The Negativity About Withdrawal is Just BS

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what’s actually happening in Afghanistan right now, and it seems to be due to the fact that the entire mainstream press has become contaminated with bullshit-itis. This time, we can’t simply blame Fox News and OANN and give everyone else a pass, which seems to be a common occurrence. Since the end of July, Americans have evacuated 122,300 from Afghanistan, but you’d never know it. All we are told about is the supposed “chaos” that has overtaken the country. It’s as if the entire country of Afghanistan was previously an absolute utopia. (Hint: it wasn’t.)

If we are to believe most of the press reports, one would think that pulling US troops out of the country has been an unmitigated disaster. Even if you listen closely to otherwise reputable news sources, you might believe the Taliban has gone into the country and slaughtered tens of thousands of civilians so they could take over power. You would never know that former “President” Donald Trump negotiated with the Taliban before he left office and made a deal for them to take over on May 1, 2021. At least one prominent “pundit” suggested that it was kinda rude for President Biden to even speak to the Taliban regarding the pullout. You would never know that the Taliban, who is largely the most popular and dominant political factions in all of Afghanistan, was running things now because the Afghan people wanted it that way. You also would not know that the previous civilian government leader, who was chosen by Trump to lead the country, after he was extracted from prison, had left the country voluntarily just a week or so before the bulk of the American pullout from the country.

Seriously, if people are troubled by what has happened as we extracted the US presence from the country after 20 years, one has to wonder what you have been smoking for since late 2001, when we invaded Afghanistan, ostensibly to get al Qaeda the hell out of the country and to retaliate against their attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. As a sort of a bonus, Dubya also took credit for “nation-building,” which he promised during his losing 2000 presidenial campaign he would never do, when he happily took credit for ousting the Taliban, which was seen as a major impetus to making Afghan women at least feel“free.”

Of course, that was about two decadesago, and our military and contractors did little to nothing more to hold back the Taliban in the subsequent two decades, so why would anyone expect anything other than the Taliban dominating the politics at the time the United States finally decided to withdraw, rather than continuing the revenue suck for another undetermined period of time?

Let’s be clear, of all the Democrats in Congress in 2001, Barbara Lee is the only one who got it right when she voted against invading Afghanistan, especially with no concept of what a “win” would look like.

And that’s the problem with believing that President Biden has completely screwed up the withdrawal. It’s not only untrue, but the very concept is nothing short of absurd. In order to believe that nonsense, you would have to believe a completely positive withdrawal from Afghanistan was at all possible, when anyone paying attention closely would know it really wasn’t.

If you imagined Afghans presenting us with a “Goodbye Party” at the end, complete with fireworks, ribbons and streams of praise for helping them establish a full-on democracy with 100% participation, then I should give you plenty of praise for your active imagination, even as I denigrate your political savvy. We have done little to nothing to establish a solid, working capitalist economy, we have done nothing to establish a strong economy with 98% employment and a strong safety net for the poor, and we have not shown them how to establish a universal educational system that treats everyone equally. Hell; we haven’t even established a government that isn’t beholden to Muslim theocrats. Why would we expect hearts and flowers when we pulled out of there?

And where did we get this idea, anyway? When have we ever emerged from a war with an opposing country praising us because we’re so “wonderful”? After each world war, we did work with other nations to help other countries recover from the destruction caused, but really, that was as much for our own benefit as anyone else’s. By rebuilding the rest of the world, of course, we were rebuilding our own economy. We were able to create new markets for our goods and services, and we then created jobs at home for new goods and services we never made before. It was a clear win-win, until the new markets we created became large and powerful enough to actually provide competition for us; then, we tried to deny the monsters we created and tried to blame them for our economic failure. (Remember the Chrysler bailout and the K-Car? You should. That was the Japanese showing they could build better, more fuel efficient cars that American consumers wanted to buy, at least until someone told them a gallon of gasoline would always cost less than a dollar.)

Where do we get notions like the one in which every country or people who have ever enticed us into attacking another country and conducting a war for 20 years has always thanked us for doing so and given us props for doing such great things for them? Especially when we haven’t done that at all. We essentially spent 20 years in Afghanistan backing up the Afghan military in their attempts to interdict and stop the IEDs from killing civilians. And how successful were we on that front, anyway? On the one hand, we were okay at maintaining the “war” with minimal American casualties, but what else did we accomplish with the “war” in Afghanistan?

Our purpose for being in Afghanistan was ostensibly to get rid of al Qaeda in the country and shut down terrorist raining camps, and we seem to have managed to do that within a couple of months. Ousting the Taliban was a side benefit, but after we did that, the Bushies assigned an ersatz government to the country; one that was not exactly the type of government the people of Afghanistan would have elected to run the country.

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