We all watched Liz Cheney spend last Sunday morning attacking Joe Biden over the withdrawal from Afghanistan. She also blamed Trump and almost everyone else including Rand Paul and Santa Claus. The only ones she managed to avoid naming were the ones who started this war, George Bush and her father, Dirty Dick Cheney.
The withdrawal from Afghanistan looks like a typical American shit show. We’ve seen it all before, way too many times. It is giving the GOP a great opportunity to attack Joe Biden and yes, Joe is the President and yes, the buck stops at his door but he’s only soaking up all the bullshit because he’s the first one in 20 years to actually do the right thing and get us out of a quagmire we should never have been in.
You want to assign blame for this disaster, start with Bush/Cheney who had a lot of buddies who made weapons for a living and needed a good war to sell them to. Move on to Obama who after his first two years was unable to accomplish anything, go to Trump who negotiated a treaty with the Taliban that guaranteed we would be out by May 1, 2021 and asked nothing from the Talban in return. This is what Biden had to work with when he arrived in the White House. Then let’s talk about how every pundit with a pencil is so surprised by how the Taliban just overran everything and took what they wanted in almost no time at all. How did that happen? How come our military intelligence never noticed that the 300 thousand Afghan troops we had trained and armed at a cost into the trillions couldn’t fight their way out of a paper bag? This is the same intelligence arm of the same Pentagon that accounts for the most taxpayer money spent by our country. This is the same military that has a budget ten times greater than the rest of the world. So what the hell are they doing with the money besides clearing parks for former Presidents to get photo ops? This is a failure of our State Department and the White House but mainly it is a Pentagon failure.
Yes, the Pentagon, who should have understood that the Taliban was building up power while they waited for Trump’s May 1st withdrawal. Like everything else Trump promised, it never happened but when Biden took office the Taliban saw he too wanted out so they just sat back and waited. They were getting just what they wanted. We will too, if only we are smart enough to realize it. I don’t know about you folks out there but I don’t want one of my grandkids to get shot fighting for a country that has little or nothing to offer the rest of the world, a country that won’t even fight for itself. We spent trillions and got our kids shot for twenty years and we ended up with nothing but a cowardly military that is running so fast Taliban bullets can’t catch up with them. The Afghan troops, not ours, are the ones who are abandoning Afghan women and girls. Ours troops gave Afghan women and girls a place in their own country that their brothers and husbands didn’t, a place those same husbands and brothers are now letting slip away.
The 300 thousand Afghan troops, that’s four times what the Taliban has, were trained, equipped and given an air force by us and now they are very busy turning their weapons over to the Taliban and getting paid to do it. That’s right, these slimy cowards are actually the ones selling their woman out. So let’s not hear any more about how we aren’t protecting those women. Our soldiers gave their lives to change that grubby little country. We set up a form of government that could support its women as well as steal from its treasury. Now the President, Ashraf Ghani has gabbed as much loot as he can carry and fled the country and the men we armed and trained are selling their women and children to a bunch of religious fanatics that will abuse and kill them on a whim.
Of course some of the loudest noise is being made about what looks like our failure to protect those Afghans who worked with and helped us. We don’t want a repeat of Viet Nam or the Kurdish situation. This again must fall on our military. They have known since before Trump left office 7 months ago that this was inevitable. If anyone ignored a responsibility it has been the military but it is also the fault of the Afghans. They knew it was going to happen. It was scheduled for three months ago and they’re surprised? Or maybe they’re not. Maybe they were so busy sticking around to pick up another paycheck that they got caught with their pants down.
We knew that the reason there had been no violence since the Trump agreement was that the Taliban was willing to wait, just as they have waited for twenty years. They are a very patient people but Biden knew that if he didn’t announce a withdrawal the attacks would renew in greater intensity and that would mean sending in more of our troops, to what end? It looks more and more that deals had been made with the government troops to lay down their arms as soon as the Americans started to leave and that is exactly what happened. The Afghan’s, that we had been paying, that we had been arming, whose families we had been feeding and educating, stabbed everybody including their very own families in the back and just quit.
And now there are pundits attacking Biden for not further protecting these cowardly creeps. Broadcasters like Mika Brzezinski have been spending mornings asking why we have abandoned these people and what are we going to do to save the families at the airport who are trying to get out? I would suggest Mika check out that footage of the airport. There are damn few families there. The vast majority of those fleeing are men, primarily young man, men who are abandoning their families to the tender mercies of the Taliban. Afghanistan it seems is an extraordinarily cowardly and morally corrupt nation and certainly not one in which we should have spent the lives of our young or the money that we could have used to advance the plight of our own people. It was never our ally. We never went there to save the people from the Taliban. We invaded it to punish Afghanistan for being a staging ground for 911 and to root out the terrorist cells. We did that and we killed Osama bin Laden. We killed him in Pakistan but strangely never invaded that country. We didn’t go to Afghanistan to settle a civil war or to nation build. That just happened because it always happens when America arrives with troops and money.
Yes, the exit is sloppy, mainly because we backed a bunch of money-grubbing cowards against a bunch of religious fanatics and the worst guys rolled over the bad guys. If this is the worst thing that happens to us over the next 3.5 years we’ll be very lucky. This is a really good move by Biden. Now we have to learn to accept it.
One final footnote! Everyone seems to be all bent out of shape about the fact that we haven’t gotten all the Afghans who worked for us out of the country. Yes, the Pentagon doesn’t seem to have had a plan in place to do this but what about the Afghans themselves? They have been on notice since Trump made the deal to leave on May 1 that this was going to happen. Why, if they were so worried about what would happen, didn’t they get the hell out of the country months ago? Sure, the Taliban took over very fast when we actually started to pull out, but those who were worried about that had months to get off their asses and get out. Forget getting the proper VISA, you get on a plane to anywhere, you send your money ahead and when you get to a safe place you worry about how to stay there or you move on to someplace else.
It certainly looks like they all stuck around for that last paycheck and now they’re screwed.