The Afghan airlift will be historic, regardless of showboating legislators and the unfortunate reality of previous guy selling the Afghan people out by handing the country to the Taliban. Trump has promoted an entirely new generation of global terrorism if only to help the MIC sell more munitions to developing countries.
That's not to say some critiques are not warranted. They certainly are. But, some of the arguments being used are so indefensible they require us to question the critics' motives or expertise. Here are some of the worst ones.
1. Biden owns this. (No. The authors of 20 yrs of war own this. The corrupt Afghan govt & the Afghan military who stood down own this. The Trump Admin that set the deadlines, drew down the troops, left behind the materiel & released 5000 Taliban own this.)
2. Well, at least he owns the chaos surrounding our exit. (No. There's no way that the Taliban regaining control would not have led to chaos w/many thousands of Afghans seeking to escape the rule of a thug regime. Whenever we started airlifting folks out, it would've started.)
3. Well, at least he should have been better prepared for the chaos. (Ok. I'm gonna give you this one. But having said that, efforts to prepare were rebuffed. The Afghan gov't did not want the US beginning mass evacuations for the reasons cited above.)
4. The US could have given those in jeopardy more warning. (No. We began discussing leaving seriously 12 yrs ago. Trump announced he wanted out when he ran & signed a deal w/an earlier deadline last yr. Biden ran saying he would leave. State warned people to leave in April.)
5. The US abandoned our allies. (No. Some of those allies left before we did. Others were well aware of US discussions re: departure, knew of the Trump deal. And there has been close coordination with allies throughout this evacuation process.)
6. The evacuation was bungled. (No. It started off badly. But it is still under way. It is currently one of the biggest airlifts in human history and within hours we will pass 100,000 safely flown out of Kabul. Actually, it has turned out to be a masterful logistical feat.)
7. Taliban control of Afg will make it a potential breeding ground for terror again. (There was no scenario in which they didn't gain control. The US has many means to respond to terror threats. Despite US military presence in Afg. the Taliban steadily gained ground for years.)
8. People will be left behind. (It is wildly unrealistic to think the US could remove everyone at risk from Afg. What's being done is above and beyond expectations. Other forms of political, diplomatic & economic pressure must be used to promote human rights in Afghanistan.)
9. We could easily have left troops there indefinitely. (No. There was a cost to that and a risk. The risk grew as the Taliban grew in strength. Trump accelerated that with the release of prisoners and his announced departure. Staying would have required a bigger investment.)
10. But we have left troops in Germany and Korea. (Not comparable. Those are allied nations facing real imminent threats from major enemies who pose a strategic risk to the United States. We have no similar on-going interest in Afghanistan.)
11. But the troops could have protected women and girls. (First, as noted, the Taliban was gaining strength for years--despite the presence of the troops. Second, troops are not the means we advance such interests anywhere else. It is not a sustainable or effective approach.)
12. But Biden says human rights are at the center of our foreign policy. (That can be true without deploying troops to confront all threats to rights. It must be. Because we'll never do that.Are critics suggesting deployments now to Ethiopia? Myanmar? To protect women elsewhere?)
13. It's not about getting out of Afghanistan. That's a distraction from the issue at hand. (No. It is about getting out of Afghanistan. It is about ending a 20 yr war. It is about acknowledging a massive US foreign policy failure & shifting to new priorities. That's the point.)
14. Biden was part of the problem, he's known about this all along. (No. Biden has been arguing to wind this down for 12 years. His view was over-ruled by President Obama. And after 9/11 almost everyone supported going in after Al Qaeda. For good reason.)
15. But...but...it's messy and painful. (As @stephenwertheim has pointed out. You can't lose a war and make it look like you've won. Getting out was right. Some chaos was inevitable. The airlift is a major logistical achievement.)
• • •
Any fair reckoning of what went wrong in Afghanistan, Iraq and the other nations swept up in the “war on terror” should include the disastrous performance of the media. Cheerleading for the war in Afghanistan was almost universal, and dissent was treated as intolerable. After the Northern Alliance stormed into Kabul, torturing and castrating its prisoners, raping women and children, the Telegraph urged us to “just rejoice, rejoice”, while the Sun ran a two-page editorial entitled “Shame of the traitors: wrong, wrong, wrong … the fools who said Allies faced disaster”. In the Guardian, Christopher Hitchens, a convert to US hegemony and war, marked the solemnity of the occasion with the words: “Well, ha ha ha, and yah, boo. It was … obvious that defeat was impossible. The Taliban will soon be history.”
The few journalists and public figures who dissented were added to the Telegraph’s daily list of “Osama bin Laden’s useful idiots”, accused of being “anti-American” and “pro-terrorism”, mocked, vilified and de-platformed almost everywhere. In the Independent, David Aaronovitch claimed that if you opposed the ongoing war, you were “indulging yourself in a cosmic whinge”.
www.theguardian.com/...
In the end, the US opted to ally with the Brzezinski’s Islamist “freedom fighters” in Afghanistan and bin Laden in order to defeat the Soviets, proving the truth of Henry Wallace’s observation that, “there is no regime too reactionary for us, provided it stands in Moscow’s expansionist path. There is no country too remote to serve as the scene of a contest which may widen until it becomes a world war.”
Incidentally, the idea that US support for bin Laden and his friends helped “win” the Cold War remains a treasured fable among some of the dimmer bulbs on Capitol Hill. Here I recall a rather unpleasant lunch I attended some years ago in Washington where the “guest of honor” was the American warlord (founder of the private military company Blackwater) Erik Prince, there to pitch, to the most unreceptive group of journalists imaginable, his plan to privatize the war in Afghanistan and line his own pockets.
At this gathering, the elephantine former Republican California congressman Dana Rohrabacher appeared and waxed not-very-eloquently about the time he spent supporting the Afghan Mujahedin in the 1980s.
Brzezinksi and Rohrabacher: What a duo.
And what a mess they started.
In the end, it all backfired in spectacular fashion, setting the stage for the events which continue to unfold in Afghanistan right now.
www.neweurope.eu/...