Considering America’s shambolic retreat from Afghanistan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali—who has spent much of her life warning of the dangers of Islamist radicals like the Taliban, and trying to protect the rights of Muslim women—takes President Biden to task for his claim that America’s “only vital national interest” in that country lies in “preventing a terrorist attack” on U.S. soil:
In reality, this chaotic, humiliating withdrawal significantly increases the risk of a terror attack on the U.S. homeland; . . . in intelligence terms Afghanistan is now a black hole. Even if we are able to extricate some of our Afghan intelligence assets, the U.S. has lost a key source of information on jihadist activity.
A little bit more imagination would also have revealed how China, Iran, and other current adversaries will likely use the Afghan fiasco to their advantage. . . . And what about our allies? Will India trust the U.S. as the leading partner of the “Quad” (along with Australia and Japan) designed to check the growing power of China? How about our European partners and the transatlantic alliance?
The second problem informing Biden’s approach concerns the moral decay of Western civilization. . . . We’ve become so focused on microaggressions in America that we have lost sight of the macroaggressions happening to women around the world. . . . In today’s perverse American culture, . . . more attention is devoted to the use of preferred gender pronouns than to the plight of women whose most basic rights—to education, personal autonomy, the right to be present in a public space—are either removed or under serious threat.
What we’ve witnessed this week in Afghanistan is a watershed moment in Western decline. [A segment of] American culture today tells us not to be proud of our country; not to believe in the superiority of American values; not to promote the rights we are afforded by our Constitution so that they can be enjoyed by people around the world.
Let us hope that enough Americans have not succumbed to this moral decay.
Read more on UnHerd: https://unherd.com/2021/08/bidens-most-heartless-betrayal/