Botched war in Afghanistan receives botched withdrawal
We screwed up and went to war in Afghanistan. We screwed up and doubled down the war effort there, after electing a supposedly anti-war president. We screwed up by not having any real goal there. We screwed up the easiest and most obvious thing to do: leave. What exactly is our foreign policy good for, besides screwing up?
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| A Dutch howitzer fires at a target in Afghanistan. If it was actually a Taliban howitzer firing at a target just outside of Los Angeles, how would you feel? Maybe Afghanis would feel the same way. // photo by Gerben van Es |
Afghanistan sure has been a hell hole this past month or two, even by Afghanistan standards.
A year ago came the welcome news that the Trump administration struck a deal with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan by May 2021 after nearly two decades of thumbs-up-our-ass US foreign policy. None of the presidents had any coherent strategy for Afghanistan. None of the generals really had any real goals. None of the rest of the US military really had any sense of mission while they were out there.
Then Biden was elected into office, and while he delayed the troop withdrawal, I was actually pleasantly surprised that he didn't cancel the withdrawal altogether. I mean, he pretty much championed the war there all through the early 2000s, voting for military intervention there.
Now, as the withdrawal deadline closes in, things are a complete clusterfuck. The Taliban started invading and within weeks, they reached Kabul, jumping through nearby towns with nearly no resistance. Tens of thousands of Afghanis that have assisted the United States have been desperate to flee the country. Staying in Afghanistan was basically a death sentence entrée with a heaping of torture as a side dish. Reports of executions and forced marriages had already surfaced.
This has led to the horrific scenes of desperation as people attempted to hang on to the wheel wells of airplanes and fell to their deaths. Several people at the Kabul airport have died amid the chaos trying to leave the country.
As 70,000 Afghanis that have assisted the United States, including their families, wait for their turn to flee, the paperwork to process visa applications that the United States had promised these people in exchange for their help, have been bogged down by bureaucracy. What exactly, have they been waiting for? Did they not have a sense of urgency to get this done? Why wouldn't the obvious answer be to transport as many people out as possible to various military bases? Then transport them to a holding area as their paperwork gets processed? Guam had already volunteered to do this.
Instead, the US government decided to screw around for a whole year, and allies in the country have been murdered in brutal fashion because of it.
US Intelligence reported that the Afghan government could collapse as soon as six months after the US military leaves Afghanistan. They weren't even close.
Twenty years we were there, losing thousands of sons and daughters to fighting, spending trillions of dollars. We have just about nothing to show for it except for a pissed-off hornet's nest.
The US government couldn't figure any of these things out, while both Bush and Obama told the American people they were making great strides in building up the Afghanistan regime and training their army up to resist the Taliban. In reality, neither of them had any semblance of leadership, none of the generals knew why we were there or what the goals were, as the Afghanistan Papers revealed. They can't even figure out how to properly run a DMV or calm the war zone known as South Chicago. Is it any surprise they can't figure out how to leave a country without getting a bunch of people killed? There's no way in hell they could figure out an incredibly complex foreign culture and how to set up a government there that wouldn't get completely trucked within a week.
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| It sure was nice of Osama Bin Laden to ironically lend his sign to GWB. // photo by the AP |
But since those warmongers have already gotten us to this point, we don't really have a choice. Preferably, it would have been managed by a president who didn't have a complete vacuum for a head. For those keeping score, I'm talking about both Trump and Biden here. Trump was the one who negotiated the withdrawal a year ago and sat in the Oval Office for several months and apparently didn't think any preparation was necessary. But these are the two people that voters thought were the best America had to offer. An egomaniacal idiot with no filter and an egomaniacal idiot with dementia. Good job, America.
Nevertheless, here we are, forced into an exit from a situation we never should have been in, that once again, as in Vietnam and Iraq 1.0, is getting a throng of allies in the country slaughtered after departure. But an exit is the only sane path forward. The alternative is to continue to drop bombs on innocent civilians, murder children, be a recruiting advertisement for terrorist organizations, piss away trillions of dollars for a negative return (fiscal conservatives, my ass), and to watch the Afghanistan puppet government continue to allow the grotesque practice of bacha bazi. But that would be the sociopath's choice. Ain't that right, Dan Crenshaw?
While this was indeed a botched withdrawal, it was always going to be really messy. All exits such as this would be, as they always have been. Let's make sure we never exit a war by never getting into one that's not on our soil in the first place.
