Wednesday, August 18, 2021

Wall Street Journal: President Biden Ignored Pentagon's Request To Keep A Force Of 2,500 U.S. Troops In Afghanistan And Warnings About The Stability Of The Country From Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin

Biden according to the Journal, believed the U.S. was propping up an Afghan government on life support, which the president viewed as corrupt and blamed for wasting billions of dollars of U.S. aid. He's photographed returning to D.C. Tuesday night from Camp David  

Daily Mail: Biden IGNORED Mark Milley's request to keep 2,500 troops in Afghanistan, Lloyd Austin's warning withdrawal wouldn't provide any assurances against a Taliban takeover and Pentagon fears of Afghan soldiers folding, report claims 

* President Joe Biden ignored Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley's request to keep a force of 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan 

* He also dismissed warnings about the stability of the country from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in the run-up to the Taliban's takeover this week 

* The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday that Biden had heard about many of the risks of a U.S. pull-out from Afghanistan, but went ahead with it anyway 

* CNN's Clarissa Ward reported Wednesday that the scene around the Kabul airport continued to be 'extremely chaotic' 

* Biden stayed firm with his decision, the Journal reported, because he believed the U.S. was propping up an Afghan government on life support 

* He and his advisers had hoped President Ashraf Ghani and the Afghan government would pull itself together once the U.S. laid out an exit date 

* Biden's team was blindsided by the pace in which the Taliban took over Afghanistan and miscalculated the Afghan army's willingness to fight 

President Joe Biden ignored Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley's request to keep a force of 2,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and warnings about the stability of the country from Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, in the run-up to the Taliban's takeover this week. 

The Wall Street Journal reported that Biden had heard about many of the risks of a full-scale U.S. pull-out from Afghanistan - including that the Taliban could take over the country - but went ahead with it anyway. 

The decision led to chaotic scenes at Kabul's Hamid Karzai International Airport this week as Americans and Afghans alike tried to flee.  

Read more ....  

WNU Editor: I wish I was a fly in the room for this meeting .... Biden meets Joint Chiefs Chairman Mark Milley and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the White House for talks on the Afghanistan mess - as the president prepares for his first TV interview with Good Morning America (Daily Mail). 

 Update: Not going to happen because it would then show the world that the White House is in chaos .... Secretary Austin and General Mark Milley should resign immediately (Jack Wedam, American Thinker).

Update #2: The CIA was also ignored .... CIA warned of rapid Afghanistan collapse. So why did U.S. get it so wrong? (NBC).

6 comments:

Anonymous said...


Slowly the details come out and the narrative adjusts.

Anonymous said...

Milley, Austin, Petreaus, McChrystal and whole bunch of others should resign, because there was no way to win the war given the constraints.

In mathematics or engineering, if you put too many constraints on a problem, it becomes intractable, which means there is no solution.

A constraint of not being able to follow the Taliban into Pakistan is a constraint.
Not fighting Pakistan is a constraint.

If you are not winning, you are losing.

Anonymous said...

When Biden announced in April that he sought to withdraw all troops from Afghanistan, Trump called the development "a wonderful and positive thing to do," much to the consternation of many Republicans who feared the loss of democratic gains in the country.

In his Saturday statement, Biden continued by saying that he did not want another president to inherit the longstanding conflict.

Anonymous said...

Trump called the development "a wonderful and positive thing to do,"

It could have been positive. Biden turned an orderly retreat into a rout.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/trump-blasts-biden-not-following-152440623.html

a) Someone @ 2:49 took a big dump and pasted something as his argument. This someone did not come up with that idea. I did. Before retirement I reasoned I did not have time later in the evening for coming up with a few paragraphs on my own. The copy and paste artist said it was no fair. Now it is all the autistic artist does.

b) Does Team Xerox knows what an orderly retreat is?

Anonymous said...


I suppose I naively assumed that the United States would maintain a presence in Afghanistan like we have in Okinawa, mainland Japan, Korea, Germany, and Italy, and that we would stay the course to ensure our hard-won advances on the battlefield

- JUSTIN WEBB (Afghanistan Vet)

Accessible by Sea: Okinawa
Accessible by Sea: mainland Japan
Accessible by Sea: Korea
Accessible by Sea: Germany
Accessible by Sea: Italy

Landlocked: Afghanistan

See the difference?


Afghanistan accessible via Pakistan a Chinese client state and enemy nation.

Anonymous said...

The DoD leadership that went along with this foreseeable disaster should resign. Since they went along with the administration’s idiocy they proved they loved the perks of their position more than they loved their subordinates and the American people.