In all my many years of blogging MSM outbursts against Republican presidents, I've never seen anyone angrier than Richard Engel about Biden's Afghanistan fiasco. Well, there was Keith Olbermann. But for present purposes, let's leave aside the clinically disturbed.
In a piece with which Morning Joe opened today's show, Engel absolutely unleashed on the Biden administration. Rolling heartbreaking footage of desperate Afghans clinging to a US military plane as it rolled toward takeoff, Engel quoted a US military official saying the situation is "100-times worse than the humiliating American pullout from Saigon."
Engel contemptuously asked: "the US couldn't see this coming?"
Here's more of hit truth bomb dropped on the liberals at Morning Joe:
One U.S. military official told me, it was 100-times worse than the humiliating American pullout from Saigon. Afghans are running from the Taliban, now in full control. Setting up checkpoints with the very weapons American taxpayers bought for the Afghan army, which collapsed instead of fighting after the U.S. pulled out of bases and left them without air support. And the U.S. didn’t see this coming? We reported on the tremendous security vacuum created when the U.S. left Bagram air force base two months ago, leaving it so undefended and empty that I was able to bike down the runway. The warning signs were there.
He ended with this utter indictment of Biden:
"A twenty-year war ended in disgrace. The administration, claiming it was taken by surprise."
Richard Engel's blistering indictment of the Biden administration's Afghanistan fiasco was sponsored in part by AARP and BMW.
Here's the transcript. Click "expand" to read more.
MSNBC
Morning Joe
8/17/21
6:00 am EDTMIKA BRZEZINSKI: NBC News international correspondent Richard Engel has the latest from Kabul.
RICHARD ENGEL: Tens of thousands of Afghans swarmed into Kabul airport. Desperate to leave at any price. They burst through security. Climbed over walls. And spilled onto the tarmac. Searching for any airplane that would take them far away from Afghanistan. Away from the Taliban.
So many managed to cram into one plane, the pilot refused to take off. People on board refused to disembark.
But it was across a barb-wire divide where it turned really ugly. On the military side of the airport, American troops trying to evacuate U.S. embassy staff found themselves overwhelmed, suddenly battling crowds, firing warning shots. This was not the mission they came for.
The Pentagon says U.S. troops shot dead two armed Afghans. But still, the crowds didn’t disperse. Instead, they ran along and clung to the undercarriage of a military transport plane as it taxied for takeoff.
One U.S. military official told me, it was 100-times worse than the humiliating American pullout from Saigon.
Afghans are running from the Taliban, now in full control. Setting up checkpoints with the very weapons American taxpayers bought for the Afghan army, which collapsed instead of fighting after the U.S. pulled out of bases and left them without air support.
And the U.S. didn’t see this coming? We reported on the tremendous security vacuum created when the U.S. left Bagram air force base two months ago, leaving it so undefended and empty that I was able to bike down the runway. The warning signs were there.
And this weekend, Kabul was taken without resistance. And the Afghan president fled. Still in the country are tens of thousands of Afghan interpreters, marked for death by the Taliban, who were taking their meals in the presidential palace, settling in, celebrating their victory.
. . .
A 20-year war, the longest in U.S. history, ended in disgrace. The U.S. leaving behind a country its citizens are too terrified to live in. The administration maintaining it was taken by surprise.
