Afghanistan Pt @2

The pundits are having a field day. Fox News and its fellow travelers are braying like ruptured bulls and the NY Post, whose reporters barely know where to find Afghanistan, is giving it ten pages every day just so they have enough room to attack Joe Biden. Everyone who never bothered to think about Afghanistan before has his or her sights set on the President. This is all Joe’s fault. He is definitely responsible for this whole catastrophe. After all he got us into this didn’t he? Yeah, we know all about Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton but we also know it was really Biden. Just like it was really Biden during a dozen years of Obama and Trump, just like it was Biden who shelled out billions to train an army of shitty little cowards who ran as soon as we weren’t there to take the bullets for them. Now it’s the Taliban’s country just as it has always been the Taliban’s country, except when we stuck our noses into it.

It was the Taliban that threw the Brits out in 1842 and the Russians in the 90’s and they, not the government, took over the country and made the mistake of looking like a terrorist stronghold just when the Saudi’s carried out 911.

They retired to the countryside when we invaded their nation but they never left the picture. We fought them because we never like religious fanatics except when they live in our southern states, vote against abortion, scam our paychecks or give out lots of Kool Aid.

The Taliban has taken over Afghanistan because they are really the popular force there.  For twenty years we had them on the run but over that same twenty years there haven’t been enough Afghan’s on the government side to get rid of them. A little help from that 300 thousand-man army that we paid for should have rooted them out. It never happened because the guys we hired were mercenaries in their own land and the Taliban were fighters for a cause. The smart money always knows who to back in that fight.

There are still 15,000 American civilians in country, even today. Why? Are the beaches that great? Or are the paychecks so lucrative that it’s worth putting your family in danger to stay to the last minute? These people had plenty of warning so why are they clogging up the airport today? Their continued presence in this embattled country isn’t Biden’s fault, or Trump’s. They knew what was happening, why the hell didn’t they get out last month or last week? Why did they wait until the last possible second? Were they waiting for that last paycheck too?

Of course that has been the big question since probably the beginning of time. Why, just in the last couple of centuries didn’t the English get out of Khartoum or the Jews out of what were soon to be German occupied countries all over Europe? I could make this list fill another page and the answer would be the same in every case. Because there are a lot of unrealistic people whose glasses are still half full even when the content is being spilled on their shoes.

Yes, there’s chaos, especially in the first couple of days. What the hell did we expect? Is there anyone out there dumb enough to expect smooth sailing when you’re ending a twenty-year war? Chaos is endemic to any kind of major disruption and anyone who didn’t expect chaos has been smoking the wrong shit. But it’s less than a week and the chaos is already calming down. Sure, people will be left behind and pundits all over the world will whine and bitch about it, mainly because they need something to write about and “It went well” is not a story. This was war and that’s how war works, particularly when you end it. The Republicans are attacking Biden because that’s what Republicans do, especially now when they have to do anything they can to drag attention away from their own sociopathic madman.

For twenty years, all Democrats and Republicans have demanded that we get out of Afghanistan. No president before Biden had the balls to do anything about it because none of them saw any way to do it that would not create chaos. Joe realized that this would be the case no matter how long we delayed it but he understood that something had to be done now. We have already pissed away over $2 trillion, killed over 2500 of our kids and maimed over 20,000 more and as Joe likes to say, “the buck stops here.” So he aced like a man and did the right thing. Anyone who thinks getting out now was wrong is too stupid to be reading compound sentences.

So let’s assume that most people thought that getting out now was the right thing to do. What did they expect it to look like? This is not loading the # 5 bus at 82^nd Street. We’re dealing with tens of thousands of people, some of whom have the necessary papers, some of whom do not, some of whom actually worked for American interests over there, many of whom did not but want to get out anyway and some of whom are just trying to create chaos because that’s what happens when you get too many excitable people in the same space at the same time. Did those guys climbing the loading ramp really think someone was going to open the door and let them in? Did the guys clinging to the engines of the plane really expect to be able to hang on at 30,000 feet for however many hours it would take to get wherever those planes were going? Those were irrational acts and that’s what happens in large crowds of irrational people. So you get chaos, that’s just the way it is and those who are attacking Biden for that chaos are idiots. Things will calm down, probably a lot faster than we all expect and everyone will realize that this was the right move. Some of the world will be better off because we did it, some of the world will be worse off because we did it, and most of the world will go on as if they never heard of Afghanistan which most of the world never has.

In about two weeks Biden and the congress will go back to passing an infrastructure bill, Bernie and the Progressives will be back to forcing the big recovery bill through and anyone with a shred of brains will be trying to find a way to pass the Voting Rights Act.

But before we go let’s take a look at the pundits and panderers who have been attacking Joe Biden’s decision. Let’s try and get a look at their motives.

On close examination we find a bunch of government employees and media people who were in a position to make some noise to start the ball rolling but did nothing.  Pushing hard from behind is an even bigger crowd who actively made money or gained status from the occupation. Here we’re looking at arms manufacturers, government contractors, their lobbyists and the ex-military officers and generals who made decisions that extended our stay in Afghanistan.

Foremost among these is retired four star general Jack Keane who has been spending the last week or so hitting fox News and all the war monger stations, telling whoever will listen that Afghanistan is now going to be a more dangerous place that will threaten America.

He called Biden’s plan embarrassing and ill conceived and it’s clear that he only feels this way because it won’t generate any income for him. You see Keane’s patriotic interest in the pullout stems from his financial interest in his associations with major weapons maker General Dynamics, where he was a board member. Or maybe its his current interests in AM General which makes Humvees or Cyalume Technologies which makes military chemical lights and other battlefield technology. But Keane was only the drum major, leading a parade of ex-military and political sellouts that graced TV and especially cable news, this week begging for the return of our occupation without disclosing their affiliations with the military industrial complex. The list included but wasn’t limited to former General David Petraeus: Dr. Rebecca Grant, former staffer to the Air force Secretary; Richard Haas, former advisor to Colin Powell, and former Secretary of State Condi Rice. All are affiliated in some way with the war machine as are additional lists as long as your arm of ex-military and political types who make a ton of money sliding your tax dollars into the pockets of the manufacturers of weapons of war and who have been very vocal about the withdrawal being a mistake. For them maybe, but not for this country.