https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/20...resident-left-wing-media-cheerleaders-didnt2/ Biden was always unfit to be president but his Left-wing media cheerleaders didn’t dare admit it The craven behaviour of the USA’s court media has hidden for too long the president’s deep flaws DOUGLAS MURRAY20 August 2021 • 8:00pm The world appears to have woken up to an important truth this week: which is that Joe Biden is a truly terrible president. It is a shame that it took America gifting Afghanistan back to the Taliban for so many people to realise this. To be charitable, there were perhaps two reasons why this had not become more obvious before. The first is that Joe Biden is not Donald Trump and for a lot of the planet that seems to be recommendation enough to occupy the Oval Office. A break from the Trump show appealed to an awful lot of people. But the second reason why too few realised what the world was going to get from a Biden presidency is that the US media simply didn’t ask the questions it needed to ask. Before the election a near entirety of the American media gave up covering it and simply campaigned for the Democrat nominee. It was the same with the Big Tech companies. So persuaded were they (Twitter in particular) that they had been responsible for Donald Trump’s election in 2016 that during the 2020 race they did everything they could to get Biden in. That included – and this cannot be said often enough – effectively muting America’s oldest newspaper: the New York Post’s story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, which contained serious allegations of corrupt tail-coating by Hunter and other members of the Biden family when Joe was vice-president. But Big Tech restricted the story from being shared and almost no other journalists bothered to follow it up. Instead, they just hung on his every incoherent sentence and accepted his pronouncements (generally beginning with “Look”) as if they had any more idea than he did about whatever point he was forever struggling to make. Worse was the strange sort of cooing that journalists made whenever Biden appeared in public ahead of the election. They would thrill when he jogged over to speak to one of them. They were flattered when he made even a wave in their direction. Then there was the most irritating Biden schtick of all – the one he has of going to ice-cream parlours. The US media can never get over the novelty of this miraculous type of excursion. It is as though nobody in high office ever eats such a thing. “What a crazy down-to-earth guy,” they think. “He likes ice cream!” Whenever he exits one of these joints and emerges solemnly with his cone, the US media can be relied upon to shout questions about which flavours he has chosen. He will say “double-choc-chip cookie” or whatever it is that day and the court media will “ooh” or applaud and make notes as though Dorothy Parker had just offered them an epigram. Until you see it up close you just cannot believe the cravenness of most of the American media. Last month the CNN presenter Don Lemon was selected to quiz Biden at a “town hall” event before the cameras. Biden was, as usual, meandering and unfocused as though lost in the fog of his own sentences. But Lemon would not press him properly. Rather, you could see him urging the president on, willing him to get to the end of the sentence or to reconnect with one of those trains of thought that been left derailed several clauses or sentences back. It wasn’t journalism. It wasn’t even kindness. He was rooting for the president. The footage this week from Afghanistan has at least exposed the some of the problems that have resulted from this lack of critique. Not least the fact that the Commander in Chief appears unfocused on the serious questions. Just last month the president had assured the nation that, following the withdrawal of American troops, there would be absolutely no collapse of the Afghan army or government. He said that there would be no reason to compare events with Vietnam and he even specified – in what turned out to be his worst hostage to fortune – that there would be no Saigon-like airlifting from the roof of the US embassy. Yet all these things, and far more, occurred this week. And the footage from America’s defeat in Vietnam looks positively orderly by comparison. Afghan women trying to push their babies over barbed wire to US troops so that they will take them out. Men trying to hold onto the sides of the last planes heading out of Kabul. Bodies falling from the sky as their attempt to hold on fails thousands of feet up in the air. What was Biden’s response to all this? It was to give a belligerent press conference explaining that all this was perfectly as it should be, and as he had expected, and that he stood by his decision. And what did Biden do after he’d just about managed to read that teleprompter script? He walked away without taking any questions. That was it. If Donald Trump had done any such thing, let alone after such a catastrophe, the US media would have declared it the work of an unaccountable dictator. Eventually Biden did give an interview, late in the week, to George Stephanopoulos of ABC. During that interview, granted no doubt because the White House knew it would be lenient, Stephanopoulos quizzed the president as much as the protocol of the sycophants’ circle allows. As ever, it showed its limits. At one stage the interviewer asked about the footage that had come out of Afghanistan. “We’ve all seen the pictures,” he said. “We’ve seen those hundreds of people packed into a C-17. You’ve seen Afghans falling …” An angry, bug-eyed, blustering Biden interrupted his interviewer. “That was four days ago, five days ago,” he said furiously, in one of the most heartless non-sequiturs I have heard for quite some time. And what did Stephanopoulos do? Certainly, he did not do what an Andrew Neil or an Emma Barnett would have done. Stephanopoulos didn’t even pause to notice the psychological weirdness of this reply. He did not ask what needed to be asked, which was: “What the hell does that mean? What has something happening four days ago got to do with what I’ve just asked you? Does the passage of five days make something ancient history in the fog of Biden head?” The ABC interviewer did none of this. Instead, he asked Biden what he thought when he had seen these pictures and allowed Biden to boast that US personnel had got on top of the situation at the airport. This is just one week in the life of Joe Biden, but you could select almost any other week in his career and find a similar soup of certainty, unknowingness, falteringness and arrogance. It is what you get when you have spent a career with a court media asking you about your choice of ice cream and reached the highest office in the land because you weren’t the other guy. The world always gets serious again. And it just got serious on Biden’s watch and has shown something that should have been revealed during the primary season long ago: that the man who is now commander-in-chief is not remotely in command of his brief.
U.S. President Joe Biden may have made the opposite mistake in Afghanistan, withdrawing too precipitously and shunning the advice of his generals and the CIA, as well as the counsel of U.S. allies. But unlike Kennedy, Biden has so far largely avoided taking responsibility for the Afghan debacle. That in turn has raised questions among supporters and U.S. allies about whether he’ll learn anything from it—or whether his approach to Afghanistan might set the tone for the remainder of his presidency. Like Kennedy, Biden largely kept in place his predecessor’s policy early in his presidency—in this case, former President Donald Trump’s peace deal with the Taliban and plans for a complete U.S. withdrawal (though Biden delayed Trump’s scheduled May 1 departure by a few months). But rather than admitting error, Biden has appeared defensive while facing a torrent of criticism since Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in a stunning 10 days of advances beginning on Aug. 6. Though Biden ran on a platform of promising to be the anti-Trump—pledging honesty, transparency, and taking responsibility—he has ended up blaming many parties other than himself. In remarks over the last week, he has pointed a finger at the Afghan government and armed forces and, of course, at Trump. His critics include Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton. “It’s striking how Biden’s decision-making here so closely follows the Trump pattern,” Bolton told the New York Times. “Biden wanted out; he apparently didn’t want to be bothered with details that might have thwarted or slowed down executing his decision. So he left. Very Trumpian.” In addition, some European diplomats say Biden plunged into a withdrawal plan that was not adequately thought out or vetted with major U.S. allies such as Britain, France, and Germany, nations that also sacrificed considerable funding and lives in Afghanistan. They complain that after Biden that declared “America is back” in the global system and that he was going to erase the legacy of the unilateralist Trump by reconnecting with allies, he didn’t do so on Afghanistan. They were also dismayed that Biden claimed he had consulted with them about his withdrawal plans when in fact several key decisions such as the abrupt abandonment of Bagram Airfield in early July—which severely demoralized Afghan national troops—were made unilaterally. “There was no meaningful debate within his own team, much less with foreign partners. It was all very much rushed through,” said one European diplomat, speaking on condition of anonymity. And the “America first” nature of Biden’s speech on Monday, he added, “really made a lot of people in Europe sit up and say, is this more of a continuation with the previous president than we realized?” Nor has the Biden team done much consulting with allies on the Afghan refugee crisis. Biden has made a persuasive case that he was right to get out of Afghanistan—and that the collapse of the Afghan national forces shortly after the U.S. withdrawal only proves that the war was unwinnable. “We spent over a trillion dollars,” he said Monday. “We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need. We paid their salaries, provided for the maintenance of their air force, something the Taliban doesn’t have. … We gave them every chance to determine their own future. What we could not provide them was the will to fight for that future.” Biden, to be fair, probably had no good options once Trump put things in motion by setting up talks with the Taliban and cutting out the elected Afghan government—which began the long process of undermining the elected government’s legitimacy. And on other major issues, such as the renegotiation of the Iran nuclear deal, the Biden administration has closely consulted with allies. Yet on this issue the president has been steadfast in denying he got anything wrong, even occasionally contradicting himself in his efforts to appear in control of the situation. In a speech to the nation on Monday, noting that “I always promised the American people that I will be straight with you,” Biden said: “The truth is: This did unfold more quickly than we had anticipated.” But in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos two days later, Biden suggested he had anticipated what ensued in Kabul and denied he had made any mistakes in planning, saying “the idea that somehow there’s a way to have gotten out without chaos ensuing, I don’t know how that happens.” According to the Wall Street Journal, Biden’s senior advisors pressed him to keep about 2,500 U.S. troops in the country while continuing to pressure the Taliban to negotiate with Kabul. Several European allies pushed for the same policy, realizing that the U.S. government’s willingness to negotiate without the participation of the administration of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani would undercut his legitimacy. Ghani later fled the country for asylum in the United Arab Emirates. Biden rebuffed such plans. He also denied to Stephanopoulos that he’d been given such advice—saying, “No one said that to me that I can recall”—or that U.S. intelligence had forewarned him about the chaos. Nonetheless, on Thursday another report in the Wall Street Journal, citing a classified July 13 cable, said the State Department had warned of swift advances by the Taliban and the collapse of Afghan security forces. In remarks Friday afternoon, and during a question period with reporters afterward, Biden again declined to acknowledge error, and he effectively doubled down on his previous insistence that the current chaos was inevitable. “There’s no way in which you’d be able to leave Afghanistan without there being some of what you’re seeing now,” he said. Biden also insisted he was working closely with NATO allies to get thousands of evacuees out and that U.S. credibility was not being questioned by U.S. allies. “Before I made this decision I was at the G-7 and NATO,” he said, “and every one of them knew and agreed with the decision I made.” Challenged about the State Department cable, Biden replied: “I got all kinds of cables, all kinds of advice,” but said he went with the “consensus opinion” that any Taliban takeover “would not occur until later in the year.” So widespread has the negative European reaction been that some leaders have been suggesting that French President Emmanuel Macron’s call for “strategic autonomy” from the United States ought to be reconsidered. “Afghanistan is the biggest foreign policy disaster since Suez. We need to think again about how we handle friends, who matters and how we defend our interests,” tweeted Tom Tugendhat, the Conservative chair of the U.K. Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee and a combat veteran of Afghanistan. In a speech on Wednesday, he said Biden’s comments casting blame on the Afghan military were “shameful.” U.S. rivals such as China have, predictably, been withering in their criticism. “The drastic change in Afghanistan’s situation is undoubtedly a heavy blow to the US. It declared the complete failure of US intent to reshape Afghanistan,” the Global Times, considered Beijing’s official voice, said in an editorial. “This defeat of the US is a clearer demonstration of US impotence than the Vietnam War—the US is indeed like a ‘paper tiger.’” The question now, perhaps, is whether Biden will learn from alleged mistakes he seems unwilling to acknowledge, some observers say. The Harvard University historian Fredrik Logevall, author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Vietnam War, Embers of War, said, “Biden and his speechwriters should have studied JFK’s response to the Bay of Pigs disaster. He took full responsibility, and his poll numbers actually rose.” (“The worse I do, the more popular I get,” Kennedy later joked.) The president “became leerier of taking military advice in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs,” said Logevall, who is working on the second volume of his history of the Kennedy presidency. “I think he determined after the Bay of Pigs that he would never allow something like that to afflict him again. Most important, he broadened his circle of advice, while also tightening his hold on the levers of foreign policy decision-making.” That came in handy during the Cuban missile crisis a year and a half later, when Kennedy rejected Pentagon advice to attack Cuba. Instead, he ordered a milder blockade that, along with a secret side deal to exchange U.S. missiles in Turkey for a Soviet missile withdrawal in Cuba, may well have prevented a nuclear war. In Biden’s case, the lesson might be to be less skeptical of his generals’ advice. No one on his team, including in the Pentagon, was advocating a large reintroduction of U.S. troops. But critics say that Biden could have waited at least for the Taliban fighting season to end rather than rushing to complete the withdrawal by the 20th anniversary of 9/11 for the sake of good political optics. “Biden keeps framing the issue as an either/or proposition, but that’s a false choice, and he surely knows it,” Logevall said in an email. “I argued back in the spring that his instinct—to end U.S. involvement—was correct, but that he should opt for a middle path, delaying the withdrawal by 6-to-9 months in order to get the peace process back on track. No doubt 20 years is a long time, but what’s the harm in making it 20.5 years?” Logevall added: “What’s odd, too, is that by nature he’s a pragmatist, a realist, and he’s been around a long time. He knows how these things work. Which makes the botched handling of the disengagement all the more puzzling to me.” Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta, a prominent Democrat, directly compared Biden’s Afghanistan decision to Kennedy’s Bay of Pigs debacle in a CNN interview earlier this week. “But President Kennedy took responsibility for what took place, and I strongly recommend to President Biden that he take responsibility [and] admit the mistakes that were made,” Panetta added. Even some longtime Biden advocates and aides are baffled. “I agree that he could have handled the [speech] better. Being belligerent doesn’t become anyone, certainly not him,” Biden’s former Senate aide Michael Haltzel said. Another former Biden advisor on national security agreed, speaking on condition of anonymity, saying he would have recommended “a very different public messaging.” Biden has also misrepresented his past positions on the nature of the U.S. intervention, saying Monday: “Our mission in Afghanistan was never supposed to have been nation building.” In fact, in numerous instances of congressional testimony as a senator and in interviews after the defeat of the Taliban in late 2001 and in 2002, Biden repeatedly talked about the necessity of nation building. In an interview with me on Dec. 20, 2001 he even mocked the George W. Bush administration for refusing to use the term “nation building” because Bush had campaigned against it. The Republicans, Biden said then, had “beat the living bejesus out of Bill Clinton for I don’t know how many years about nation building [in places like Somalia, Bosnia, and Kosovo]. Now they’re trying to make a fine distinction: We’re not putting troops on the ground, we’re not going to keep them there. Well, good. But you’re coordinating meetings to put a government in place. You’re going to insist on elections, and on and on. What would you call that?” Biden’s turnaround on that issue has also dismayed America’s European allies. “State building was not the purpose? Well, this is arguable,” European Union foreign-policy chief Josep Borrell told reporters. “We have been doing a lot in order to build a state in Afghanistan.” Outgoing German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had a cordial summit with Biden at the White House only last month, has avoided public criticism of Biden but according to German media reports was also dismayed by the way the withdrawal was handled. “For those who believed in democracy and freedom, especially for women, these are bitter events,” she reportedly told a meeting of officials from her party late Monday.
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2...hanistan-is-a-grave-blow-to-americas-standing Biden’s debacle The fiasco in Afghanistan is a grave blow to America’s standing And much of the blame lies squarely with Joe Biden Aug 21st 2021 If the propagandists of the Taliban had scripted the collapse of America’s 20-year mission to reshape Afghanistan, they could not have come up with more harrowing images. As insurgents swept into Kabul, desperate Afghans, terrified about what the victorious zealots might do, chased departing American cargo planes down the runway, trying to clamber into the landing gear and inevitably falling to their deaths. The American-backed government had surrendered without a fight—something that American officials were insisting would not happen only days before. Afghans were left in such a horrifying bind that clinging to the wheels of a hurtling aircraft seemed their best option. America has spent $2trn in Afghanistan; more than 2,000 American lives have been lost, not to mention countless Afghan ones. And yet, even if Afghans are more prosperous now than when America invaded, Afghanistan is back to square one. The Taliban control more of the country than they did when they lost power, they are better armed, having seized the weapons America showered on the Afghan army, and they have now won the ultimate affirmation: defeating a superpower.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/08/20/biden-machine-has-lost-grip-reality/ The Biden machine has lost all grip on reality Led by a delusional part-time President and a VP who has vanished, America faces an uncertain future DOMINIC GREEN20 August 2021 • 3:30pm Joe Biden is failing faster than any President in American history. His administration has lost its grip on reality, if it ever held it. The world’s most powerful military is exposed as impotent and incompetent. And we’re only eight months in. The chaos on the ground in Afghanistan, the casual betrayal of NATO allies, and the high-speed collapse of America’s global standing all stem from the same tainted source. This administration refuses to face the facts – including the fact of its own ineptitude. It is staffed by Ivy League wonks, think-tank smart-Alecs and unworldly snobs who know best. It is led by a Vice President who has vanished, and a part-time President whose utterances appear delusional. “We’re aware of congestion around the airport,” says Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security advisor, as though the desperate crowds fleeing for their lives in Kabul – even passing babies over the barbed wire – were akin to business travellers trying to enter DC during the rush hour. “No one is being killed,” Biden said in his disastrous interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Thursday – even though at least a dozen deaths have already been confirmed, and reports of random beatings and gunfire keep coming in. The Obama team called this “atmospherics”. The idea was that if the media vibes are good and the President looks cool, then all is well. The Obama team are now back, and Biden has been photographed in Aviator shades like Tom Cruise in Top Gun. But no one knows what to do. The reality principle is having its revenge on the “smartest guys in the room”. In April, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin was asked whether the Biden administration had a plan for extricating Afghans who had served the U.S. in its war with the Taliban. “We’ll get back to you on that,” Austin replied. But they never got back. If there ever was a plan, it cannot now be put into operation, because the U.S. now operates at the Kabul airport at the Taliban’s mercy. “We don’t have the capability to go out and collect large numbers of people,” Austin admitted this week. One reason being, as both Jake Sullivan and the Pentagon’s press secretary John Kirby admitted on Thursday, that the U.S. authorities have no idea about the total number of Americans in Afghanistan. The smartest guys in the room have never looked so dumb. Lloyd Austin too was lost for words this week when asked if rescuing American nationals “depends on diplomacy with the Taliban”. This was the shamed but honest silence of an incompetent promoted far beyond his abilities. Joe Biden’s shameless and dishonest excuses are far worse. When the part-time President deigns to show up for work, his mind is still on vacation. He either has no idea what is going on, or has reached the conclusion that the right response to a crisis is to lie, deny, bluster and blame everyone else. In July, Biden told the press that it was “not true” that his own intelligence community had warned that “the Afghan government will likely collapse” in the event of a withdrawal. On Thursday, Biden told George Stephanopoulos that he had always expected a collapse. He also told Stephanopoulos he “cannot recall” whether he was advised to retain an American military presence in Afghanistan during the withdrawal. To defend themselves against Biden’s buck-passing, the State Department, the military and the intelligence agencies are now briefing against the White House, and telling the Wall Street Journal that they warned Biden and his advisors, but they wouldn’t listen. The Hollywood legend William Goldman titled his autobiography Which Lie Did I Tell? The decadence and self-delusion of this administration, and the arrogance and incompetence of the military and civil bureaucracies, are so extravagant that they cannot even lie consistently. Dominic Green is deputy editor of The Spectator’s world edition.
What is the alternative, stay there for three generations and take over the government while we are at it? The Major error is on George W. Bush, which was compounded under Obama, and Fucked up beyond belief by Trump with Pompeo's self-serving urging, and Stephen "Mengele" Miller's diabolical plans to make it impossible for Afghan refugees to enter the U.S. The Trump administrations intention was to intentionally leave all our afghan colleagues behind to be slaughtered. Which would have happened had he been re-elected, and may still happen... It is Biden who, however ineptly, will bring the fiasco to a close. He was left in a difficult position by the previous, uncooperative, uncommunicative Trump administration who had already drawn down troops to bare bones and committed to withdrawing without,so far as anyone knows, any plan other than to get out and leave our Afghan allies behind to be slaughtered. Trump and Pompeo made it impossible, apparently intentionally, for Biden to reverse a fait accompli. Yes, Biden deserves criticism for his lack of knowledge of the true situation, and for placing too much trust in the Afghan government and not realizing that the Afghan forces would not fight on the side of a corrupt government that they had no loyalty to, and also for not coordinating properly with our European Allies. This has not been sleepy Joe's finest hour! Not Yet. But let's wait to see if he can rescue the Afghans who helped us out. If he can pull that off, which remains to be seen, then he can redeem himself in the eyes of the world. And once again people will be high-fiving and saying "You're da'man Sleepy Joe."
https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Biden-s-Afghanistan-fiasco-is-a-disaster-for-Asia Biden's Afghanistan fiasco is a disaster for Asia Self-inflicted defeat sends message that allies cannot count on US August 30, 2021 17:00 JST Taliban fighters patrol inside the city of Kandahar on Aug. 15: historians will be baffled that the world's mightiest power waged war for two decades to make the Taliban great again. © AP Brahma Chellaney is a geostrategist and author of nine books, including "Asian Juggernaut: The Rise of China, India and Japan." The Kabul Airport massacre is a reminder that the geopolitical consequences of America's Afghanistan fiasco -- one of the biggest foreign policy failures under any U.S. president since World War II -- will likely play out for years. According to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's potential successor Armin Laschet, this is the "biggest debacle that NATO has suffered since its founding, and we are standing before an epochal change." U.S. President Joe Biden paved the way for the Taliban sweep of Afghanistan by pulling the rug out from under the Afghan military's feet. The sudden withdrawal of some 18,000 U.S. civilian contractors effectively disabled the Afghan military's planes and helicopters, leaving ground troops without close air support and emergency logistics, including medical evacuation, and rendering the reputable special forces immobile and out of action. Historians will be baffled that the world's mightiest power waged war for two decades to make the Taliban, the world's deadliest terrorists, great again. But the immediate message from Biden's Afghanistan disaster is that U.S. allies cannot count on America when the chips are down. The damage to America's reputation and credibility could potentially herald a paradigm shift in international geopolitics. Already, the image of America's betrayal of its Afghan allies and capitulation to the Taliban has become etched indelibly in the global imagination. Indeed, a secret meeting between CIA Director William Burns and the Taliban leadership in Kabul on Aug. 23 has only underscored the troubling U.S. equation with an Islamist militia whose brutality has been a hallmark of its fundamentalism. With Biden quickly blaming a local ISIS affiliate for the airport bombing and ordering reprisals against the group, the U.S. has been left to draw specious distinctions between good and bad terrorists. Given Afghanistan's strategic location at the crossroads of Central, South and Southwest Asia, the greatest strategic fallout from Afghanistan's security and humanitarian catastrophe is likely to be felt in the Asian region. This is ironic because Biden sought to justify his withdrawal as necessary to focus on the great-power competition with China. In reality, the void opened by America's retreat has only given greater strategic space for China, Russia and Iran to expand their strategic footprints. For securing oil deliveries, the Taliban are now paying a cash-strapped Iran in dollars from their lucrative narcotics trade. China, with its long-standing ties to the Taliban, including supplying weapons via Pakistan, has taken the lead in portraying the U.S. as a declining power whose ditching of the Afghan government demonstrates that it is an unreliable partner for any country. America's self-inflicted defeat and humiliation in Afghanistan has also blunted U.S. leverage to determine China's coronavirus culpability, including pressuring Beijing to share lab records, genomic samples and other data relevant to finding out how the COVID-19 virus originated. It is thus no surprise that the Biden-ordered U.S. intelligence inquiry, at the end of its 90-day deadline, has failed to reach a definitive conclusion on the virus' origins, although time is running out to find reliable answers. If the intelligence inquiry -- like the recent report by congressional Republicans -- had concluded that the virus leaked from a Wuhan lab, it could have further ruptured already fraught relations with China, which has been demanding that the U.S. stop tracing the origins of the virus. At a time when Biden is grappling with an Afghan disaster of his own making, he can ill afford a crisis in ties with China, which explains why he did not extend the term of the intelligence inquiry but instead called on a recalcitrant Beijing "to cooperate with the World Health Organization's Phase II evidence-based, expert-led determination into the origins of COVID-19." President Joe Biden delivers remarks about Afghanistan on Aug. 26: at a time when Biden is grappling with an Afghan disaster of his own making, he can ill afford a crisis in ties with China. © Reuters After Kabul's fall, China's victory lap included a state-media warning to Taiwan that the U.S. would abandon it too in the face of a Chinese invasion, prompting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen to declare, "Taiwan's only option is to grow stronger... It is not our option to do nothing and only rely on others for protection." One definite loser from the Afghanistan debacle is India, whose security risks are coming under siege from the Taliban-Pakistan-China coalition. India, one of the largest aid donors to Afghanistan, had a big presence in that country, but its diplomats and civilians were among the first to flee. Since last year, India has been locked in military standoffs with China, its leading adversary. But if India now faces a greater terrorist threat from across its western borders, it will have less capacity to counter an expansionist China. Afghanistan's fall will likely strengthen the anti-India axis between the Taliban's sponsor, Pakistan, and Pakistan's main patron, China. Will Biden now revoke the major non-NATO ally (MNNA) status enjoyed by Afghanistan and Pakistan, which engineered the U.S. rout through its proxy? Fifteen other countries, including Japan, Australia and Israel, have MNNA status, which carries security benefits under U.S. law. By empowering the Taliban, Biden has strengthened all jihadi groups, promising the rebirth of global terrorism. And by betraying one ally -- the elected Afghan government -- he has made other U.S. allies feel that they too could be betrayed when they most need American support. Nowhere will the U.S. costs for its Afghanistan blunder be more visible than in Asia, where an emboldened China is set to up the ante. 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