Today, President Joe Biden announced that the military mission of the United States in Afghanistan will end on August 31. We have been in that country for almost 20 years and have lost 2448 troops and personnel. Another 20,722 Americans have been wounded. Estimates of civilian deaths range from 35,000 to 40,000. The mission has cost more than a trillion dollars.
I feel deeply pained for the women and girls of Afghanistan, at risk of much harm from the soldiers of the Taliban army and its misogyny. The agony of my powerlessness in the face of such oppression and death leaves me stunned.
AND, Biden is doing the right thing. The USA needs to get out of its decades long meddling and warring in other countries to no better end than enriching the military-industrial complex. Our 'volunteer' armies of the poor, POC, and immigrants don't need to be put at risk for no apparent relevant rationale. The USA appears to have serious deficits in 'nation-building.'
Let us build peace. Here. At home. Let us bankrupt the war-makers. Let us re-purpose our bright youngers to civic service and enriching this nation.
I acutely remember our departure from Vietnam. Combat operations ceased in 1973, and over the next year we repatriated our soldiers back to the United States, leaving mounds of equipment and matériel in the hands of the South Vietnamese, who promptly abandoned it on the battlefield with North Vietnam. We got our prisoners of war back, some of whom had been in captivity for going on nine years.
In March 1975, North Vietnam launched a ground offensive against South Vietnam. By the middle of April, it was clear that Saigon was about to fall, and there was pressure on Congress to revisit its decision to not support any further military action in South Vietnam. We all know what followed afterward.
I also recall Henry Kissinger's stated objective to achieve what he referred to as "a decent interval" before Saigon actually fell. How decent that interval was is a matter of conjecture and/or personal opinion. It was clear, however, that as military objectives go, the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Whether the United States achieve its political objectives by staying the course by bolstering the Saigon government between 1958 and 1975 is also a matter of conjecture. Maybe there a secret archives that will see the light of day sometime 50 years from now that will reveal what political objectives were actually being sought, above and beyond delaying the inevitable. If the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the place where the United States would lay down a marker about 'thus far and no further', that was a bad place to do it.
Worse yet, the American military establishment was still being run by the generals who would come of age during World War II, and who were apparently intoxicated by America's victory over Japan in the war that lasted just under four years, while utterly destroying Japan as a military power. Vietnam was not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, or the Marianas Islands. These are men who are used to getting their way, who mistook technology for national purpose. Politically, the war was the price of surrender of the American government to the so-called China Lobby, political allies within the Republican Party of the Chinese nationalist government that had been ousted from mainland China in 1949, and then seeking refuge on Taiwan.
American foreign policy towards China, and by extension, to China's neighbors in Southeast Asia was heavily influenced by American General Claire Lee Chennault, the military officer who had organized the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed 'The Flying Tigers', a group of American military pilots assembled by General Chennault to engage Japanese forces over China in 1941, the year before the United States officially entered World War II. General Chennault's second wife, known as Anna Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai, in China, in 1923) had been a war correspondent; and following the death in 1946 of Chennault's wife Nell (Thompson) to whom he had been married since 1911, he married Anna and brought her back to Washington DC, where together, there were staunch advocates for the Nationalist Chinese government. General Chennault died in 1958, and Anna Chennault continued her involvement in Republican politics, and policies which were grounded on the idea that at some future point in time Nationalist China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would return to Beijing in triumph, supported by the United States. To them the communist victory in 1949 was utterly unacceptable. It was also Anna Chennault who tipped off the Diem government in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson was about to conclude a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, allowing the South Vietnamese to sabotage the nascent negotiations. Chennault was also overheard negotiating with then-candidate Richard Nixon looking to oppose Lyndon Johnson's request for a second term of office in the 1968 presidential election. This was overheard on a CIA wiretap; but presidential advisor Clark Clifford persuaded Johnson not to make an issue of it, treasonous as it was, because that would have exposed the nature of the wiretap, and the fact that it was being used against a member of the Washington political establishment. You can see how domestic partisan politics and political agendas can have worldwide consequences. Viewed in hindsight, Lyndon Johnson should have pursued the matter; he ended up withdrawing from the presidential race, and allowing Richard Nixon to continue to wage war for another five years until the 1973 cease-fire. But Johnson's ego got in the way, and his advisor, Clark Clifford, did him no favors. He would have done better, as John Kennedy did, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, by admitting his mistakes and moving on.
The other thread of the story has to do with supporting French ambitions to return to Vietnam and to restore its colony there in 1946. Again, the issue was communist-led opposition to French rule. Thus it happened that American arms provided to France between 1946 and 1954, when the French army at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and destroyed by the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese Revolutionary Army in May 1954. American President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, and following a series of negotiations, what was then French Indochina was divided into a North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, and a South Vietnam, headquartered in Saigon. The United States had initially agreed to a plebiscite at which all Vietnamese would get to decide which country they wanted to remain with. United States reneged on the deal and began arming the South Vietnamese; much of this military buildup was due to congressional pressure by the Republican Party, envisioning a much more robust American response to the French defeat. In this, Anna Chennault was the go-to connection between the Republican Party and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. First it was Kennedy, and afterward it was LBJ, but the pattern was set, and the wheels were set in motion. After 1960, and through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, whether we were consciously aware of it or not, we were on a collision course in Southeast Asia, because our previous decision-making was a one-size-fits-all pattern of opposition to communist regimes, emotionally driven, and with the egos of the actors very much in evidence.
Many of us of a certain age know or things ended up, very much like what we saw over the past 20 years in Afghanistan. We took sides in a war of national liberation against a European colonial power, France, as much because of our cultural affinity with France, and the American government's obsession with communism. That was the opposite tack that we took during World War II when we supported Great Britain against Germany, but as to the British Empire, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to support Winston Churchill's imperial ambitions. Before he died, President Roosevelt was overheard saying that he was not going to let the French back into Indochina after the war. The president who succeeded Roosevelt, Harry Truman, was unschooled in international politics, and so he let the re-militarization of Vietnam by the French government to slip by unchallenged. Following that we allowed our cultural affinity with France and the debt that we owe them historically by supporting George Washington's army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783, to cloud our judgment. Like Iraq, and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war of choice; and, as with the other two, a war we lost
Given the history that I have laid out above, I have to view with a great deal of skepticism the argument that the United States is living Afghanistan 'too soon'. As President Biden said in his comments today, something to the effect of 'when is enough, enough'. The president noted that we had been in Afghanistan 20 years, and that the children of soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago were now doing tours of combat where their parents had fought. This is a perfect paradigm of the 'sunk cost' fallacy, throwing good money after bad, hoping to recoup your losses. There is also the 'Gambler's Fallacy', which is basically if you lose a long string of bets, your luck is bound to change. As the song says, and ain't necessarily so.
It has been said, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I look at historical parallels to see patterns of behavior that seem to repeat themselves in somewhere other, because that is the way people behave. We got into Afghanistan, because George W. Bush got us into Iraq on false pretenses. Bad karma happens when you lie to yourself; but the problem is that you cannot lie about yourself. If we keep following the same old patterns that Republican administrations have foisted on us, were going to get the same bad results that we have now. Today, we have the right President, and at the right time. In the time that we have Joe Biden, let him heal us, and then maybe we can heal ourselves.
List of those who have tried and failed in Afghanistan:
The Babylonian Empire
The Persian Empire
The Greek Empire
The Roman Empire
The Sassanid Empire
The Mongols
The Russian Empire
The British Empire
The Russian empire
The British Empire
The Soviet Union
The United States
I had a friend who was there in Kandahar Province. He told me about an ancient watchtower that was outside their base. It was said to be thousands of years old, and was considered unsafe to go inside, but he went inside anyway. On the steps to the top, on the walls, were inscriptions in Greek, Arabic, Russian. "I realized it was unlikely we were going to have a different outcome."
Twenty years ago we went to war with the largest opium producing Authoritarian regime to fight terrorism. Now we have an Opiod epidemic, voter suppression laws on the books, one party is adamantly leaning Authoritarian, and domestic terrorist attack the procedures of democracy, and is growing threat.
Had the US military stayed in-country for another hundred years, the results would have been the same.
Other random, gloomy rainy day thoughts;
What will the Afghanistan War Memorial, a war everyone wants to forget, look like?
Where will the next dirty little very profitable war be? (Erase Afghanistan/Taliban and insert Vietnam/Viet Cong.)
A trillion dollars would have bought a lot of infrastructure. How can we replace war profiteers with infrastructure profiteers? C'mon, Kellogg Root & Brown, show us something!
What do we do with the prisoners in Guantanamo? Finally give them a trial? How about we re-patriate them and replace them with those accused of Jan. 6th crimes and hold them incognito for a couple of decades.
Republicans insist that we only teach smiley-face American history to our children.
It's another rainy day in Connecticut. Sorry, western states. If I could, I would send it all to you.
Let's imagine how Republicans will excoriate President Biden if (more likely when) the Taliban takes over Afghanistan. It will be as if their cult leader hadn't cut a deal with the Taliban, putting the Afghanistan government at a grave disadvantage by excluding it from negotiations. Predictably, John Bolton wasted no time criticizing Biden after today's announcement.
Biden made the tough decision that he needed to make.
Myself & others for a long time have characterized the Republican Party as our Taliban because of the similar religious conservative punitive gun carrying behavior of both. However, Trump capitalized on the Republican direction and took it farther until seeking help from Russia, favoring dictators like Putin, thr Big Lie, the January 6th Capitol attack, occupations of state capitols, and now Republican state laws to suppress voting, censure books and teaching of American history is looking even more Taliban than ever.
Whether or not right wing extremism is linked throughout the world, their objectives for domination, single party rule, their thinking, tactics, sympathies and public statements follow the same patterns, and often use each others words. Social media, news media and entertainment media are mixing the pot and making this easier. Where the US used to be called the "melting pot" for our inclusion, perhaps the melting pot is now a homogenization of right wing radical ideas and actions, playing to the worst natures of mankind is attacking our multicultural democratic modern world. Much like covid19, an infection with no purpose other that to infect and live off its hosts until they are dead.
Such a shame it is that the greatest threat to our security now comes from our fellow Americans. This is a sad commentary on our nation’s state of affairs.
Realists knew even back in the Bush days that this was how things would end. We'd seen it before in several parts of the world when colonialism ended. After the colonial forces leave, a bloodbath inevitably follows. History rarely mentions those, but for example, the killings that followed after Great Britain granted India its independance were horrific, and led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. Was Britain right to leave?
Yes. Leaving was long overdue.
If there ever was a clear example of our leaders ignoring history and proceeding to war without a defined mission and overt success criteria, this Afghan period will be one of the most overt. In the reaction that led us into this quagmire, "We" stopped listening. We didn't listen to history, we didn't listen to our own military leaders, we didn't listen to a large part of our government, our advisors, or our electorate. THIS TIME things would be different! And yet - somehow they weren't.
It took a lot of moral and political courage to bite the bullet and call a halt to this, and President Biden deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
Given the mess he was handed as an incoming president after an inept and corrupt administration, President Biden has mapped out a reasonable way forward from a situation that no president should have to deal with. Will he and his successor, since this will be a years long process, have a Congress of helpmates or obstructionists?
“He also seemed to acknowledge the extraordinary danger facing Afghan women and girls under the rule of the Taliban as it continues to sweep through the country.” That women and girls suffer under a repressive and brutal regime is a standout hardship of this defeat.
Afghanistan has been ruled by the tribes since the beginning of time and will until the end. The idea of a unified country is a Western concoction for which they hate and kill us.
Time to lick our wounds, pack our tents and head home.
Hopefully, hopefully, we have learned a lesson. Hopefully.
Most of the discussion of all this fails to note that it's beyond the ability of the US to dictate the future of Afghanistan. This was as obvious twenty years ago as it is now. Biden, whether or not he says so publicly, is simply recognizing reality.
While I feel bad for the Afghani people, I am not sorry we have withdrawn our troops. Biden’s question of whether you would send your child there is a valid one. Unless you have sent a child off to the Middle East to fight a war that cannot be won, you probably can’t answer that question. We have. The young man who went there came back a very different man with mental as well as physical injury. But we were fortunate, he came home. Biden’s approach to try to cut off the money also seems wiser.
I feel deeply pained for the women and girls of Afghanistan, at risk of much harm from the soldiers of the Taliban army and its misogyny. The agony of my powerlessness in the face of such oppression and death leaves me stunned.
AND, Biden is doing the right thing. The USA needs to get out of its decades long meddling and warring in other countries to no better end than enriching the military-industrial complex. Our 'volunteer' armies of the poor, POC, and immigrants don't need to be put at risk for no apparent relevant rationale. The USA appears to have serious deficits in 'nation-building.'
Let us build peace. Here. At home. Let us bankrupt the war-makers. Let us re-purpose our bright youngers to civic service and enriching this nation.
I acutely remember our departure from Vietnam. Combat operations ceased in 1973, and over the next year we repatriated our soldiers back to the United States, leaving mounds of equipment and matériel in the hands of the South Vietnamese, who promptly abandoned it on the battlefield with North Vietnam. We got our prisoners of war back, some of whom had been in captivity for going on nine years.
In March 1975, North Vietnam launched a ground offensive against South Vietnam. By the middle of April, it was clear that Saigon was about to fall, and there was pressure on Congress to revisit its decision to not support any further military action in South Vietnam. We all know what followed afterward.
I also recall Henry Kissinger's stated objective to achieve what he referred to as "a decent interval" before Saigon actually fell. How decent that interval was is a matter of conjecture and/or personal opinion. It was clear, however, that as military objectives go, the war in Vietnam was unwinnable. Whether the United States achieve its political objectives by staying the course by bolstering the Saigon government between 1958 and 1975 is also a matter of conjecture. Maybe there a secret archives that will see the light of day sometime 50 years from now that will reveal what political objectives were actually being sought, above and beyond delaying the inevitable. If the war in Vietnam was supposed to be the place where the United States would lay down a marker about 'thus far and no further', that was a bad place to do it.
Worse yet, the American military establishment was still being run by the generals who would come of age during World War II, and who were apparently intoxicated by America's victory over Japan in the war that lasted just under four years, while utterly destroying Japan as a military power. Vietnam was not Tarawa or Guadalcanal, or the Marianas Islands. These are men who are used to getting their way, who mistook technology for national purpose. Politically, the war was the price of surrender of the American government to the so-called China Lobby, political allies within the Republican Party of the Chinese nationalist government that had been ousted from mainland China in 1949, and then seeking refuge on Taiwan.
American foreign policy towards China, and by extension, to China's neighbors in Southeast Asia was heavily influenced by American General Claire Lee Chennault, the military officer who had organized the American Volunteer Group, nicknamed 'The Flying Tigers', a group of American military pilots assembled by General Chennault to engage Japanese forces over China in 1941, the year before the United States officially entered World War II. General Chennault's second wife, known as Anna Chennault (born Chan Sheng Mai, in China, in 1923) had been a war correspondent; and following the death in 1946 of Chennault's wife Nell (Thompson) to whom he had been married since 1911, he married Anna and brought her back to Washington DC, where together, there were staunch advocates for the Nationalist Chinese government. General Chennault died in 1958, and Anna Chennault continued her involvement in Republican politics, and policies which were grounded on the idea that at some future point in time Nationalist China's leader, Chiang Kai-shek, would return to Beijing in triumph, supported by the United States. To them the communist victory in 1949 was utterly unacceptable. It was also Anna Chennault who tipped off the Diem government in Saigon that Lyndon Johnson was about to conclude a negotiated peace with North Vietnam, allowing the South Vietnamese to sabotage the nascent negotiations. Chennault was also overheard negotiating with then-candidate Richard Nixon looking to oppose Lyndon Johnson's request for a second term of office in the 1968 presidential election. This was overheard on a CIA wiretap; but presidential advisor Clark Clifford persuaded Johnson not to make an issue of it, treasonous as it was, because that would have exposed the nature of the wiretap, and the fact that it was being used against a member of the Washington political establishment. You can see how domestic partisan politics and political agendas can have worldwide consequences. Viewed in hindsight, Lyndon Johnson should have pursued the matter; he ended up withdrawing from the presidential race, and allowing Richard Nixon to continue to wage war for another five years until the 1973 cease-fire. But Johnson's ego got in the way, and his advisor, Clark Clifford, did him no favors. He would have done better, as John Kennedy did, following the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, by admitting his mistakes and moving on.
The other thread of the story has to do with supporting French ambitions to return to Vietnam and to restore its colony there in 1946. Again, the issue was communist-led opposition to French rule. Thus it happened that American arms provided to France between 1946 and 1954, when the French army at Dien Bien Phu was surrounded and destroyed by the Viet Minh, the North Vietnamese Revolutionary Army in May 1954. American President Dwight Eisenhower refused to intervene, and following a series of negotiations, what was then French Indochina was divided into a North Vietnam, based in Hanoi, and a South Vietnam, headquartered in Saigon. The United States had initially agreed to a plebiscite at which all Vietnamese would get to decide which country they wanted to remain with. United States reneged on the deal and began arming the South Vietnamese; much of this military buildup was due to congressional pressure by the Republican Party, envisioning a much more robust American response to the French defeat. In this, Anna Chennault was the go-to connection between the Republican Party and the South Vietnamese government under Ngo Dinh Diem. First it was Kennedy, and afterward it was LBJ, but the pattern was set, and the wheels were set in motion. After 1960, and through the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, whether we were consciously aware of it or not, we were on a collision course in Southeast Asia, because our previous decision-making was a one-size-fits-all pattern of opposition to communist regimes, emotionally driven, and with the egos of the actors very much in evidence.
Many of us of a certain age know or things ended up, very much like what we saw over the past 20 years in Afghanistan. We took sides in a war of national liberation against a European colonial power, France, as much because of our cultural affinity with France, and the American government's obsession with communism. That was the opposite tack that we took during World War II when we supported Great Britain against Germany, but as to the British Empire, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt refused to support Winston Churchill's imperial ambitions. Before he died, President Roosevelt was overheard saying that he was not going to let the French back into Indochina after the war. The president who succeeded Roosevelt, Harry Truman, was unschooled in international politics, and so he let the re-militarization of Vietnam by the French government to slip by unchallenged. Following that we allowed our cultural affinity with France and the debt that we owe them historically by supporting George Washington's army at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1783, to cloud our judgment. Like Iraq, and Afghanistan, Vietnam was a war of choice; and, as with the other two, a war we lost
Given the history that I have laid out above, I have to view with a great deal of skepticism the argument that the United States is living Afghanistan 'too soon'. As President Biden said in his comments today, something to the effect of 'when is enough, enough'. The president noted that we had been in Afghanistan 20 years, and that the children of soldiers who had fought in Afghanistan 20 years ago were now doing tours of combat where their parents had fought. This is a perfect paradigm of the 'sunk cost' fallacy, throwing good money after bad, hoping to recoup your losses. There is also the 'Gambler's Fallacy', which is basically if you lose a long string of bets, your luck is bound to change. As the song says, and ain't necessarily so.
It has been said, history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme. I look at historical parallels to see patterns of behavior that seem to repeat themselves in somewhere other, because that is the way people behave. We got into Afghanistan, because George W. Bush got us into Iraq on false pretenses. Bad karma happens when you lie to yourself; but the problem is that you cannot lie about yourself. If we keep following the same old patterns that Republican administrations have foisted on us, were going to get the same bad results that we have now. Today, we have the right President, and at the right time. In the time that we have Joe Biden, let him heal us, and then maybe we can heal ourselves.
List of those who have tried and failed in Afghanistan:
The Babylonian Empire
The Persian Empire
The Greek Empire
The Roman Empire
The Sassanid Empire
The Mongols
The Russian Empire
The British Empire
The Russian empire
The British Empire
The Soviet Union
The United States
I had a friend who was there in Kandahar Province. He told me about an ancient watchtower that was outside their base. It was said to be thousands of years old, and was considered unsafe to go inside, but he went inside anyway. On the steps to the top, on the walls, were inscriptions in Greek, Arabic, Russian. "I realized it was unlikely we were going to have a different outcome."
Twenty years ago we went to war with the largest opium producing Authoritarian regime to fight terrorism. Now we have an Opiod epidemic, voter suppression laws on the books, one party is adamantly leaning Authoritarian, and domestic terrorist attack the procedures of democracy, and is growing threat.
Hmmm. “Houston, we have a problem.”
Had the US military stayed in-country for another hundred years, the results would have been the same.
Other random, gloomy rainy day thoughts;
What will the Afghanistan War Memorial, a war everyone wants to forget, look like?
Where will the next dirty little very profitable war be? (Erase Afghanistan/Taliban and insert Vietnam/Viet Cong.)
A trillion dollars would have bought a lot of infrastructure. How can we replace war profiteers with infrastructure profiteers? C'mon, Kellogg Root & Brown, show us something!
What do we do with the prisoners in Guantanamo? Finally give them a trial? How about we re-patriate them and replace them with those accused of Jan. 6th crimes and hold them incognito for a couple of decades.
Republicans insist that we only teach smiley-face American history to our children.
It's another rainy day in Connecticut. Sorry, western states. If I could, I would send it all to you.
Let's imagine how Republicans will excoriate President Biden if (more likely when) the Taliban takes over Afghanistan. It will be as if their cult leader hadn't cut a deal with the Taliban, putting the Afghanistan government at a grave disadvantage by excluding it from negotiations. Predictably, John Bolton wasted no time criticizing Biden after today's announcement.
Biden made the tough decision that he needed to make.
Myself & others for a long time have characterized the Republican Party as our Taliban because of the similar religious conservative punitive gun carrying behavior of both. However, Trump capitalized on the Republican direction and took it farther until seeking help from Russia, favoring dictators like Putin, thr Big Lie, the January 6th Capitol attack, occupations of state capitols, and now Republican state laws to suppress voting, censure books and teaching of American history is looking even more Taliban than ever.
Whether or not right wing extremism is linked throughout the world, their objectives for domination, single party rule, their thinking, tactics, sympathies and public statements follow the same patterns, and often use each others words. Social media, news media and entertainment media are mixing the pot and making this easier. Where the US used to be called the "melting pot" for our inclusion, perhaps the melting pot is now a homogenization of right wing radical ideas and actions, playing to the worst natures of mankind is attacking our multicultural democratic modern world. Much like covid19, an infection with no purpose other that to infect and live off its hosts until they are dead.
Such a shame it is that the greatest threat to our security now comes from our fellow Americans. This is a sad commentary on our nation’s state of affairs.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
and the women come out to cut up what remains,
jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
and go to your gawd like a soldier.
Rudyard Kipling
Realists knew even back in the Bush days that this was how things would end. We'd seen it before in several parts of the world when colonialism ended. After the colonial forces leave, a bloodbath inevitably follows. History rarely mentions those, but for example, the killings that followed after Great Britain granted India its independance were horrific, and led to the creation of Pakistan as a separate Muslim state. Was Britain right to leave?
Yes. Leaving was long overdue.
If there ever was a clear example of our leaders ignoring history and proceeding to war without a defined mission and overt success criteria, this Afghan period will be one of the most overt. In the reaction that led us into this quagmire, "We" stopped listening. We didn't listen to history, we didn't listen to our own military leaders, we didn't listen to a large part of our government, our advisors, or our electorate. THIS TIME things would be different! And yet - somehow they weren't.
It took a lot of moral and political courage to bite the bullet and call a halt to this, and President Biden deserves a lot of credit for doing so.
Given the mess he was handed as an incoming president after an inept and corrupt administration, President Biden has mapped out a reasonable way forward from a situation that no president should have to deal with. Will he and his successor, since this will be a years long process, have a Congress of helpmates or obstructionists?
"Those who cannot remember the past..." Here we are 50 years after the Vietnam War, repeating ourselves.
“He also seemed to acknowledge the extraordinary danger facing Afghan women and girls under the rule of the Taliban as it continues to sweep through the country.” That women and girls suffer under a repressive and brutal regime is a standout hardship of this defeat.
20+ years
Four presidents
Dozens of diplomats
Countless generals
Billions of dollars
Thousands of deaths
And here we sit with no workable solution
Biden made the only rational decision.
Afghanistan has been ruled by the tribes since the beginning of time and will until the end. The idea of a unified country is a Western concoction for which they hate and kill us.
Time to lick our wounds, pack our tents and head home.
Hopefully, hopefully, we have learned a lesson. Hopefully.
Most of the discussion of all this fails to note that it's beyond the ability of the US to dictate the future of Afghanistan. This was as obvious twenty years ago as it is now. Biden, whether or not he says so publicly, is simply recognizing reality.
While I feel bad for the Afghani people, I am not sorry we have withdrawn our troops. Biden’s question of whether you would send your child there is a valid one. Unless you have sent a child off to the Middle East to fight a war that cannot be won, you probably can’t answer that question. We have. The young man who went there came back a very different man with mental as well as physical injury. But we were fortunate, he came home. Biden’s approach to try to cut off the money also seems wiser.