Does the name Mawlavi Talib ring a bell? No reason it should. In Afghanistan, it’s just another name — one in 5,000.
One in 5,000, that is, if you’re talking about the 5,000 prisoners the Trump administration pressured the Afghanistan government to release last year in furtherance of its sham peace deal with the Taliban.
Except Mawlavi Talib was not just any released war prisoner.
He turned out to be a Taliban commander — just like the
Taliban commanders President Obama shamefully released while pleading with the militant Islamists to come to the negotiating table, pretend to recognize the “sharia-democracy” regime we’d then been struggling to stand up for over a decade, and indulge us in a brief respite of calm so we could slip out of Afghanistan quietly, without something like the catastrophe that is now unfolding. This, as President Biden, until Monday, hid under a conference table at Camp David.
The debacle in Afghanistan — the U.S. surrender, the deadly chaos that has followed, the withdrawal without any feasible plan to prevent the reemergence of jihadist safe havens (actually, the proliferation beyond the havens that already exist) — belongs to Biden. He is the commander in chief, he could have prevented it, he insisted that it wasn’t happening even as it was washing over him, and he has shamed our country as it has not been shamed since the end of the Vietnam War nearly a half-century ago.
That said, to hear former Trump officials and Trump apologists at the RNC rip into Biden as if the former president’s fingerprints and nauseating “forever war” drivel were not all over this debacle is hard to take.
As the Trump administration knew it would, the release of the prisoners swelled the ranks of the Taliban even as they were overrunning the U.S.-backed government throughout the country. Indeed, the leader of the Taliban, Abdul Ghani Baradar, who took control of Afghanistan on Sunday, had been in Pakistan’s custody for years until 2018 — when he was
released at the request of the Trump administration, in furtherance of its negotiations with the terrorist organization.
Those, you may recall, are the same negotiations for which President Trump tried to invite the Taliban to Camp David until publicity about that outrageous notion embarrassed him into canceling.
The debacle in Afghanistan belongs to Biden. But the previous president is an accomplice to this catastrophe.
www.nationalreview.com
