In my last blog I wrote about critics attacking Joe Biden for his decision to get the hell out of Afghanistan. Then on Sunday morning Martha Raddatz, despite being someone who should know better, gave us the ultimate example of what I was knocking when she used This Week to actively attack Biden for the fact that the pullout hadn’t gone like a fire drill at a Catholic grade school. It’s hard to believe that with all her experience in Afghanistan and the Middle East she would be so lacking in understanding of what happened, what was necessary and how it would all work itself out. Raddatz has spent half her career getting off helicopters in hostile deserts, so to realize that she is so lacking in understanding of the temperament of the people she has been covering for decades is really astounding. Did she actually expect the Afghans that are crazed to flee their country at any cost to act with the same sense of control and discipline that one would expect from a bus queue in downtown London?
She speaks about the big question; should we have made this move or not but never has the guts to take a position on it. What she does is use it as an insinuation that Biden has somehow done something really wrong when the fact is he did what everyone wanted and needed him to do but didn’t have the power or the stones to do themselves.
For some unexplained reason Raddatz and her sorely lacking panel of “experts” quickly made a leap to the accusation that we are flying these unvaccinated refugees to countries, which in some cases, don’t have protected populations. It appeared from the way they attacked this problem that this was also Biden’s fault. Actually this is the job of the World Health Organization, who should have vaccination teams waiting at the airports in the host countries to vaccinate the incoming refugees. Will it happen? Who knows? It’s easier to talk about then to do.
Then Raddatz made a complete about face and interviewed retired general and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mike Mullen, who had backed the invasion when it happened and who oversaw the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Mullen has since changed his mind and supports Biden’s decision to get out, stating strongly that Biden had the right idea ten years ago but no one would listen. Now Mullen thinks, Biden has done the only intelligent thing open to him.
But nothing is easy and just to prove that “no good deed goes unpunished” an arm of ISIS instituted a bombing attack on the airport killing 13 Americans, over 70 Afghans and wounding many more.
The Taliban had been cooperating, doing the right thing because they know it’s to their advantage, but this sub-human band of degenerate killers just couldn’t let these people go on their way in peace. They just needed a bloody act to prove again to the world why they need to be dead. Biden has promised to make them that way and I’m sure we all look forward to his accomplishment of that task but even with that attack we still can look back at a maneuver in which we have moved over a hundred twenty- three thousand refugees out of a contested war zone at the cost of only 13 of our young men and women.
Now before you challenge my “only 13” understand that I am fully aware that to each of those young warrior’s families one, their one, is far to high a price to pay for anything that happens in Afghanistan. Those families will never be the same. The trauma they are feeling at this moment will never disappear. But in the vast realty of death in America we must understand that we kill more than 13 of our young people every day in this country simply so we don’t inconvenience those who demand that we do not infringe on their presumed right to carry a loaded gun. Seen in those twisted dimensions that loss doesn’t seem too high a price to pay.
For most Republicans and even a few demented Democrats who are having a hell of a time knocking Biden for the mess that was the beginning of the pullout, yes the operational plan was messy for the first couple of days but was it Biden’s plan or was it the Pentagon’s plan? The buck does stop at Biden, but is it his job to do all the minutiae of planning of every operation he puts in place? I think not. Most probably that was the job of the generals at the Pentagon, many of whom didn’t want us to pull out and therefore weren’t killing themselves to make sure we did it successfully. I’m not saying that these guys who made their bones fighting that war and are probably making a lot more of everything by continuing it, deliberately sabotaged the evacuation effort but I’m not saying they didn’t. There has been a hell of a lot of money floating around Afghanistan for the last twenty years. A lot of American contractors got very rich and were more than happy to pass some of the taxpayer money onto people who could facilitate their operations, people mostly in the military.
But then the bad planning was somehow pulled into shape and miracle of miracles, this bunch of incompetent assholes managed to fly out over a hundred twenty three thousand people, an accomplishment that has never been approached since Dunkirk.
There was an interesting discussion on Bill Maher’s show Friday night when reporter Katty Kay and fascist fabricator Ralph Reed went at it over the lasting political effect of this massive extraction of humanity. Reed who wants this lie to last as long as Benghazi did for Hilary, knows full well how damaging that first big lie was and therefore vastly overstates the current interest in Afghanistan by the American people. Current polls, taken just as the actual pullout was starting, showed that across the board, interest in what we were doing in Afghanistan ranked somewhere below who won the Olympic skateboard title. Even now with the events of that unfortunate country filling the headlines, the American people’s real interest in Afghanistan as a voting issue, is still nowhere near making the charts.
Let’s face it gang, we are a spoiled, selfish nation and anything that does not directly affect us is not really high on our interest chart. It will be damned near a miracle if anyone other than those 13 grieving families are still talking about Afghanistan this November, let alone a year from now. And you can take that to the bank.