Maher blasts effects of botched Afghanistan withdrawal: ‘Terrorists are running wild’

Liberal comedian Bill Maher on Friday slammed the Biden administration for its poorly orchestrated withdrawal from Afghanistan, arguing that thanks to a lack of planning, “terrorists are running wild” in the now-Taliban-controlled nation.

He offered the blunt criticism after one of his guests, Democrat Party strategist Lis Smith, argued that criticism of the withdrawal isn’t legitimate anymore in the wake of the U.S. drone strike that killed Sept. 11 plotter Ayman al-Zawahiri.

“A lot of Biden’s critics said that, when we pulled out of Afghanistan, that we were going to let the terrorists just run wild there. And this sort of blunts that criticism,” she said.

Maher was taken aback.

Watch:

“But the terrorists are running wild! The Taliban are completely back in charge, and they reneged on everything they ever said they were going to do. Women are back to being third class citizens, and they’re letting the terrorists move back into their [homes] in downtown Kabul. What are you talking about!?” he said.

Smith wasn’t convinced.

“You know who’s not running wild? The head of al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, OK? So I think that matters,” she said.

She appeared to believe that the successful elimination of one terrorist somehow made up for the Biden administration’s poorly conducted withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Maher staunchly disagreed.

“Well, he was [found] and we got him, but they let him back in. The Taliban were not good partners, not honest negotiating partners. So look, I think Biden did the right thing by pulling out of Afghanistan. And it was a tough decision. And did he stick the landing? No. It’s so disappointing why something that consequential couldn’t have been done with more efficiency,” he said.

“They had time to plan it, and when they finally pulled it off, it’s like they only thought of [it] two days before, and it just makes me worry about everything in this country because this country just really can’t do anything efficiently, and I thought the military was the last line of defense.”

Maher had a point. The Biden administration made numerous mistakes such as allowing the Taliban to provide security at the Kabul Airport. This mistake led to a suicide bomber successfully infiltrating the airport and killing 13 service members.

“They sent my son over there as a paper pusher and then had the Taliban outside providing security. I blame my own military leaders. … Biden turned his back on him. That’s it,” Steve Nikoui, the parent of one of the deceased, said at the time.

He added that the Biden administration’s operation was a “turkey shoot.”

Collins Dictionary defines a turkey shoot as “a battle or other conflict” where “one side is so much stronger or better armed than the other one that the weaker side has no chance of winning at all.”

“Basically, it’s funneled into like a single-file type [of] entry point at which, you know, if you have any sort of chaos of any sort, they would all gather to that one funneled area [in] which they would all be susceptible and I think that’s exactly what happened,” Nikoui said.

“It was just basically so chaotic and not really planned out. Now, I’m a carpenter and even I could spot that with my untrained military eye,” he added.

Former President Donald Trump has claimed the bombing wouldn’t have occurred had he still been in charge. Part of the reason why, he’s argued, is because he wouldn’t have rushed the withdrawal as Biden had.

“We had plenty of time. They [the Taliban] weren’t gonna move. We had them under total control. We had the airplanes, we had the Air Force, they had nothing … There was no reason to expedite. I could have taken two years, three years to get [US forces] out. We were gonna get ‘em out fast, but … we were in no rush. We controlled everything, and they were afraid to move,” he told Fox News host Sean Hannity at the time.

“They wouldn’t have done a thing without my approval. Everything they did was conditions-based, and the biggest condition [was] you can’t kill Americans. And they can go back to their civil war after we’re gone, they can do whatever they want to do, but you can’t ever kill Americans and you can never come to our homeland, and he [Taliban leader Mullah Abdul Baradar] knew what was going to happen if they ever did it.”

Listen via Fox News’s “Hannity“:

The Biden administration also made the colossal mistake of abandoning Bagram Airport.

“We should have kept Bagram because Bagram is between China. It has total access to China, Iran, and Afghanistan. And I guess they didn’t realize that they abandoned it,” according to Trump.

Plus, it was a far more ideal airport to use for evacuations.

“You need not be a military genius on the level of Napoleon or Frederick the Great to realize that the international airport in Kabul — with a single runway, surrounded by mountains, and in the middle of a city of 4 million souls — is not an ideal base of operations from which to conduct this evacuation. In fact, the airport is dangerously exposed,” National Review noted.

“As we’ve so painfully discovered, basic security for the airport is a problem and flight operations can be threatened and even shut down due to the security situation. So why exactly did we give up our air base at Bagram?”

The answer to that question still remains unsettled, though all evidence points back to President Joe Biden and his abysmally poor decision-making …

Vivek Saxena

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