Secretary of State Antony Blinken has been an utter failure at ensuring the protection of Americans and Afghan allies in Kabul.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
OPINION
“This is manifestly not Saigon,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken bellowed on the Sunday talk shows last weekend, attempting to spin his boss’s inexplicably ill-executed Afghanistan withdrawal. As Americans watched the most embarrassing foreign policy debacle in national history unfold, Blinken’s cavalier assertion proved to be a lie.
The fact that Blinken promoted such a patently false outlook as an administration-approved TV talking point only underscored that there was simply nothing else to say. The American people saw for themselves the hurried helicopter evacuations from the U.S. embassy and the Taliban jihadists march into Kabul’s presidential palace.
To borrow from human-rights attorney Kimberley Motley, as quoted in The Wall Street Journal, the situation is actually more akin to “Saigon on steroids.”
Blinken was not just wrong on the Saigon comparison — he was horribly, incontrovertibly wrong on everything related to the Afghanistan pullout. Given the fraught geopolitical stakes involved here, and given the secretary of state’s indispensable role as the president’s effective top foreign policy advisor, Blinken should resign his post.
The secretary of state is, of course, not merely the United States’ top foreign policy sage. He also heads up our global embassy network, which means Blinken is ultimately accountable for having no plan to safely evacuate on Uncle Joe’s artificial, ideologically driven withdrawal timeframe.
Blinken and his boss similarly bear the blame for the fact that more than 10,000 U.S. citizens remain stranded at a time when the “Afghanistan Evacuation” special section of State’s Bureau of Consular Affairs site pathetically asserts: “The United States Government cannot ensure safe passage to the airport.
The buck stops with our commander-in-chief, but Blinken’s State Department also independently botched this ill-fated withdrawal.
Blinken, following his boss’s lead, has been generally missing in action after last weekend’s pitiful tour across the Sunday talk shows. Blinken did admit that the Taliban retook Afghanistan more swiftly and easily than was expected after the U.S. drawdown. Well, whose fault is that, exactly?
Finally, it was recently revealed that an internal State Department memo that circulated last month warned top officials at Foggy Bottom about the potential imminent collapse of Kabul after a U.S. withdrawal.
Blinken appears to have reviewed that missive — and opted to ignore it.
Resign, Tony.
Josh Hammer is Newsweek opinion editor and a research fellow with the Edmund Burke Foundation. Twitter: @josh_hammer.
Read the original post New York Post