Blumenthal Is Furious And Frustrated
U.S. Senator Dick Blumenthal, we learn from a piece in the Washington Examiner, is furious at his chief.
“Sen. Richard Blumenthal,” the paper reports, “took aim at the White House and State Department on Monday, saying he is ‘furious’ over struggles to secure planes to evacuate a group of Americans and Afghan allies from Afghanistan.”
And here is the money quote, carefully authored, one can be sure, by some member of his staff who has learned to be furious on cue: “’I have been deeply frustrated, even furious, at our government’s delay and inaction,’ Blumenthal, a Democrat who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said. ‘I expect the White House and State Department to do everything in their power, absolutely everything, to make this happen. These are American citizens and Afghans who risked everything for our country. We cannot leave them behind.’”
In fact, we have left them behind and do not know, at this point, their precise numbers, who they are, or how exactly the Biden administration is prepared to get them out of a country now entirely controlled by the Taliban, whose chief, a bit more persistent than Biden, is Sirajuddin Haqqani, a leader of the Haqqani network and now the Taliban’s acting interior minister. Haqqani was once a resident in an American holding pen for terrorists in Cuba, the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.
Blumenthal’s frustration, it would appear, is just beginning.
In addition to being frustrated and furious, Blumenthal reminds us that he is also worried. And his worry accounts for his silence: “I haven’t yet spoken publicly about these efforts because we worried that heightened attention would only escalate tensions and put these people at even greater risk of being targeted.”
No intrepid Connecticut reporter has yet asked Blumenthal whether his new found courage in speaking out now will put the sequestered victims of the Taliban and the Haqqani network in further jeopardy. The prisoners of the Taliban are, after all, still behind enemy lines, and there is some indication in Blumenthal’s justifiable fury that he still considers brutes like Haqquani and the Taliban to be enemies.
Unfortunately, there also is some indication that the Biden administration, putting aside 20 years of frustrated opposition to the Taliban by the U.S. government, seems now fully prepared to begin diplomatic relations with the new Emirate of Afghanistan, which may demand some sort of tribute – a payment Islam often demands of those they have conquered as a sign of submission -- before the terrorists begin releasing their prisoners, thus allaying Blumenthal’s fury and worry.
Among its traditional allies – France, Great Britain, Spain, Canada, etc. – the United States has lost face. Trust has received a black eye, and core Western countries also find it nearly impossible to extract its citizens from Talibanland. China, on the other hand, has gained face – and, according to recent accounts, Bagram Air Force Base. And Afghanistan’s last Jew, Zebulon Simentov, has left the country, Blumenthal, who is Jewish, may be relieved to know.
The extraction problems have been with us for some time. Last week, Texas Republican U.S. Representative Dan Crenshaw disclosed that “after securing a charter flight to evacuate a group, including American citizens, lawful permanent residents, and Special Immigrant Visa holders, the State Department pulled the clearance for the charter plane due to the ISIS-K bombing that killed 13 service members at the Kabul airport. They also had trouble getting the State Department to help coordinate overflight rights from Saudi Arabia and coordination to land in Jordan.”
A frustrated Blumenthal, who also has been attempting to wrest Americans and others from the jaws of the Taliban, commented, “There will be plenty of time to seek accountability for the inexcusable bureaucratic red tape that stranded so many of our Afghan allies. For now, my singular focus remains getting these planes in the air and safely to our air base in Doha, where they have already been cleared to land.”
Time, writes T.S. Eliot in his poem, The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock “there will be time/ To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;/ There will be time to murder and create,/And time for all the works and days of hands/That lift and drop a question on your plate…/ Time for you and time for me,/And time yet for a hundred indecisions,/And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before the taking of a toast and tea/.
Time, which always erodes a lucid memory, is the best friend of certain kinds of politicians. But one senses that time will run out on the Afghanistan drama sooner rather than later – perhaps before the taking of a toast and tea by incumbent politicians on election eve, many of whom will by that time be haunted by indecisions, visions and revisions.