Horowitz: Republicans embracing refugee resettlement completely misunderstand 9/11 and Afghanistan



Invade the world, invite the world.

As I've been reflecting on our odious response to COVID-19, it's hard to ignore the parallels with our counterproductive response to 9/11. The core solution to the virus was always to pursue early and even pre-emptive treatment of the actual virus. Instead, we destroyed ourselves with endless voodoo control measures that flattened our society and economy, not the curve of the virus. Pondering our Afghanistan policy, it appears that our policy from day one was essentially doing everything to make the Islamic threat worse while wasting time overseas on endeavors that not only failed to stop the threat but actually brought it closer to home.

At present, by my count, GOP governors from states including Iowa, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Georgia, South Carolina, Maryland, Utah, and Massachusetts are requesting the resettlement of thousands of unvetted Afghans in their states. Many of these same GOP politicians are hand-wringing about leaving Afghanistan and feigning concern over terrorism — all while missing the simple point that Afghans can only hurt us here if we bring them here!

Afghanistan never did and never will have an army or air force that is capable of attacking our homeland. To concern ourselves with Afghanistan in light of the threat from China is ludicrous. 9/11 was not about a military threat that required a military invasion. It was all rooted in the problems with our immigration and visa system. Rather than locking that bad system down, our government went overseas to referee a 1,000-year civil war, then proceeded to admit thousands of people from both sides of the civil war — coming full-circle on the impetus for the 9/11 attacks.

On Sept. 11, 2001, a ragtag terrorist organization attacked us through our immigration system, killing nearly 3,000 Americans. We simply let in people we should not have admitted and allowed them to work with networks in this country of other people who should not have been let in. We responded by making the problem worse and increasing migration from those countries without any system to vet incoming immigrants.

We have clearly not learned our lesson, or we are just willing to allow the false gods of mass migration to overshadow safety concerns. We have issued roughly 2.2 million green cards to nationals of predominantly Muslim countries from 2001 through the first quarter of 2018, a level we've never seen in our nation's history. We've brought in more just in a five-year period than the entire Muslim population of Belgium, which has become saturated with radical Islamic elements.

Consider the immigration policies of the past 20 years in light of what the 9/11 Commission staff report on terrorist travel wrote in 2004:

It is perhaps obvious to state that terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country. Yet prior to September 11, while there were efforts to enhance border security, no agency of the U.S. government thought of border security as a tool in the counterterrorism arsenal. Indeed, even after 19 hijackers demonstrated the relative ease of obtaining a U.S. visa and gaining admission into the United States, border security still is not considered a cornerstone of national security policy.

Here is a list of people we've brought in just on immigrant visas from predominantly Islamic countries. Notice nearly 100,000 Afghans were brought in since 2001:

Not only did we send our best warriors into a meat grinder with no defined mission or logical outcome, we had them fight for a compromised force, making them subject to endless "green on blue" attacks. In the ultimate paradox, we invested so much in building up the Afghan military that we brought thousands of unvetted Afghans to our shores every year under the guise of helping a war effort that in itself placed our troops in danger from unvetted coalition "partners."

Several hundred Afghan military trainees have gone AWOL in our country over the years. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) observed that the "limited vetting of Afghan trainees, and the restrictions of the investigatory and asylum processes, may pose a security risk to the United States when trainees go AWOL." We've spent about $81 billion on the Afghan security forces, as part of a nearly $1 trillion price tag for the two-decade war.

Yes, you can always count on the Democrats to wait 20 years and then pull out in the worst way imaginable, not even bothering to plan an orderly pullback and ensure that weapons are removed or destroyed before the retreat. But this should not be used as an excuse to rectify the situation with mass migration.

Some are suggesting that we owe it to these people to resettle them in the United States. This is the most absurd line of argument imaginable. It's only because of the war that we are bringing foreign nationals to our shores in record numbers. The same unvetted Afghans who were leading our soldiers into ambushes for years are being brought here in the thousands every year. The number of special immigration visas from Afghanistan has increased over time, and they are not subject to the refugee cap. We've brought "here" roughly 65,000 individuals who helped us fight "there."

Those Republicans joining Democrats in demanding that we bring in tens of thousands of unvetted Afghans, as if the American people owe them more blood, treasure, and sacrifice, are violating the social compact of governance. These swamp congressmen and governors must understand the admonition of the 9/11 Commission staff report: that 9/11 was all about visas and immigration because "terrorists cannot plan and carry out attacks in the United States if they are unable to enter the country." Now, in addition to nearly 2,500 dead and tens of thousands of wounded soldiers fighting "over there," we have nothing to show for the war other than 100,000 largely unvetted new Afghan migrants.

Have we learned nothing from Europe? In 2014-2015, Europe suffered a massive migration crisis from places like Afghanistan and north Africa with the rise of the Islamic State. It set off a torrent of Islamic terror attacks on the continent, and the problem has still not abated. Europol's latest European Union Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2021 (TESAT) documents that perpetrators of five completed terrorist mainland attacks during 2020 had "entered the EU as asylum seekers or irregular migrants."

To this day, we have not even ended the foreign military training programs on our U.S. military bases, even for those from countries with a strong jihadist presence. Even after Saudi Royal Air Force pilot Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, one of an estimated 850 Saudi military personnel training on our bases, shot dead three Americans at Naval Air Station Pensacola in 2019, we continued the program. If we couldn't even vet official military trainees from the Middle East, are we really supposed to trust every Tom, Dick, and Harry Afghan who claims to have "helped" our military help his own country?

One would think Republicans would universally reject the proposition of following in Europe's footsteps. Then again, these are some of the same Republicans who have refused to reject COVID fascism and have instead rejected the one way to treat this virus while opting for painful and counterproductive measures – just like our response to 9/11.

It's time for red-state legislatures to convene and bar all refugee resettlement in the United States. We have already accepted hundreds of thousands of people from our own hemisphere thanks to the Biden administration's invitation at the southern border. As for the Middle East, our own taxpayers have already paid enough for what goes on there with our blood and treasure. We need not come full-circle again and pay for it on our own shores with the one policy that will ensure that what inevitably will happen in Afghanistan will indeed migrate to our shores.

'The fall of Kabul should be the DOWNFALL of the Biden administration'



In the wake of the United States pulling troops out of Afghanistan, the progressive Left in the United States appeared more concerned about preferred pronouns and the Green New Deal than the reality of what had transpired in Kabul, Afghanistan's capital city.

In this clip, BlazeTV's Chad Prather asserted what he believed the people of Kabul will face now with the Taliban in control: murder, rape, and death.

On Tuesday's episode of "The Chad Prather Show," Chad explained why he believed the fall of Kabul should be the "downfall" of the Biden administration.

"We [Americans] have no concept of how the rest of the world operates," Chad said. He later added that the rest of the world doesn't care about equality but rather who is in control.

Chad savagely dismantled the Biden administration's foreign policy and went on to say that American culture had become weak.

"At least Trump could shut things down," Chad said. "He got things done."

Watch the clip to hear more from Chad. Can't watch? Download the podcast here.


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Whitlock: The fall of Afghanistan illustrates the utter failure of the ‘intelligence community’ President Eisenhower predicted



America today isn't hard to understand. In his farewell address 60 years ago, President Dwight Eisenhower explained the destructive path the "intelligence community" planned for us.

His explanation went well beyond expressing fear of a military-industrial complex. He warned that secularism, technology, and academia beholden to government would conspire with the military to undermine the greater purpose of our nation.

Every failure we're witnessing today — from Afghanistan to Big Tech censorship to critical racism theory being taught in our schools — can be traced to the 15-minute warning Eisenhower delivered on Jan. 17, 1961.

The American people have been stripped of their power. A cabal of military, political, technological, media, and academic elites has seized control of our republic under the pretense of fortifying democracy. I call the cabal the "intelligence community," the elites who are convinced their degrees, titles, fancy word salads, and wealth make them a superior breed of human being. They practice intelligence supremacy. They grab power in the sincere belief that their ascendancy assures the safety and prosperity of the world at large. They are the most high.

Everyone outside this country can easily see that America no longer serves a higher power or a higher purpose. The Taliban conquered our military might because they justifiably rejected the secular values we tried to impose on their country.

That is not written or said as an endorsement of Sharia law, the set of Islamic religious rules that denies women equal rights. It's stated to expose the folly of thinking secular values could unseat religious ones in Afghanistan. You can't subdue the Greater Middle East with guns and drones, bombs and airplanes. Muslims, and other highly religious people, do not fear death the way Americans do.

Our military-industrial complex cannot control the Taliban or end their belief in the patriarchy. They're not trapped in the American-made matrix President Eisenhower predicted six decades ago. Eisenhower's farewell address is too often solely reduced to his military warning. His speech was much more than that. The World War II hero outlined the threat of Marxist political ideology in layman's terms.

"We face a hostile ideology — global in scope, atheistic in character, ruthless in purpose, and insidious in method," Eisenhower said. "Unhappily the danger it poses promises to be of indefinite duration. To meet it successfully, there is called for, not so much the emotional and transitory sacrifices of crisis, but rather those which enable us to carry forward steadily, surely, and without complaint the burdens of a prolonged and complex struggle — with liberty at stake. Only thus shall we remain, despite every provocation, on our charted course toward permanent peace and human betterment."

That is Eisenhower, in 1961, telling us that a war is being waged in the minds of Americans. Would we remain one nation under God, or would a hostile, atheist ideology overrun our religious values and love of freedom?

Eisenhower then pivoted to discussing the dangers of an American society trapped by military expense.

"This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience," he said. "The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist."

From there, Eisenhower urged Americans to be suspicious of the federal government's influence on scholarly research and science. Sixty years ago, Eisenhower warned us about the Trust the Science movement. It's as if he knew one day America would provide funding for a lab in Wuhan, China.

"Today, the solitary inventor, tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields," he said. "In the same fashion, the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity."

Finally, Eisenhower forecasted that Jack Dorsey, Mark Zuckerberg, and the satans of Silicon Valley would become our rulers.

"Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect," he said, "as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite."

Sixty years ago, our 34th president interpreted George Orwell's book, "1984," which was published four years before Eisenhower ascended to the presidency.

Two years after Eisenhower left office, President John Kennedy was assassinated. Five years later, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated. President Kennedy defied our military commanders in his handling of Cuba. Bobby Kennedy's first presidential campaign speech, "Conflict in Vietnam and at Home," centered on exiting the Vietnam War. Dr. King spoke against the Vietnam War.

I'm not wearing a tin-foil hat. Neither was Dwight Eisenhower.

The whole world, even Taliban soldiers hiding in mountain caves, can see that our military, academic institutions, politicians, spying agencies, media, tech billionaires, and celebrity class have been corrupted by a blind pursuit of power, money, and fame.

Long before we surrendered Kabul, we surrendered the moral high ground through fear and cowardice. As control of America was stripped from the people, a handful of public executions silenced dissent. No one should be surprised the Taliban embarrassed us abroad. Our intelligence community has been embarrassing us at home for 60 years.

Trump calls Afghanistan 'the most embarrassing military outcome' in American history



Former President Donald Trump has been on the attack, criticizing the Biden administration over the issue of Afghanistan as the nation swiftly falls to the Taliban while the U.S. seeks to withdraw.

"It's not that we left Afghanistan. It's the grossly incompetent way we left!" he declared in a statement on Monday.

"Afghanistan is the most embarrassing military outcome in the history of the United States. It didn't have to be that way!" Trump said in another statement.

"Can anyone even imagine taking out our Military before evacuating civilians and others who have been good to our Country and who should be allowed to seek refuge? In addition, these people left topflight and highly sophisticated equipment. Who can believe such incompetence? Under my Administration, all civilians and equipment would have been removed," Trump said in another statement.

But Trump is not the only American unhappy with the situation in Afghanistan, where the Taliban has been seizing control of the country.

A recent survey found that a majority of likely general election voters disapprove of President Biden's handling of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan — 59.5% strongly disapprove and an additional 9.8% disapprove, which combines for a whopping 69% in the survey expressing disapproval.

Many GOP lawmakers have leveled criticism against the Biden administration over the situation in Afghanistan.

"Biden, the White House & their shameless hype men at MSNBC continue attacking the straw man of leaving #Afghanistan," Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida tweeted. "It isn't about deciding to leave, it's about the incompetent way they executed it."

GOP Rep. Chris Stewart of Utah blamed the "ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan" on the president and the Pentagon.

"But the ongoing catastrophe in Afghanistan was entirely avoidable and is a blatant failure of leadership – both by President Biden and the Pentagon," Stewart said in a statement. "Allowing weapons, helicopters, ammunition, and classified documents to fall into the hands of the Taliban is inexcusable. Not being able to defend our own embassy is a disgrace. Leaving the Afghani soldiers and interpreters who fought beside us to fend for themselves is incomprehensible. Competent military leadership could have withdrawn our forces in an orderly fashion, creating benchmarks and priorities that would have prevented the current situation. Neither the President nor the Pentagon did any of that."

'It's a disgrace to this country to depart like this': Vets watch Afghanistan deteriorate amid US withdrawal



As Americans and the rest of the world witness the rapid fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban as the U.S. moves to withdraw, the unfolding situation can be particularly painful for U.S. veterans and Gold Star families.

"It's a disgrace to this country to depart like this," said retired Army Colonel Dave Brostrom, whose son Jonathan died in combat in Afghanistan in 2008. "This is very disheartening," he said, according to CBS News.

"You know, my son died trying to protect his fellow soldiers, but for the ultimate cause of stabilizing the country and establishing a good government, yes, it was a sacrifice that was for naught," Brostrom noted when asked whether it felt like his son gave his life for nothing, the outlet reported.

Republican Rep. Mike Waltz of Florida, a veteran who served in Afghanistan, explained that he has swung between rage and grief.

"You know it, it's a painful back and forth between rage and — and grief, to be perfectly candid with you," he said, according to WMFE. "It is incredibly difficult to watch so many of us, not just veterans, but particularly Gold Star families, even 9/11 victims have reached out, you know, asking, was it all in vain, just watching all of that blood, sweat, and tears, and treasure go up in smoke. And I want everyone to hear me loud and clear that it was not in vain. Their sacrifice was not in vain that America was kept safe for the last 20 years. But it's incredibly, it is an incredibly difficult time. And for anyone who's going to a very dark place, please, please reach out. There's a veteran crisis hotline and you're not alone."

Other lawmakers have also been sharing the Veterans Crisis Line on social media. People can choose to call on the phone, text message, or chat online.

"I just can't help thinking about what a waste it is. I can't allow myself to think about how after all that blood and treasure, it ends like this," retired Army Colonel Janet Holliday said, according to the New York Times.

To current active duty servicemembers and veterans in the Third District who may be struggling with the ongoing cri… https://t.co/MxEPIKBRLu
— Congressman Greg Murphy, M.D. (@RepGregMurphy) 1629129991.0

Report: Head of US Central Command met with Taliban to beg for non-interference with evacuation at Kabul airport



The head of U.S. Central Command met face-to-face with senior Taliban leaders Sunday to plead with the Islamist militants for non-interference with the U.S. military's evacuation efforts at the Kabul airport in Afghanistan, the Associated Press reported.

According to an anonymous defense official, Gen. Frank McKenzie met with the Taliban in Doha, Qatar, and won their agreement to establish a "deconfliction mechanism" — an agreement to permit evacuation operations at the airport without interference from the new Taliban government in Kabul.

McKenzie reportedly told the Taliban that the U.S. military would respond forcefully to defend the airport should the Islamist militants interfere with evacuation efforts.

The Taliban seized control of Afghanistan Sunday after taking control of the capital in Kabul and overthrowing the Western-backed government there. President Ashraf Ghani fled the country and the U.S.-trained Afghani security forces collapsed.

Desperate Afghani citizens have rushed to the Hamid Karzai International Airport seeking to board international flights and flee the country. Videos posted to social media show the airport in utter chaos, with people clinging to a departing U.S. Air Force C-17 transport plane and the tarmac severely overcrowded.

The mass confusion forced U.S. troops to temporarily suspended evacuations until the tarmac could be cleared. According to Reuters, U.S. troops fired into the air to deter people from attempting to force their way onto a military flight evacuating U.S. diplomats and embassy staff.

The Pentagon said Monday that an additional 1,000 troops would be sent to join the 5,000 troops already stationed in Afghanistan to protect evacuation efforts and defend the airport. Pentagon spokesman John Kirby told reporters that American forces killed two armed individuals at the airport during the evacuation.

The U.S. Embassy in Kabul was evacuated Sunday and diplomats were relocated to the airport. Ambassador Ross Wilson is still in Afghanistan, according to ABC News. He will remain in the country with the "core" team of diplomats to continue the embassy's work as evacuation efforts proceed.

The fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban follows President Joe Biden's decision to withdraw U.S. forces before the 20th anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that led to the U.S. war on terror. Over two decades, the U.S. spent billions of dollars on counter-insurgency strategies against Taliban fighters and training for the Afghani military to secure their country.

Biden administration officials were reportedly stunned by the speed with which the Taliban gained control of the country.