This is my first diary. I have followed the news this morning and it is next to impossible to make heads or tails out of it. There are a lot of hot takes and pretty much every hot take I have seen is deficient in some way. You can’t boil down a war with no end to one hot take.
1. We were failing in Afghanistan. 20 years. $1 trillion dollars. 600,000 dead. What we were doing was not working. But what we have done didn’t work either.
2. It feels wrong to say the Afghan people did not want to fight. Are we really going to lump literally everyone in the country together with some sort of “you must risk your life” standard as if they are to blame for Western involvement and several other countries propping up a militant Taliban they had to fight? This is the worst and laziest stereotype. I’d argue the people caught in the middle were never given a chance.
3. It is lazy to say the buck stops with Biden. He inherited an untenable situation. It is not lazy to say Biden should have done something different. It seems fair to say our intelligence should have been more realistic about a Taliban takeover of the country. We acted like we did little if anything to prepare for the humanitarian consequences. Our current administration could have done more to house refugees. It feels as if Washington (the Biden administration?) is banking on the fact that most of America doesn’t give a shit. We’re tired of the toll on us. Which is lazy and lacks empathy.
4. It does feel right to put more responsibility on Bush and Trump. Trump negotiated this whatever with the Taliban. Bush had no plan. But I think it is too easy to put all the responsibility on just those administrations. More, sure, yes definitely. I mean, let’s not forget “The Taliban is good” was basically the official government stance in the 80s and 90s. “The enemy (the mujahideen) of the enemy (Soviets) is my friend” was the policy, even if both should have been the enemy.
5. There is a temptation to say we should have stayed in Afghanistan for humanitarian purposes. I have mixed feelings about this because of our history there, the U.S. history of invasion with no plan. We should have had a plan for the people there. And we should admit that responsibility.
sigh.
