Daniel Greenfield / Sultan Knish Articles at DanielGreenfield.org

When Kabul fell, the Taliban offered the Biden administration a deal. Either the United States could control the city until August 31, the terror group’s deadline, or the Taliban would. The Taliban may have been testing Biden, wary of a direct military confrontation with a large concentration of American forces, but if so they quickly learned that they had little to worry about. Instead of maintaining control over Kabul so that Americans could be speedily evacuated, the Biden administration and its cronies turned over the city to the Taliban. And the Taliban turned to their most professional and deadliest assets. The Haqqani Network had been closely allied with Al Qaeda and picked up many of its tricks. Its commanders understood urban warfare, excelled at suicide and truck bombings, and had expert units whose commandos had been trained in Pakistan by the terror regime’s ISI secret agents. The Taliban officially named Khalil al-Rahman Haqqani to head security in Kabul. The Haqqani Jihad...

More American soldiers died in one week of Biden’s retreat than in the last two years of war. 9 American soldiers had died in combat in Afghanistan from August 2019 until now when over a dozen of our men were murdered in one single day during Biden’s shameful retreat. Like so many of the American soldiers who were killed by the Taliban and their Al Qaeda allies during the Obama-Biden administration, and like the Americans murdered in Benghazi by Jihadists allied with Al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, they did not have to die. American soldiers died because they were prevented from defending themselves. Abandoning thousands of Americans behind enemy lines, the Biden administration turned the Kabul airport into Fort Apache surrounded by the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and other Jihadis. Taliban Jihadists controlled checkpoints, checked papers, beat Americans, and entered the airport to “coordinate” security with American forces. Thousands of American citizens and soldiers were cut off from eac...

Human rights are not a government, they’re a culture. America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths. These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture. The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people. This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with. And even in America there are voices that favor tearing up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and reverting to a hierarchical model. From t...

During the 2007 Dem primaries, Biden attacked Obama for adopting his position on Afghanistan. The flailing Biden campaign put out a press release accusing Obama of being a "johnny-come-lately" who had belatedly adopted Biden's push for "significantly increasing reconstruction assistance" and sending more American soldiers to Afghanistan. While running for president, Biden had based his entire foreign policy around sending more troops to Afghanistan. He had memorized one line, "if we're surging troops anywhere, it should be in Afghanistan", and repeated it in the Senate, in interviews, and on the campaign trail. Sending more troops to Afghanistan, he argued would give America "the moral high ground". “The next president of the United States will have to rally the American people and the world to fight them over there, unless we want to fight them over here. But the over there is not, as President Bush has falsely and repeatedly claimed, i...

"As Virus Cases Rise, Another Contagion Spreads Among the Vaccinated: Anger," the New York Times hisses. "Vaccinated people are ready for normalcy — and angry at the unvaccinated," the Washington Post jeers. "It's O.K. to be mad at people who refuse to get vaccinated," America Magazine reassures. Hating people is a hell of a prescription for a medical crisis, but to the Left all problems are political problems. And they deal with political problems by hating twice as hard as ever. Our media, like that of most totalitarian countries, exists to tell regime loyalists whom to be angry at today while distracting them from the regime’s latest disaster. The American Left only knows and understands identity politics. Its view of the world is rooted in the same Marxist theories that made the Soviet Union and every Communist government so dysfunctional, but the need to juggle the intersectional dynamics of multiculturalism has made it especially insane. Anyone w...

"I want to understand white rage, and I’m white," Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, whined at a congressional hearing. He might have done better to understand Muslim rage. A week after his testimony, the Taliban had not only doubled their number of districts, but possessed hundreds of captured U.S. armored vehicles, along with artillery and drones. The Pentagon's spokesman told reporters to ask the Afghan military about the gear. In May, Milley had shrugged off questions about whether the Afghan military would survive. “We frankly don’t know yet. We have to wait and see how things develop over the summer.” The Afghan military was beginning to fall apart while Milley was defending critical race theory. A week earlier, the New York Times had described "demoralized" Afghan forces "abandoning checkpoints and bases en masse." Two days after Milley’s disgraceful performance, the media reported that even the Taliban were “surpr...

"Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?" ABC News asks. "Afghanistan Is Your Fault," barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. “Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms,” Politico ponders. The one thing that the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes. Afghanistan didn't fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real. The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed, and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul. Afghanis...

The media is filled with absolutely worthless analyses of why the Afghan army surrendered. Some commentators blame the United States for not providing logistics. Others claimed that we undermined its non-existent morale. There's hand-wringing over the 300,000 Afghan soldiers who wouldn't fight. And the $90 billion that we squandered on building up the army that wouldn't fight. These analyses are just as dumb as the ones that accompanied the collapse of the Iraqi Army in the face of ISIS. The Afghan army, like its Iraqi counterpart, was a wholly artificial western institution. When faced with a tribal crisis, its members revert to their first duty, which is going to the defense of their tribe. The Afghan army didn't "surrender".  Its Pashtun members surrendered to the Taliban who are fellow Pashtuns. Hazaras fled to Iran and took our equipment with them for the benefit of Hezbollah, the Houthis, and any other Shiite terrorists. The Uzbeks fled to Uzbekistan.  T...

"Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time. That's why Americans have never lost and will never lose a war. The very thought of losing is hateful to Americans."  General George S. Patton  "It's our belief that one day mujahideen will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day." Taliban commander to CNN Why can't America win wars?  You've gotta fight a war to win a war. And we don't fight wars. In my upcoming article on the disaster in Afghanistan, I warn that we've lost the ability to define what a war is and why we fight them. "If we can’t go to war for ourselves, not for democracy, human rights, or so that Afghan girls can go to school, then we will lose soldiers, lose wars, and lose our nation," I write.  The average American spent the last deca...

American soldiers would often show up at villages in rural areas of Afghanistan to win the 'hearts and minds' of the locals only to learn that they not only don't understand what America is, but aren't even aware that they're living in a country called Afghanistan. And don't especially care. Afghanistan is an imaginary country. Much like Iraq and Syria. These places have history, but the idea of a country is an external concept embraced by local elites who want centralized authority, but resisted by locals in rural areas. The real Afghanistan is a collection of different ethnic groups and Islamic denominations, where tribe matters far more than nationality. We "won" Afghanistan by backing an anti-Taliban tribal coalition. The strategy, much like the Sunni Awakening in Iraq, paid off because we provided air and military support to a viable tribal opposition. The clean and effective victory was then ruined by trying to "modernize" and "dem...