Could it have been done differently? That’s the big question being asked about the evacuation of Afghanistan. The obvious answer is yes, probably about a dozen ways, but then one has to ask, “Would the alternatives have been any better?” I guess we’ll never know but the smart money says that aside from keeping all the military in place until all the civilians left, there was no better way.
Not surprisingly, Martha Raddatz was back at it last weekend when she followed an interview of Secretary of State Tony Blinken with a mindless, lying attack by GOP Senator Ben Sasse. Sasse is one of those convenient Republicans who moaned and whined about what a bad man Donald Trump was but rarely voted against him. For this tirade, Sasse has invented a new term, “Happy talk,” which seems to indicate a lack of truthfulness but doesn’t come anywhere near the 30,000 lies the Republican President told the American people during his disastrous time in office.
Look, this may not have been Biden’s finest hour but it was something that had to be done and none of his predecessors had the intelligence, the balls or the ability to do it. Bush instigated the war, and it’s therefore his responsibility until it ends. Obama tried to end the war militarily and failed while Trump made a deal he himself didn’t understand and that left the Taliban in charge of everything.
Anyone, let alone someone with the experience of Raddatz, who thought that this thing could end anyway other than the way it did, is an idiot. Chaos is the result of war. Always! Anyone who thought this one would be different is a fool.
Somehow, a portion of the GOP and even a few Democrats have this image of troops lining up and generals signing surrender papers with all kinds of pomp and circumstance the way we did after WWII. Has anyone seen that happen since? I mean, consider all the wars we’ve been in since then. Have any of them ended like that? No, because war has changed. They don’t end definitively. We don’t drop an atom bomb or flatten a city the way we did Dresden.
Biden announced the August 31st departure date in the beginning of July so there was almost two months for the people who wanted to get out of Afghanistan to do so. That they didn’t is not Biden’s fault. That the Afghan army, which was supposed to protect those people and create an orderly exit fell apart was not Biden’s fault.
Did Biden know the army was a paper tiger that would crumble immediately or that President Ashraf Ghani was a thief and a coward who would take the money and run? Probably and that could be why he was in such a hurry to get us out.
So yes, there was chaos and those that didn’t expect it because they refuse to think logically are, of course, the ones making the most noise. Let’s hope they find something else to distract them in the near future and stop making fools of themselves.
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It seems that too many people are looking at the pullout of our troops and demanding that Joe Biden answer the question, “What was it all for?” Maybe most of those people should have asked that question twenty years ago of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and John Bolton. Maybe those Republicans who were in congress twenty years ago, the ones who all voted to go to war, should consider the fact that they voted to go to war based on information that was wholly false, information that was fed to them by the GOP war machine.
Joe Biden has obviously already asked himself that question, discerned that it was all for nothing and realized that we had to get the hell out of that pathetic country now.
Deadline White House had a guy named Paul Rieckhoff as a guest in Tuesday. Rieckhoff runs an outfit called Righteous Media. He is typical of those who are angry and anxious to direct that anger at someone but really don’t know where to attack. So he is going after the only guy who has done anything concrete in twenty years. He raves about hundreds of thousands of people left behind. Really? It’s a ridiculous number and it makes Rieckhoff look foolish and insignificant.
He obviously has served with Afghans who have been left behind and are the cause of his rage but I am sure he also served with Afghans who sold their weapons to the Taliban and hopped a bus for Pakistan and I have to wonder how he feels about those former comrades in arms? After all, they are the principle reason the Pentagon’s extraction plans collapsed. They didn’t hold the line. They cut and ran leaving everyone holding the bag.
But GOP fantasizers who keep babbling about the emergence of some terrorist stronghold, now that we are no longer standing by to defend against it are spinning the biggest fantasy. How about trying a little logic on this one too? Most intelligence channels agree that the 911 plot was hatched in Germany and carried out by Saudis who trained in the United States. Yes, Osama bin Laden was in Afghanistan at the time but he left soon after 911 and was killed in Pakistan.
So I mentioned logic and here it is. With a planet full of potential bases from which to carry out their terrorist activities, why would potential plotters now decide to go back to Afghanistan? Right now, there are so many nations available to terrorist cells that it’s hard to count them all, but Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Libya, Iraq, Somalia, half of East Africa and Bangladesh leap to the fore and that leaves four continents not even considered.
ISIS wants to be back in Afghanistan and is already causing trouble, as evidenced by the bomb that killed 13 Americans last week. But the Taliban along with many other Muslim sects and tribes hate them. The probability is that for the next twenty years they will be so busy fighting each other they will not have any time left to attack anybody else.
Biden has spoken about getting America’s nose out of everybody else’s business around the globe. Let’s hope he means it. We have plenty on our plates right now just keeping the American nutcases in tow. It’s time we cut our military spending back to something that approaches reality. We have to stop building planes that don’t fly and boats that don’t float. Let’s convert those weapons factories into companies that produce electric cars and solar collectors. Maybe the money we save by no longer trying to turn a 7th Century collection of warring tribes into a modern democracy will help to convince Joe Manchin that we really do have enough money to finance both the Infrastructure and the post infrastructure bills so he will stop being a pothole in the road to a better America.