PIERS MORGAN: As 9/11 approaches, Biden’s Afghanistan disaster should cost him his presidency

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This Saturday is the 20th anniversary of 9/11, one of the darkest days in American history.

To mark the occasion, President Biden will travel to Ground Zero in New York where the Twin Towers were destroyed, to Virginia where a plane was flown into the Pentagon, and to a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania where Flight United 93 also crashed after an on-air battle between terrorists and hero passengers.

This would be a sombre enough experience for any American President given that nearly 3,000 people were killed on that infamous day back in 2001 which represented a terrible failure of US intelligence.

But now it will also be a moment of bitter shame and humiliation too, thanks to Biden’s appalling mishandling of the US withdrawal from Afghanistan and abject surrender to the very people who helped commit the attacks by harbouring the terrorists who carried them out.

Today, the Taliban declared total victory in the 20-year war that ensued after America invaded Afghanistan to avenge the 9/11 atrocity, claiming they had seized control of Afghanistan’s Panjshir province, the last of 34 provinces to hold out against them.

America’s defeat to just 75,000 murderous medieval thugs is thus complete.

And the full scale of that defeat is only slowly becoming depressingly clear.

The appalling scenes in the immediate aftermath of the withdrawal were horrendous enough, notably the suicide bomber attack on Kabul airport that killed 13 US troops and several hundred desperate Afghan people including scores of women and children.

But to rub salt in the corpses, blood and wounds, gleeful Taliban fighters have been marching around taunting America by posing in US military clothes and equipment, holding mock funerals for American, British, French and NATO forces, hunting down and killing anyone who supported the US or its allies, and ordering terrified Afghan women back inside their homes on pain of severe punishment.

Biden, whose constant virtue-signalling about women’s rights now looks preposterously hypocritical, promised every American who wanted to leave Afghanistan that they would be able to leave.

But The New York Times this morning reported that around 1,000 people, including many American citizens and Afghans holding visas to the United States or other countries, have been trapped in Afghanistan for five days as they ‘await clearance for the departure from the Taliban.’

So, the fate of yet more US lives, and of those who risked their lives to help America, lies in the hands of the scumbags who harboured al-Qaeda’s terrorists. And there’s nothing President Biden can do about it other than hope the Taliban do the decent thing when they’ve never done a decent thing in their lives.

There are many others still stranded in Afghanistan including an estimated 100-200 American citizens, thousands of green-card holders, and a majority of the 250,000 Afghans eligible for Special Immigrant Visas.

Understandably, they are terrified.

‘The reason the Taliban wants to prevent these people from leaving is likely because they intend to punish them for their cooperation with the U.S.,’ said Mick Mulroy, a former senior Pentagon official who has been helping to evacuate Afghans from the country.

The other reason is simply that they can.

The Taliban holds all the power now and is calling all the shots.

Hapless President Biden never saw any of this coming.

On July 8, he said there was no chance of American diplomats being lifted to safety from the US embassy by helicopters as they had to be from Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war.

But they were.

He also dismissed the possibility of the Taliban re-gaining control of the whole country as ‘highly unlikely.’

But they did, in just a few days as the 300,000-strong Afghan army in which Biden had so much faith collapsed like a pack of cards in a sudden gust.

Now the Taliban’s running the show again, only this time armed to the teeth with a staggering quantity of left-behind US military equipment including 43,000 pickup trucks, 22,000 Humvees, 900 armoured vehicles, 600,000 guns, and over 200 aircraft.

‘I think we’re back where we started from,’ said Rudy Giuliani, the man who became known as ‘America’s Mayor’ for his strong leadership following 9/11, a reputation he’s since squandered defending Trump from the indefensible. ‘The whole purpose of that war was to have our soldiers there so they couldn’t plan to come and attack us. So now what has Biden done? He’s taking the soldiers out. This is like a field day for terrorists.’

I would argue that it’s even worse than Giuliani fears.

America’s supine surrender to a bunch of ragbag oppressive mountain killers, who they’ve now turned into a hugely better-equipped military force, means the US is now in a worse position than it was in 2001.

And none of it makes any sense.

The US currently has 800 military bases in 70 countries, including 119 in Germany, 119 in Japan, 80 in South Korea and even 44 in Italy.

In total, nearly 200,000 US troops currently serve overseas.

Yet the US government decided it couldn’t continue with 2,500 troops in Afghanistan to keep the Taliban in check and prevent the country becoming a safe harbour for terrorists to operate in again?

As many military experts better qualified than me have observed, this is reckless lunacy.

Before this latest calamity, Joe Biden had built up an unenviable record of getting almost every judgement wrong on US foreign policy.

He opposed the first Iraq War, ‘Desert Storm’, in 1991 despite it being fully justified and a stunning success.

He then supported the disastrous second Iraq War in 2003 that wasn’t remotely justified and was an ignominious failure that inspired the rise of ISIS.

And he opposed the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

Now he’s made his biggest miscalculation of all, and he’s done it on his own watch.

President Trump’s predictable gloating over Biden’s disaster is laughable given it was he who signed the agreement with the Taliban that put the train to this fiasco destination in motion.

But ultimately, it was Biden who proceeded with the withdrawal plan – and then suddenly accelerated it at such absurd speed that it blew up into a deadly shambles.

HE’S the President who made that call, not Trump.

The buck therefore stops with him.

And the price of that buck looks more and more expensive with every day that passes.

The all-conquering Taliban have been massively emboldened and are thoroughly enjoying rubbing America’s humiliated face in it.

Other terror groups like ISIS and al-Qaeda also feel emboldened, knowing that all you need to see off the mighty US military is time and patience.

America’s main rivals like China and Russia will be licking their lips at such apparent weakness by the world’s No1 superpower.

And the rest of the world now thinks the United States can’t be trusted when it comes to supporting allies.

‘America’s back!’ President Biden declared when he took office in January this year.

Yes, it is.

Back to where it was on 8/11/2001 – a sitting duck for terrorists, with Afghanistan once again rules by a vile bunch of barbarians quite happy for their country to be used as a training ground for those who seek to annihilate the United States.

President Jimmy Carter, a man of similar admirable personal qualities to Joe Biden, never recovered his presidency from the Iranian hostage debacle in 1979, and that wasn’t even his fault.

This debacle is most definitely President Biden’s fault, and he is now suffering the immediate consequences which could be politically catastrophic.

His approval ratings are tanking as public confidence in him disintegrates.

And little wonder.

Twenty years on from 9/11, Biden has made the US look weak, spineless, cowardly, and disloyal.

It’s hard to imagine a worse, more humiliating way to commemorate a day that is so painfully etched in every American’s heart.

Or a more shameful one.

It could, and should, cost him his job.