Biden's problems are about to get much, much worse

 If the Taliban embarks on a killing spree, Biden's reputation will take another battering

Source - Daily Telegraph - 30/08/21

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Is it all over yet? So Joe Biden appeared to ask himself as he was caught taking a sly look at his watch during a service to mark the arrival, at an airbase in Delaware, of the bodies of 13 US troops killed in the blast outside Kabul airport last week. Sorry, Joe, but no it isn’t over yet. In fact, the bloodbath in Afghanistan has yet to begin.

But the signs, sadly, are there. The Taliban’s intentions are pretty clear from the many reports of their bully boys going from door to door searching for individuals they believe to have worked with Allied forces during the past two decades. According to Ajmal Ahmady, the former governor of Afghanistan’s Central Bank, who fled as soon as the Taliban reached Kabul, several addresses where he lived have already been visited. In an interview with Zenger News a man claiming to be a Taliban commander boasted that the group have managed to take possession of 7000 biometric scanners which were used by the US military to collect fingerprint and iris scans of Afghans who worked for Allied forces. Those scanners, it is feared, will still contain a database which could be used for purging collaborators.

Come tomorrow night and I don’t think we will be hearing too much more of the new, soft-focussed Taliban and its talk of protecting women’s rights and cutting carbon emissions. As soon as the last US plane has left Kabul airport Afghanistan will be a different world, one in which the US will have lost all influence and all bargaining power with the Taliban. The Taliban will be in power and that will be that – it will be normal service resumed, where it left off in 2001. So long as the Taliban doesn’t openly sponsor a terror organisation which goes on to attack US interests, it is pretty well guaranteed to be left alone.

How is it going to look for Biden once the real bloodbath begins? There have been plenty of massacres in the modern world, but, if the Taliban do embark on a massive purge, there will be few in which the US has been so involved in helping those carrying out the killing. The US spent £80 billion building up Afghan armed forces whom it then undermined by negotiating with the Taliban over the heads of the country’s official government. Worse, a lot of military hardware has been left behind. According to Republican congressman Jim Banks, the Taliban has been gifted 75,000 military vehicles, 200 aeroplanes and helicopters and 600,000 small arms. Unbelievably, this haul now puts the Taliban-run Afghanistan in the top 15 percent of the world’s nations for firepower.

Some of this kit, hopefully, will be too sophisticated to be usable without very specialised training – but then the Taliban will know where to find former government soldiers and airmen whom the US helped to train. We saw when Gaddafi was overthrown in Libya the havoc created when terror groups suddenly find themselves with access to an abandoned armoury. The difference this time is that it will be far better kit than that possessed by Gaddafi – and that the US will be directly responsible for it falling into the wrong hands.

Not all this can be laid at Biden’s door – it was, after all, Donald Trump who first arranged negotiations with the Taliban in Doha and who set the withdrawal in train. But it was on Biden’s watch that the withdrawal was completed. If he has already been heavily damaged by the chaos in Kabul of over the past few weeks, it is nothing compared with what will be coming his way if the Taliban do as they are threatening to do and crank up their reign of terror at midnight tomorrow.