Twenty Years of Nothing

So the United States has been kicked out of Afghanistan, as were the Russians, British, Romans, and if legend be believed, Alexander the Great before.

Recriminations will be flowing for awhile, as our media flounders around seeking for a way to blame Republicans when there are no Republicans holding any national power whatsoever to be responsible for anything requiring leadership.  About all they can do is to blame a Republican, George W. Bush, for getting us into Afghanistan while hoping that everyone will forget the fact that Mr. Obama, he of halting the seas from rising, kept us there.

What old W had promised was in fact accomplished about the time he left office, namely, an Afghanistan not actively run by savage barbarians bent on world terrorism - and that's about the only vaguely possible goal in a medievally benighted place like that.  Even impossibly-Utopian W knew better than to imagine the Afghans were going to be converted into Swiss in two, twenty, two hundred, or two thousand years.  It was never going to happen; the terrain is just too rough, and the barbarism just too ingrained.

Decades ago, the Soviets fought with barbarity equal to the barbarity of the Afghans; that didn't work either.  We mainly threw dollars, which the Afghans gladly scooped up and then used for their own nefarious purposes entirely counter to our own.

Were there honest, decent Afghans who liked Americans and wanted to fight to make a decent country for themselves?  Likely so - but, either not enough of them, or they were not smart enough, and in any case they were fighting against a culture that militates against anything that could be described as modern, decent, just, fair, or free.

To but scratch the surface, we're now hearing that a major cause of the collapse is the utter corruption of what claimed to be the Afghan government and army; Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani fled the country, reportedly carrying so much cash that his helicopter couldn't fly and he had to leave some of it behind, poor him.  We can readily imagine Hunter Biden doing this, but not even Sleepy Joe would be so infamously venal.

Even half a decade ago, the New York Times reported that, as their headline put it, "U.S. Soldiers Told to Ignore Sexual Abuse of Boys by Afghan Allies."  How enthusiastic about defending pedophiles could you expect American soldiers to be?  How confident in their own generals, that tolerated vile abuse under their noses?  And, how competent an Afghan military that was suffused with such a debauched culture?

That's the problem: The enemy in Afghanistan wasn't the Taliban particularly, or the Afghan people, or the terrain, or the double-crossing Pakistani ISI secret services, or the amused Russians, though all those surely qualify as secondary opponents .  It was, in a word, Islam - the utterly barbaric, evil, inhuman wickedness that is in every way opposed to all that Americans would view as decent and right, unmitigated by the slightest shred of civilization, as it's practiced in Afghanistan in a way that would make a Saudi blush.

Are all Muslims debauched pedophiles? Of course not.  Do all Muslims demand that all women be permanently imprisoned in burkhas, never to leave their homes unaccompanied by armed male guards?  No.  Does every last Muslim dedicate his life to eradicating Jews and other infidels from his home, his country, and his world?  Certainly not.

But that's what the new leaders of Afghanistan have proclaimed as their goal.  What's worse, by their lack of sufficient desire to opposed them with armed force while they had the chance, that's what the rest of the bulk of the Afghan people have chosen as an acceptable outcome.

Yes, Joe Biden seems to have sabotaged the Afghan military, for reasons not entirely clear.  Fine: is their a shortage of guns and ammo rattling around the place?  Are the decent, freedom loving Afghans, if such there be, incapable of walking into the abandoned American bases and firing up a Humvee as the Taliban have done?

Gen. Petraeus claims that the Afghan Army was perfectly willing to fight, and perhaps they were, back when he was leading our forces.  But as Osama bin Laden famously observed, people want to back the strong horse not the weak one, and they don't come any weaker than our current Commander-in-Thief.  Afghanistan itself doesn't appear to have the capability of generating leaders for good, only evil, and when we stopped providing good leadership, that's what was left.

Do we thus condemn Joe's decision to exit the field?  Not really: the entire nation of Afghanistan is not worth a single drop of American blood.  It wasn't twenty years ago; it wasn't when Mr. Obama was president, or Mr. Trump, and it is not now.

Joe Biden's total incompetence and corruption is indeed on full display, but not because he's leaving Afghanistan - we should have done that long ago, and failing that, today is the best day for it.  Our beef with him is simply the contempt he shows for the Americans and other allies risking their lives there, by not lifting a finger to make any arrangements to get them to safety in advance of pulling a bunk.  That is despicable and contemptible, but what more could we expect from the man who famously has been wrong on every foreign policy subject for forty years?

If Joe Biden had any decency or honor - hah! - he'd resign immediately and slink off into richly-deserved obscurity, as Donald Trump has called for him to do.  That'll never happen.

Charges of impeachment have been filed against him, and if the Democrat party had any decency, honor, or even felt the need to remain competitive in free and fair elections characterized by free speech - double hah! - they'd pile on to remove their lasting shame before the damage gets any worse.  Again, that'll never happen.

It's not just Biden though - any decent or honorable American general worthy of his uniform would have resigned before obeying orders to abandon our own citizens this way, and and decent administration would summarily sack the Pentagon leadership that executed such a disastrous "plan", if it even deserves that word.  Once again, neither are even being discussed, thus demonstrating what we've been quickly coming to fear - our entire institutional infrastructure is utterly corrupt and rotten down as far as we can see.  The serving soldiers at the bottom may well be the lions they've always been, but they're led by jackasses if not something worse.

If we ever again are blessed with a reformist administration that actually loves this country, a Day 1 job must be the immediate sacking and forcible retirement of every single military officer of three or more stars or the equivalent, and a deep-dive investigation into the rest of the military leadership with an emphasis on successful field-command experience, with desk-jockey and political years being a powerful negative.

We pity the poor innocent Afghans who are about to suffer the degradation of a medieval barbarism that the civilized world left centuries ago - all, what, couple dozen of them that there might be.  For the est, they aren't worth the cost of the atomic bombs required to nuke them back into the Stone Age, not that anyone would even notice the difference.

We wish the Taliban every speed and advantage in destroying every last shred of Western technology, ideally starting with the airport and telecoms, for, save the odd rounding error, there is nothing and nobody in Afghanistan that should have any part or presence anywhere in the civilized world.  Unfortunately, what's far more likely is that the Chinese will buy it all - which, considering the sums they've showered on the Biden crime family, may have been the plan all along.

Yes, the Afghans will shortly be getting the government they mostly deserve - anyone willing to ignominiously lose their life clinging to a jet landing gear to try to escape their country, should be willing to gloriously risk wielding a firearm to save it.  They apparently weren't - and, it looks like, we aren't either.

Maybe Caesar Joe, Fascist Fauci, and Roundheel Harris really are the government we deserve?  There's precious little evidence to the contrary.  How long before we have our own version of the Taliban closing restaurants and places of public worship, forcing people to wear clothes they don't want to, confiscating private property... oh, wait...