The Inevitable Finally Happens in Afghanistan
Published at 09:18 on 16 April 2021
It was obvious from the moment it became crystal-clear that the US ruling class was not serious about Afghanistan, that the military operation there was doomed to failure.
It would have been an extremely heavy lift even if the ruling class were firmly committed to the pursuit of victory: the USSR, which had the advantage of Afghanistan being a neighboring country, had still been forced to retreat from Afghanistan in humiliation and defeat. That land is not called “the graveyard of empires” for nothing.
So there we had the USA, trying to chintz out on foreign aid to the Afghans, and getting promptly distracted by Saddam Hussein and launching a war of lies against his regime instead of focusing on finishing something already started in Afghanistan. The conclusion was foregone; the only question was how much time it would take before the inevitable happened.
The rationalizations put forth for invading Afghanistan were crap, too, by the way. The Taliban are vile, but really not much more vile than longtime US allies the Saudi regime, which engages in its own repression of women and has its own Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. So much as for harboring terrorists like Osama bin Laden, well, Pakistan did that, and it was possible to deal with bin Laden (poorly; he should have been arrested, interrogated, and tried, not summarily executed) in Pakistan by means that fell short of all-out invasion. But I digress.
What sucks now is that the Taliban is primed and ready to once more rule the roost there. Expect Biden to be blamed for that or any other immediate fallout from his acceptance of defeat.
In a way, he will have been responsible, though not in the immediately proximate way that Establishment rhetoric will paint him to be. Biden was one of the Democrats who fell for the Bush regime’s snow job about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction. He deserves blame for that, and to be honest, he has in hindsight accepted at least some blame for it.
Again, US defeat became a foregone conclusion in about 2003. The only question was how long it would take to finally admit it. And Biden is not a unique president in this regard: Trump basically conceded the same thing, and was planning an even earlier pullout than Biden now is. So no matter what the outcome of the 2020 election was, the US was going to be pulling out of Afghanistan.
This seems to be a habit of ours. I mean Vietnam the French were there first and they failed. Same thing so many lives lost so much money spent and also other lives and what about all the Afghanis that they left there who worked for the US who are now at threat of being executed by the Taliban.