani terrorist a “kill list”: Team Biden gave the new Afghan warlords a list and identities of Americans and American allies trapped in Kabul, supposedly in the belief that the virulently anti-American Haqqani extremists would help escort them through the mobs and Taliban checkpoints to the evacuation flights. Even worse, they gave them the employment and biometric databases, including fingerprints, face scans, iris scans, family data, and more on millions of Afghans who assisted and worked with American and allied forces and the Afghan government. The Taliban are now using this U.S.-provided system to hunt (and kill) the trapped Americans and our allies.

• Thwarting private efforts to save lives: While Team Biden dithered, military veterans of the Afghan War — including former special operators — raced into the chaos with their own private efforts. Organizations such as Ark Salus, Pineapple Task Force, and the Nazarene Fund rescued thousands of Americans and Afghan allies. The Nazarene Fund concentrated on extracting Afghan Christians, who are marked for torture and death. Conservative commentator Glenn Beck, who works with the Nazarene Fund, charged that the State Department repeatedly thwarted the group’s efforts to rescue Christians.

Who is responsible for these decisions? A short list would include Joe Biden, Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, CIA Director William Burns, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, Secretary of Defense General Lloyd Austin, and General Mark Milley.

Also playing a crucial, though shadowy, role is the highly connected Afghan operative Zalmay Khalizad. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, from which he launched his diplomatic career with a fellowship in 1984, Khalizad is also a mover in such globalist organizations as the Atlantic Council, Brookings Institution, RAND Corporation, CIA, and Project for a New American Century. During the past four decades, he has been a fixture in both Republican and Democratic administrations, especially regarding formulating U.S. policies for Iraq and Afghanistan. These ventures have put him in close working relationships with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and other Deep Staters. He was our lead negotiator with the Taliban, with whom he has been friends for many years. 

What Afghans Believe

But the seemingly planned failure in Afghanistan mirrors the foreign policy failures of the past in another significant way: Americans are saddled with the expense of resettling tens of thousands of refugees. So even if no more Americans die in Afghanistan, and taxpayers do not spend another dime in the country, they’ll continue to pay for the misadventure far into the future. They’ll pay for at least 60,000 Afghans to be resettled in the United States. They’ll pay for their food and medical care until they get jobs. They’ll pay to educate their kids. And they’ll pay the price, in money and blood, for the crimes and likely terror attacks those violent tribesmen commit.

And they won’t have a choice. Afghans helped the American war effort, GOP Senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska avers, and so Americans are obliged to rescue those helpers from certain death at the hands of the Taliban.

“A great nation is a nation that keeps its word,” Sasse told Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace,

And the American people need to understand who we’re talking about here. We’re talking about men and women who risked their lives to protect Americans. They fought hand-in-hand with our troops and we made promises to them.

That, of course, means importing not just those who helped the war effort, but family members, too. Contrary to early reports, the total will vastly exceed, by at least 200 percent and perhaps 300 percent, the 20,000 who helped the war effort.

Continued Sasse:

We’re talking about 60,000 to 80,000 people. So the first thing to say is, the American people need to understand who we’re talking about. We’re talking about heroes who fought with us to take the fight to al Qaeda and the Taliban….

When you fought on behalf of Americans to protect our people, you’re welcome in my neighborhood.

Ten Republican governors agree with Sasse and asked Biden to resettle Afghans in their states. 

By the time this piece is published, tens of thousands of more Afghans will have been dumped into military bases across the United States, where they will await “resettlement.” But numbers aren’t the only problem with this deluge of humanity: Almost as soon as the exodus began, authorities flagged 100 of 7,000 Afghans who applied for Special Immigrant Visas as a security risk; at least one is tied to the ISIS terror outfit.

That’s why Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance, a GOP Senate candidate in Ohio, attacked Sasse in a video after Sasse invited the Afghans to his neighborhood before all the Americans whom Biden stranded in Kabul were evacuated.

“I’d like to hear zero about Afghan refugees until we get every single American out first,” Vance tweeted a few days before Sasse claimed it will be a wonderful day in the neighborhood when his beturbaned friends arrive. After Sasse attacked him, Vance explained why Sasse is wrong.

“He said great countries honor their word,” Vance noted in a video posted to Twitter. “Of course nobody disagrees with that. It’s a ridiculous platitude.” 

“The question isn’t whether to keep a promise to Afghans,” he said, but to whom we “owe an obligation.… And to any leader of this country, the obvious answer should be American citizens. So let’s focus first on getting them out of Afghanistan.”

Continued Vance:

So let’s have an honest question about what exists in Afghanistan. According to Pew [Research], 40 percent of the people there believe that blowing yourself up, committing a suicide bombing, is an acceptable way to solve a problem. 

So yes let’s help the Afghans who helped us. But let’s ensure that we’re properly vetting them so that we don’t get a bunch of people who believe they should blow themselves up at a mall because somebody looked at their wife the wrong way.

Here’s what Vance didn’t report about that Pew survey, but Jason Richwine of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) did: 

• 99 percent of Afghans want Sharia law to be the law of the land;

• 85 percent want to stone adulterers;

• 79 percent want apostates punished with death; and

• 60 percent advocate honor killing. 

Whom Biden Plans to Bring Here

Those data matter, and if Americans want to know why, and what’s in store when the refugee resettlement racket airmails nearly 100,000 Afghans to the heartland, they can look to Europe. In July, police arrested three Afghans for the gang rape and murder of a 13-year-old girl, a crime with which Europeans are all too familiar.

CIS’s Richwine reported the data on Afghan crime in Austria. While the violent crime rate for Afghans is a mere 9.1 times that of Austrians, the rape rate for Afghans is 22.1 times higher. Cheryl Bernard explained the Afghan predilection for rape in the National Interest in 2017.

In 2014, when leaders such as Angela Merkel decided Europe must accept all comers, “citizens and officials alike responded with generosity and openness,” Bernard wrote. “Exhausted refugees spilled out of trains and buses to be met by crowds bearing gifts of clothing and food, and holding up placards that read ‘Welcome Refugees.’”

But Europe’s bleeding-heart leftist elites got a rude awakening: 

The large and growing incidence of sexual assaults committed by refugees against local women. These were not of the cultural-misunderstanding-date-rape sort, but were vicious, no-preamble attacks on random girls and women, often committed by gangs or packs of young men. At first, the incidents were downplayed or hushed up — no one wanted to provide the right wing with fodder for nationalist agitation, and the hope was that these were isolated instances caused by a small problem group of outliers. As the incidents increased, and because many of them took place in public or because the public became involved either in stopping the attack or in aiding the victim afterwards, and because the courts began issuing sentences as the cases came to trial, the matter could no longer be swept under the carpet of political correctness. And with the official acknowledgment and public reporting, a weird and puzzling footnote emerged. Most of the assaults were being committed by refugees of one particular nationality: by Afghans.

Though “Europeans held a baseline positive sentiment towards Afghanistan” and “were predisposed to be positive towards Afghan refugees,” an unsettling truth finally dawned on the Hippie-Boomers who clattered down the sunny highways of their youth in Volkswagen buses. 

It became clear that Afghans “were committing sex crimes to a much greater extent than other refugees.” And so attitudes changed. Tulln, Austria, banned more refugees “after a series of disturbing incidents all emanating from Afghans [including] the brutal gang rape of a fifteen-year-old girl, snatched from the street on her way home, dragged away and serially abused by Afghan refugees.”

“And that was just one in a string of outrage-inducing occurrences, all of them going to the account of Afghans.” Bernard continued:

A while before, in Vienna, a young female Turkish exchange student had been pursued into a public rest-room by three Afghan refugees. They jammed the door shut and proceeded to savagely attack her. Grabbing her by the neck, they struck her head repeatedly against a porcelain toilet bowl to knock her out. When that failed to break her desperate resistance, they took turns holding her down and raping her.

Of course, leftist authorities tried to hide the attacks until they couldn’t. A daily newspaper, Bernard wrote, included these stories:

Front page: Afghan (eighteen) attacks young woman at Danube Festival. “Once again there has been an attempted rape by an Afghan. A twenty-one-year-old Slovak tourist was mobbed and groped by a group of men. She managed to get away, but was pursued by one of them, an Afghan asylum seeker who caught her and dragged her into the bushes. Nearby plainclothes policemen noticed the struggle and intervened to prevent the rape at the last moment.” Page ten: “A twenty-five-year-old Afghan attempted to rape a young woman who was sitting in the sun in the park. Four courageous passersby dragged the man off the victim and held him until the police arrived.” Page twelve: “Two Afghans have been sentenced for attempting to rape a woman on a train in Graz. The men, who live in an asylum seekers’ residence, first insulted the young woman with obscene verbal remarks before attacking her. When she screamed for help, passengers from other parts of the train rushed to her aid.”...

Type two words into Google — Afghane and Vergewaltigung — and a cornucopia of appalling incidents unfolds before you. The mentally retarded woman in Linz, kidnapped, dragged to an Afghan refugee’s apartment and raped until she was finally able to escape into his bathroom, lock herself in and, as he battered at the door, crank open the window and scream for help. Incidents like that one point to a cold-blooded predator, with planning and premeditation.

Afghan men have also exposed themselves at public swimming pools.

Bernard dismissed drunkenness and the clash of cultural norms — that the men are punishing European women for not wearing burqas or adhering to Islamic dress codes — as excuses, and instead offered a “quite disturbing theory” from a friend and Afghan court translator:

They are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.

And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.

Bernard goes on at some length, but a larger point is that Biden and Sasse know nothing about whom they are bringing here. Neither do the 10 Republican governors who invited the refugees to their states. None of this is to say all the Afghan refugees are criminals, stupid, crazy, or Islamist extremists. It is to say that Europe’s experience with Afghans, and the data on crime, drugs, and mental illness, warn that in a cohort of 60,000 unvetted refugees, more than a few will be. Again, what little vetting has been done has uncovered more than 100 potential terrorists. The sheer numbers mean that there are others who have already landed, as have rapists, the mentally disturbed, etc.

Another large point, overlooked by the major media, is that it would make much more sense, and cost far less money, to resettle Islamic refugees in Islamic countries than in the United States or other Western countries where the culture is alien to them. Yet despite the cultural differences, the U.S. government’s relocation of Middle Eastern refugees in the United States has strongly favored Muslims over Christians, despite the persecution of Christians in the Middle East (see page 17).

Who Pays?

The obvious question: Who is on the hook for it all? Answer: Americans. To all but the most obtuse — the neocons, globalists, and Deep Staters — we’ve paid enough. 

We buried almost 2,000 fighting men in national cemeteries; the long-term bill is $6.5 trillion.  And now we must support an influx of poverty-stricken refugees, who, because of their religion, despise the society and culture into which they have been thrust. Americans will spend tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars educating them, and even more for their healthcare, and then even more to jail the criminals among them. Some Americans will pay with their lives.

The final invoice for this 20-year fiasco has not arrived.

R. Cort Kirkwood is a longtime contributor to The New American. He was a newspaperman for more than 25 years.