Gen. H.R. McMaster, a former National Security Advisor and a military officer in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2012, did not mince words when summing up the Taliban’s rapid takeover which led to the Biden administration’s disastrous and shameful exit from Afghanistan.

He called it “an American catastrophe.”

Former President Donald Trump messaged what conservatives and a growing number of liberal Democrats are now realizing: “It’s not that we left Afghanistan, it’s the grossly incompetent way we left!”

Our European allies are rightfully concerned over the administration’s amateurish nonstrategy. Huw Merriman, former British Treasury minister, called Biden a “total blithering idiot” for blaming Afghan forces for the military collapse.

Simon Clarke, another former minister, said it was the end of an American era. During the early days of evacuation chaos, he called one of Biden’s feeble explanations “grotesque,” and “an utter repudiation of the America so many of us have admired so deeply all our lives - the champion of liberty and democracy and the guardian of what’s right in the world.”

Even left-leaning MSNBC, which toes the Democratic party line, took a brief shot at the president with the shocking headline on its website: “Biden’s disastrous Afghanistan charade.”

The administration’s messaging has also been a disaster. A few days before last Thursday’s twin bombings that killed 13 U.S. service members and dozens of Afghans fleeing the Taliban takeover, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki assured Americans that the Afghanistan evacuations are “now on track” and would not call the airlift “anything but a success.”

Psaki went as far as to say that Team Biden feels it hasn’t gotten enough credit.

Biden lied when he falsely claimed that al-Qaida was out of Afghanistan. He then stated that the administration was “clear-eyed about the risks” of leaving Afghanistan and that it had planned for every contingency and that there would be no real problems for Americans or our Afghan allies to get to the airport in Kabul.

On a Sunday talk show eight days ago, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin stated: “It’s not a bad situation getting better, but a “tremendous piece of work.”

To shift the narrative from the chaos of Afghanistan, Biden even compared the Afghanistan debacle to the Berlin airlift, one of the greatest emergency humanitarian efforts of the Cold War era.

This is ridiculous comparison. Berlin had been divided between the West and the East since the end of World War II and amid growing tensions the Soviet Union blocked food, electricity and other resources from reaching West Berlin by land.

For 11 months between 1948-49, President Harry S. Truman directed an airborne rescue with the British to fly in material and that operation became a model for humanitarian aid. Nearly 300,000 flights were flown at the height of the campaign, with one plane landing every 45 seconds at Berlin’s main air hub.

World War II produced two historic evacuations. After Gen. Douglas MacArthur was forced to abandon the Philippine island fortress under orders from President Franklin Roosevelt in March 1942, MacArthur issued a statement in which he promised his men and the people of the Philippines, “I shall return.” That promise would become his mantra during the next two and a half years until the liberation of the Philippines.

The other historic World War II event was Dunkirk, in the north of France in 1940. When 338,226 Allied troops and other personnel were stranded after being cut off and surrounded by German troops, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill called on all British and Belgian boats to help rescue the trapped army.

Not a single British soldier was left on the Dunkirk beaches. Churchill called it a “miracle of deliverance.”

President Biden has nothing in common with these great leaders in history. MacArthur or Churchill both had a great ability to lead and inspire.

That’s just the opposite of Joe Biden’s cut-and-run strategy in Afghanistan that’s produced nothing but chaos and American deaths.

By Jim Zbick | tneditor@tnonline.com

The foregoing opinions do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editorial Board or Times News LLC.