How quickly they forget. Donald Trump was passing messages through his spox Liz Harrington on Twitter yesterday, saying that “Joe Biden should resign in disgrace.” Kayleigh McEnany was expressing great concern for the girls and women of Afghanistan. Yet, the picture that you see above is of Mike Pompeo meeting with then-Taliban Head of Political Office, Mullah Beradar, who is now the new President of Afghanistan. Trump had Beradar released from a Pakistani prison in 2018.
Then there’s this. This was scrubbed from Trump’s website.
Here is his statement that he just deleted from his website. From @wsteaks pic.twitter.com/Q9ebZknPIr
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) August 16, 2021
It will be amusing to see how they attempt to walk this back, and that’s about all that is amusing about this situation.
The harsh reality, and this is not new information, is that there was never going to be a day when the Afghan National Security Forces was going to stand alone and protect the country from the Taliban after the United States withdrew. That is pure fantasy, always has been. Four different administrations have poured billions of dollars into Afghanistan and the truth of the matter is the Taliban successfully infiltrated both the ANSF and the Afghan government. That’s how it fell so quickly. We were living in a dream world for twenty years. Don’t take my word for it, read what a veteran who fought there has to say. Daily Beast:
I think the Afghanistan I was living in, [in 2010] which is the Afghanistan many Americans perceive or discuss to this day when they talk about things like cowardice or dishonor among the ANSF, was actually a vibrant fantasy world on par with that of Westeros or Middle Earth. Our Afghanistan, which resembled America in some senses, was a country where people fought to the death for their ideas, like we did in World War II.
Many Americans shared in the mass delusion: the people I deployed with, military leadership, the commentariat and political leaders. I don’t think many Afghans were taken in by the lie. Looking back on things, most of the Afghans I met used the lie opportunistically, as a way of getting something they wanted.
“There is a government of Afghanistan,” influential local politicians or military leaders would say, in deference to my connection to the lie, when we were meeting. “Hamid Karzai is its president.” I don’t blame the Afghans for this deception. Many Afghans died for the lie; far more of them have died (and will die) for the lie than Americans. It’s only right that some of them should have gotten something out of the arrangement.
For the Taliban’s part, they’ve been trying to communicate the truth to us since 2001. They’re savage and unethical, barbaric, cruel, and objectionable in every possible sense — religious extremists to boot, the worst kind of people (people, though, in spite of it all). Their having been right, and our having been lying to ourselves, doesn’t make the Taliban good people, or us bad people. It does mean their vision of the world was grounded in realism, and sober facts, and our vision in the U.S. and the West can now safely and with certainty be consigned to the bonfire, or repurposed as military or political fiction.
That’s the only way to explain how a country—excuse me, a lie—vanished in a week.
When American troops were there, they were holding up a facade. They left, the facade fell. It’s a shame that this is happening on Biden’s watch because the optics are horrific. In a perfect world, and no such thing exists, probably the best thing to do would have been to remove our military presence after Bin Laden was killed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
We played babysitter and cop for twenty years. If there is a means by which an eventual withdrawal would not be humiliating and chaos would not ensue from people desperately trying to escape the Taliban, I have no idea what that would be. The choice was to perpetually stay in the region and the argument is being made that that is a good thing for intelligence reasons and to stabilize the area — and that’s the same argument that has been made for twenty years.
It will be interesting to see what Biden says later today. He’s getting the blame but there is plenty to go around. The last administration negotiating with terrorists is not some insignificant development that can be swept under the rug, but as you see, that’s where it’s going.
The most disingenuous thing about the current handwringing is how, after twenty to forty years of using them as props or proxies, the Reagan Republicans/neo-cons suddenly want to pretend to give a damn about the Afghans. They give exactly the same shit about these newly created refugees as they ever did the Uighurs, Yazidis or Kurds. Generally speaking, they tend to be worth more to that crowd dead than alive.
And in a couple of weeks, when the Delta surge comes to a head and we get LOTS of news reports of kids in ICUs, people will stop caring all over again. After all, that happened over THERE, not HERE.
Let’s not forget how the right-wing was so ready to use “women’s rights” being destroyed by the Taliban as one of the “reasons” we had to be there–even as the right-wing was doing their best to trash women’s rights in THIS country.
The Taliban was (horrors!) forcing women and girls to wear clothes that covered them from head to toe; meanwhile, the American right was slut-shaming teen girls for wearing “provocative” clothes that “distracted” boys in schools.
The Taliban was (horrors!) forcing women to stay home unless they were accompanied by or had permission from their husbands or brothers or fathers to leave; meanwhile, the American right was busy passing laws to make abortion completely illegal (or, as a “best case” scenario, giving the man who contributed the sperm–even if the man had raped her–a right to intervene in her pregnancy). I know the latter isn’t as drastic as the former but, slippery slopes being what they are, there IS a large contingent on the American right that actually believes women should stay at home and NOT be involved in politics (ironically enough, even a large number of right-wing women who currently hold elective office believe this as well, making them outrageous hypocrites).
At this point, I don’t have the energy, patience or time to even bother rehashing the endless litany of specific lies they’ve peddled for all these decades. They lied until it got them into put them in a blind alley…end of story. The rest is just commentary.
Completely accurate assessment Ursula – the correct strategy was to go in, take out the Al Qa’eda camp and, seeing bin Ladin wasn’t there, get back on the transports and get out.
Trump and his pompeous sidekick obviously never bothered to read anything about the ‘graveyard of empires’ that is Afghanistan – Alexander the Great tried as did Genghis Khan and Tamerlane; the British tried (three times) at the height of their imperial power and failed miserably, the Soviet Union tried with the same result.
That being said, the Republiqanons are trying to shift the blame to Joe Biden (completely overlooking the simple fact that the whole fin de siecle debacle was engineered by their Cretin in Chief. Howver, it does appear that the basis of the GQP is that ‘The Trump can do no wrong’ (and if he did, then it gets airbrushed out of existenca a la Joe Stalin).
Oh and don’t overlook the fact that the Taliban grew from the Mujahideen who were sponsored, aided and armed by the CIA
You’re absolutely correct: had even American military minds, never mind political morons, bothered to digest the history of war in Afghanistan, they’d surely have chosen a more reasoned path for their attempt. The “Soviet Vietnam” that was their invasion of Afghanistan led to the magnificent guerilla resistance of the Mujahideen, to the enrichment of various anti-Soviet warlords and eventually to the radicalised Taliban. If indeed the Taliban has succeeded in actually conquering the entire country, they’ll be the first to have ever done it.
Sometimes I am overwhelmed by a sense of despair, seeing all the poor and obvious abuse of our troops to preserve a false façade of everything will be alright, just send some more troops in with heavy equipment, supplies and translators, so my billion dollar baby keeps sending me cash … the list is probably medium length, but holds names known to big business as criminals that don’t give a damn about people, just their greed and cut of the billions of allocated dollars by the Republican warmongers …
I blame Cheney and Bush43. The former guy was doing it for some reason that benefited *him*.
“In a perfect world, and no such thing exists, probably the best thing to do would have been to remove our military presence after Bin Laden was killed. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?”
You are oh so close to having nailed it with these two sentences.
My correction is this: The best thing we could have done is do what we initially started doing over there when the Taliban govt. refused to hand over Bin Laden and the rest of his group. As in assemble a force, go in there and kill him/them ourselves. Then get the fuck out and tell the Taliban (and for that matter Musharriff over in Pakistan at the same time) that it’s exactly what would happen in the future – and that if he had actionable intel ahead of another terrorist attack from people they were harboring we wouldn’t just sit back but come in, in FORCE and shit-hammer them again! We did assemble a good force although not as large as it could have and should have been because little Georgie Bush Jr. was still butt-hurt over his daddy losing re-election and convinced (even though Daddy, James Baker and the others who actually knew shit told him otherwise) that not taking the first Gulf War all the way to Baghdad and deposing Saddam was the reason. So, a lot of planning and resources that should have gone into Afghanistan were diverted to the upcoming invasion of Iraq.
The sun literally hadn’t set on September 11, 2001 before Bush and Cheney were thinking about how to use the attacks as a way to get us into Iraq! Nothing, and I mean NOTHING they would officially learn in the ensuing weeks that Iraq had NOTHING to do with the attacks would dissuade them and the neocons.
For all that, we still had (probably) enough devoted to Afghanistan to take out Bin Laden and his key people. But, for political show we outsourced a good chunk of the actual fight once we had them cornered at Tora Bora to locals and that’s how Bin Laden and some others slipped away. At one point we had American troops with eyes on the shack we were sure Bin Laden (and probably others we needed to kill) was in, but they weren’t given the green light to take him/them out! Nooooooo they were told. Turn it over to the locals! Well, we’ve seen how well that worked out by which I mean not well at all.
Still, once it was clear not only Bin Laden but the important people of Al Queeda weren’t using Afghanistan to hide in anymore we should have gotten the hell out of there.
After we DID actually kill Bin Laden then yes, we SHOULD have started winding down our presence in Afghanistan and been out of there within a year or so.
But starting back in the Bush 43 years we kept hearing all the bullshit “happy talk” from military commanders about how we were building a professional Afghan Army and various police forces and getting agreements between different groups/regions to cooperate with the main govt. in Kabul. It was always bullshit. We were ALWAYS outsiders and all they were doing was biding their time and waiting for us to eventually leave just as every other invader in that country’s long, tortured history (even Genghis Kahn gave up on the place!) eventually had done. The main government in Kabul was ONLY the government in Kabul.
Politicians in the U.S. including President Obama didn’t want to be seen as being the ones who “lost” Afghanistan. We faced a choice, and a difficult one. Commit to a presence there pretty much in perpetuity that was large enough to hold the place together and keep the Taliban influence semi-contained and accept the costs in blood and treasure or get the hell out. A case could be made either way. However, few politicians on either side of the aisle (including President Obama and then VP Joe Biden) were willing to have an open and honest dialogue with the other side, much less the American public about the costs and rewards (regional stability in a part of the world where it’s in short supply – keep an eye on what’s to come in Pakistan) of a permanent presence in Afghanistan.
I get the pressure to get out. I’ve felt for most of the last twenty years we were wasting our time trying to do so-called nation building. But after the dust settled from our initial invasion we should have been honest with ourselves and the Afghans about things. That we’d be staying and with enough forces to deal with any uprisings that would allow the Taliban back into power.
Instead (again) we got all this bullshit about how we were both keeping things stable AND teaching the Afghans how to run their country in their own way and providing an Afghan security apparatus that would one day be able to be effective without us backing them up. It was ALL bullshit.
I know this will sound blasphemous to most readers here, but sometimes we don’t give Trump enough credit for his ability to scheme. I think that after the hosing the GOP got in 2018 where HE was proverbially on the ballot he was worried about his re-election chances. He thought (I believe) he might have a shot against many of our top contenders being talked about but was scared to death of one candidate. Joe Biden. Regardless, he knew it would be a tough fight and he might not be able to thread the needle the way he had in 2016. As the primaries went on and his worst fear was realized (Biden being the nominee) he pulled out every stop he could think of. And ALSO started planting turd bombs that would blow up on a President Biden if his (Trump’s) worst fears were realized. One of those turd bombs was easy for him since he’d already talked about it so much and even had plenty on his own side if not openly advocating withdrawing at least not willing to oppose it. There were exceptions of course, but Trump figured he could play on his “Master of the Deal” reputation with his “deals” with the Taliban. (without including the actual govt. over there btw!) But I think he knew it would all go to hell once we were gone, and go to hell quickly. He COULD however count on the GOP (as we are seeing) to back him up and shift the blame even if he was still in the WH.
Make no mistake. Trump put us into a lose, lose situation which to be fair (I can’t believe I am saying this but it’s true) he’d been handed by prior administrations. It was always a question of losing little or losing big. If Trump ever had any illusions about winning re-election he knew they were over before the fall election campaign ever began in earnest. The evidence of THAT is plain for all to see. I’ll close by calling attention to that May 1 deadline Trump set us on course for. Things were as close to being on autopilot as they could be before he left office. But make no mistake – Trump had plans to blame Obama and Bush all along if he was still President, and his successor if he was out.
Still, I fault a lot of people in addition to Trump. Some of whom are on our side of the aisle and who in general I greatly admire for good reason.
Let’s never 4get Trump RELEASED 5,000 Taliban from captivity. The current installed president was RELEASED by Trump from a Pakistani prison in 2018. History matters. 2trillion dollars in afganiststan & years of back & forth with the taliban was a fool’s paradise. Thousands of troops killed & injured. For what?
Let’s be honest. All the wars we’ve been in since Korea were all done to enrich the arms manufacturers and their investors, I’m sure many of whom have been the politicians promoting and funding them. Wasn’t it Eisenhower, the last sane Republican who said “Beware the military industrial complex” or something to that effect? He knew we were headed toward endless wars because it made people (the wrong people) ridiculously wealthy. I have no doubt they’ll find another war to promote so they can keep manufacturing and selling tanks, fighter jets and weaponry.
I also recall the Republicans going on about how we were going to do away with Islam and make those countries Christian. Like that was ever possible.
Anyoe who has the faintest knowledge of the military or of Afghan history knew exactly what was going to happen there when we left. That is why no one ever had the guts/spine/balls to actually do so.
Until now.
Awesome, and thank you Ursula for giving us such great fodder for the canon. I wish I could do the 123 thing but it’s late and for a rare occasion I’m a little on the sleepy side and although this reeks of trump number two I have to pass. But being fair I will pose a question. Which batshit stupid flag humping piece of excrement brought the taliban to Camp David to meet and talk peace bullshit in I believe it was 2018 if I not mistaken. And I will never forget the date of this auspicious meeting. A date that should have some sort of designation on any calendar. And do you know what that date was. Why it was September 11. Of course I really think he can be forgiven simply by what he was known to have said in front of many witnesses after the fall of the Towers. I now have the tallest building in Manhattan. Although not true this is truly repulsive and he has no right to criticize anything Biden says. To paraphrase a statement that went the rounds but I don’t remember the particulars so I will cut it short. Donald Trump isn’t qualified to carry Joe Biden’s jock strap.