Leak of Ukraine War Plans, Accusations on Afghan Surrender Point to Biden Administration’s Incompetence

The Biden administration’s foreign policy failures are spinning out of control so fast it is a small wonder they do not have more Americans reaching for the nearest supply of Dramamine. The spiral started earlier in the week when a trove of classified documents pertaining to American and NATO plans to bolster Ukraine’s army were leaked to Twitter in America and to Telegram in Russia. Then on Thursday, in a performance bordering on the theatrical, President Biden’s national security spokesman, John Kirby, blamed the current administration’s shambolic surrender in Afghanistan in 2021 on President Trump. It is possible that these twin debacles add up to just another day in the life of President Biden’s White House.They could, though, also have unintended consequences and therefore bear some additional scrutiny. In the case of the document leak, first exposed by the Times, the Pentagon has so far been tight-lipped. According to the newspaper the department’s deputy press secretary, Sabrina Singh, simply said that “We are aware of the reports of social media posts and the department is reviewing the matter.”So are the Russians, where Telegram is a popular means of communication for both officials and everyday citizens. Many of them have been having a field day with what the Times described as leaked charts of anticipated weapons deliveries, troop and battalion strengths, and other plans.The leaks, according to the Times, “represent a significant breach of American intelligence in the effort to aid Ukraine” and constitute a “big coup for Moscow at a time when Russia had appeared to be trailing the United States in intelligence gathering in Ukraine.”Exactly who leaked the secret military plans to Russia, and how, is under investigation, but the very fact of their dispersal just ahead of a major, widely anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive speaks to a current Washingtonian culture of inattention, to say the least. This is the case even though the documents do not specify concrete combat plans. The Times notes that one of the documents summarized the status of a dozen combat brigades, with nine of them apparently being trained and supplied by America and “other” NATO allies. Other documents disclosed, to the random Internet users and the Kremlin alike, the level of consumption of ammunition for the American-made HIMARS multiple launch rocket systems, a detailed description of Ukrainian military units, their equipment, and training schedule for the period between January and April.The Pentagon is reportedly working to remove the documents from the social media space, but it was not immediately clear if that is technically possible. In the meantime, the damage has already been done. The only mitigating factor may be that the documents appear to be about five weeks old, and it is likely that situational assessments of the course of the war will have already evolved since. The Kremlin, though, will count this as a small victory. It is creating even more bad optics for Mr. Biden at a time when Russia is holding the American journalist Evan Gershkovich hostage in a notorious Moscow prison. It is a given that Russia will manipulate data from the documents for its own propaganda purposes, and there are indications that it has already started to do so.Still, there is no more glaring example of the Biden administration’s abysmal record on foreign policy than the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021. In the course of that ill-conceived and disastrously executed pull-out of American forces, which led to the Taliban’s complete takeover of the country, 13 American soldiers and 170 Afghans were killed in attack by two suicide bombers at Kabul’s airport.According to a new report, “President Biden’s choices for how to execute a withdrawal from Afghanistan were severely constrained by conditions created by his predecessor,” President Trump. The after-action report’s summary said that “the outgoing administration provided no plans for how to conduct the final withdrawal or to evacuate Americans or Afghan allies.”That risible assessment would appear to confirm what many Americans already suspect — that this White House was incapable of formulating a plan of its own for how to handle the situation in Afghanistan in a way that might have been less chaotic and that might have spared the lives of 183 innocent people. It appears that the only lesson Mr. Biden’s team learned from our surrender is that “We now prioritize earlier evacuations when faced with a degrading security situation.” Words fail — but not for Mr. Kirby, who in the press briefing Thursday wriggled his way out of questions about accountability for the Biden administration’s failures in Afghanistan with great aplomb.In any event, the abrupt absence of an American security footprint Afghanistan telegraphed to malign actors everywhere that under tough circumstances Washington can be a less than reliable partner. The suffering in Afghanistan that was precipitated by the American withdrawal appears to know no end. Mr. Trump has previously called for Mr. Biden to “resign in disgrace” for what “he has allowed to happen in Afghanistan.”

Leak of Ukraine War Plans, Accusations on Afghan Surrender Point to Biden Administration’s Incompetence

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