There has been a great deal of chatter about the current situation in Afghanistan being embarrassing and chaotic, and frankly, it’s a pathetic take on a highly challenging situation. Do you want to know what’s embarrassing? It’s embarrassing that Bush and Cheney turned a mission to bring down the people who attacked us on 9/11 into two unjustified wars that lasted more than 20 years. It’s aggravating that these two warmongers could commit us to two wars that eventually will cost our government and its taxpayers approximately $6 trillion two decades later (1).
Do you want to know what’s embarrassing? It is embarrassing that we have a news media that regularly promotes and facilitates wars. They act as the public relations arm of the industrial-military complex as if it was their job to justify rushes to war. Fact: Iraq didn’t have shit to do with the attack on 9/11. They did not have so-called weapons of mass destruction or a nuclear program. The media twisted themselves into a pretzel to promote entering the Iraq War. The New York Times motto should have been “All the Bullshit Not Fit to Print.”
Do you want to know what’s chaotic? It’s chaotic to watch administrations and the news media scramble to find a justification for injecting billions of dollars into a policy sinkhole. Some would say our mission ended once the Taliban was no longer in power in 2001. If we were generous, we should have at least closed shop after we killed Osama Bin Laden. Wasn’t this what it was all about? No, we had to make it about nation-building. Instead of packing it up and supporting Afghan and UN efforts to recover, we wanted to engage in nation-building and profiteering. Most of the media skipped merrily along with that refrain. When it became apparent that efforts to construct a functional government, wracked by the challenges of corruption and tribalism, were futile, the Bush administration told everyone it’s about Afghan women and girls. When the hell did Republicans start caring about women and girls?
According to our constitution, we are supposed to have civilian leadership of the military, but too often, those are just words on a page or a theoretical exercise. Democrats are regularly told; you need to listen to the Generals. When Republicans are in control of the military, they use it as an offensive weapon. Republicans abused the military, but like any large organization, the Defense Department, its main priority is to thrive and survive, and it does that quite well under Republican administrations. It’s not as if the military does any worse budgetarily under the Democratic administrations. The difference is that Democrats don’t want to take the sports car out for joyrides as readily as the Republicans.
History will show that our government has been excellent at starting wars but horrible at ending those wars after World War II. I agree with Lawrence O’Donnell that our government and military do not have plans to end wars after defeat, and finishing them will always be chaotic. It will be even more chaotic if your predecessor leaves you a three-page agreement that was worse than an act of appeasement. It was an act of submission. Making things worse is that the reason Trump did it was to claim he ended the war during the 2020 Presidential campaign. No forethought or afterthought. Trump released as many as 5,000 prisoners in his agreement. Among those ex-prisoners is a man that gave direct support to Al-Qaeda. He will most likely be the President/Prime Minister of Afghanistan. War never ends neatly, especially if you lose. The focus needs to be on getting Americans and as many Foreign Nationals who made significant sacrifices on our behalf out of Afghanistan.
We should always view “conventional wisdom” with suspicion and, in many cases, avoid it altogether. The Beltway reporters have chameleon-like capabilities. They are shapeshifters that apply different sets of rules for reporting on Republican presidents and Democratic presidents. For example, Trump spent 428 days sitting on a golf course at his ratty establishments during his presidency. Many of these times, there were crises. That was both acceptable and normal to the Washington media. President Biden spends one weekend at Camp David at the beginning of the Afghanistan evacuations, and the Beltway press loses their mind. Where is he? He was working doing the people’s business. BTW, please stop making comparisons to Viet Nam. Now that’s embarrassing.
I’ve heard news media representatives attack President Biden, claiming that his management of this crisis is incompetent. Yet, I’m hard-pressed to find instances when they used those words for Trump, even though incompetence was a hallmark of his presidency. The news media needs to stop “framing” things and instead report facts with context. I had not heard any of the people reporting on the problems concerning the Special Immigrant Visa program (SIV) for Interpreters say that were 17,000 applications sitting there on January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden assumed office. They have also done a piss poor job of indicting Congress for not revising the SIV process until a month ago, but you still have members of Congress bellowing how horrible this is.
Joe Biden is the first American president to level with us about the Afghanistan War. He made that clear even while he was Vice President. Biden spoke about it being an unproductive, wasteful use of our blood and treasure. He is in the process of ending a conflict that after 2001 was a war looking for a justification, a rationale that didn’t exist. I had hoped that after four years of lies, corruption, and incompetence, there would at least be a sigh of relief that our democracy dodged a bullet with the defeat of Donald Trump, and at least the news media would self-correct. I’m starting to believe that on that point, I might be the delusional one.
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