Armchair Generals

Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III and Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, brief the media, the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Aug. 18, 2021. (DoD photo by Lisa Ferdinando)

Afghanistan is an absolute clusterfark.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, but most of it sits squarely on President Biden’s shoulders. We can play armchair generals until our faces turn blue, but, at the end of the day, this was Biden’s evacuation plan and his alone. Trump left him with a shoddily negotiated deal with the Taliban that would almost certainly have led to the Taliban completely retaking Afghanistan. This is true. But that doesn’t change how badly the evacuation is being executed. The Taliban is an awful band of human rights-abusing terrorists and serial killers. Any deal with them was Faustian from the jump. Biden did not attempt to renegotiate that deal at any point, outside of pushing our military pull-out by a few months. The Taliban consistently broke the terms of the Trump deal, and no one did anything. No reprisals, no nothing.

The entire military and intelligence gathering infrastructure is pointing fingers at each other. Biden claims no one told him the country would collapse this quickly while plenty of leaks are stating the very opposite. Heads need to roll, starting with the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense, along with the heads of the NSA, the DNI, the CIA, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is our worst foreign policy debacle since at least the fall of Tehran if not the fall of Saigon. To say nothing of the Bay of Pigs.

Biden clearly wanted out and didn’t care how it was accomplished. Billion’s worth of our military equipment was just straight up abandoned, to be used against us or sold to the highest bidder from some unsavory country like China, Russia, or Iran. Tons of cash and even our database of allies (which the Taliban is, of course, using to hunt them.) Our allies were not pulled out before the military, and neither were American citizens. In fact, the Biden Administration apparently doesn’t even have an accurate count of how many Americans are still left in the country. The contractors and air support that the Afghan military needed to stay operational were both pulled, which is why that military collapsed so quickly. They had no true means of fighting the Taliban.

Biden, in less than seven months, is turning into Carter 2.0, just without the deregulation. If a single American is held hostage or killed, I don’t really know what stops DeSantis or whoever from winning in 2024. Countless allies, such as translators, have already been brutally killed, along with many of their family members. Loads of women and girls, some scarily young, have been sold into sexual slavery. In some ways, that’s a fate worse than death. The Taliban is whipping people in the streets for arbitrary reasons (like there’s a good reason to whip someone,) killing women who are not “modestly” dressed, and a whole load of other nasty crap. All on President Biden’s watch.

I don’t know if we should have stayed in Afghanistan forever, but the last American military casualty was well over a year ago, in February of 2020. The Afghan military, who wanted to fight, had lost scores since that time. We were essentially logistical support at this point. It wasn’t really much of a war that we were fighting. On par with what we do for Israel or South Korea. Our position at the status quo where we were was not untenable. I could understand it if we were losing men every day or week or month. But over a year without a single casualty just makes the collapse of the country sad. Billions were spent, thousands of our soldiers’ lives were lost, injuries galore.

Why sacrifice all of that for this mess? But that’s just my opinion, a random person in a sea of armchair generals.