Port: It's like a race between Biden and Trump world to see who can be the most callously stupid

MINOT, N.D. — I, like many of you, have been horrified by events in Afghanistan .

The precipitous withdrawal of our military forces from that country was a mistake. Whatever your opinion of the original decision to invade, whatever criticisms of our subsequent occupation may be apt, the fact is we were there. We made hundreds of thousands of Afghanis our partners in our mission there.

Now we're abandoning them and leaving a power vacuum in Afghanistan that is being filled not just by the Taliban but China as well . Chinese state media is even using Afghanistan as a warning for Taiwan.

This is how well America stands by its allies, the communists are saying, and it's a point that's hard to dismiss as we watch terrified Afghanis fall from the sky after attempting to cling to departing American jets.

"There are a lot of Afghans who trusted the United States. Not just translators. Not just civil society activists, but also Afghan soldiers," an Afghan pilot, currently in hiding from the Taliban, said in a recent interview . "We loved fighting alongside Americans. Please don’t leave us behind. Please. We will be great Americans."

The callousness on display in this terrible situation from President Joe Biden's administration doesn't seem to be any accident. It seems to be something Biden has wanted to do for a while.

"In 2010, he told Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, that the U.S. had to leave Afghanistan regardless of the consequences for women or anyone else," Politico reports . "According to Holbrooke’s diary, when he asked about American obligations to Afghans like the girl in the Kabul school, Biden replied with a history lesson from the final U.S. withdrawal from Southeast Asia in 1973: ‘F--- that, we don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam, Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.’”

Nixon got away with it.

That's our commander-in-chief's standard for foreign policy? And now, as we abandon them, he's blaming the Afghanis for not fighting hard enough.

American forces vacated the Bagram airbase without telling the local Afghani commander and left the Kabul International Airport as the available point for airlifting people out of the country. We pulled our combat troops out before we evacuated the civilians, now we're sending thousands of troops back in to try and secure what has become an atrociously bloody situation.

And Biden is blaming the Afghanis?

I will never understand the push for a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan.

We weren't exactly fighting a war anymore.

The last American combat casualty in Afghanistan happened in February of last year .

What we had was a relatively peaceful occupation, at least as measured by the American perspective. One that made a great deal of strategic sense. It put American boots on the ground in a part of the world where many modern national security threats come from. It prevented Afghanistan from turning into another terror state.

Given the rapid collapse of Afghani forces when confronted by a resurgent Taliban , many have derided our efforts there, forgetting that our foreign policy prevented American forces from providing air cover for the Afghanis. Private contractors were prohibited from even helping the Afghanis fix their equipment.

Not only are we abandoning them, but it also seems we actively set them up for failure.

MORE FROM ROB PORT

• Port: Ruling found UND police chief was victim of discrimination over vote for Trump

• Port: Fargo commissioner Tony Gehrig threatened to call police chief after cops prevented him from driving home from bar

• Port: Joe Biden calls for more oil production, just not in America

In the meantime, there are thousands upon thousands of Afghanis we made commitments to who feel betrayed.
"I’ve had a dozen conversations with American intelligence officers and special operators over the past few weeks, and they’ve told me that they swore to their Afghan recruits that if they fought shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans, we’d protect their wives and children," Sen. Ben Sasse, a Republican from Nebraska, wrote in National Review . "Those promises are being broken."

I'm not sure we can undo the betrayal, but we could mitigate it by opening our communities up to Afghan refugees.

So far, the Biden administration seems to be dragging its feet on this front. "Eighty-eight thousand of our Afghan allies have applied for visas to get out of the country, but this administration has approved just 1,200 so far," Sasse notes.

"The United States government has the legal authority to cut the red tape for refugees during urgent humanitarian crises. And we have the responsibility and the resources to secure safe passage for them now, without bureaucratic delay," former President George W. Bush said in a statement on the crisis .

The problem is, it's not just the Biden administration's slow-motion handling of refugee applications.

There is already pronounced hostility toward the refugees coming from Trump world.

Tucker Carlson is on Fox News warning of an invasion "probably in your neighborhood."

"If history is any guide, and it’s always a guide, we'll see many refugees from Afghanistan resettle in our country in coming months, probably in your neighborhood," he said during a recent broadcast. "And over the next decade, that number may swell to the millions. So first we invade, and then we're invaded."

Another Trump world stalwart, Charlie Kirk, apparently unaware of the lack of progress the Biden administration has actually made on approving visas, is saying the President "wants a couple hundred thousand more Ilhan Omars to come into America to change the body politic permanently," referring to far-left Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar .

"It is becoming increasingly clear that Biden & his radical deputies will use their catastrophic debacle in Afghanistan as a pretext for doing to America what Angela Merkel did to Germany & Europe," Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller wrote on Twitter .

"Is it really our responsibility to welcome thousands of refugees from Afghanistan?" asked Fox News' Laura Ingraham.

The answer to that is yes.

Yes, it is.

Not just because we invaded Afghanistan and own this situation - we broke it, so we bought it - but because America has a duty to be the shining city on the hill for the rest of the world. A place of safety and opportunity and prosperity for those "yearning to breathe free."

I suspect, given past controversies around refugee resettlement in our part of the world, that many North Dakotans and Minnesotans disagree with that sentiment.

It is the very definition of hypocritical for flag-waving Trump supporters, who define themselves as patriots, who say they believe in American exceptionalism, to turn their backs on the refugees created by American foreign policy, not to mention one of the primary responsibilities of our exceptional nation.

The Biden administration's handling of Afghanistan has been atrocious.

The reaction to that abysmal situation from many on the right has been worse.

To comment on this article, visit www.sayanythingblog.com

Rob Port, founder of SayAnythingBlog.com, is a Forum Communications commentator. Reach him on Twitter at @robport or via email at rport@forumcomm.com .