Recently Sen. Lindsey Grandstand tweeted about how informative the wonderful Pakistani ambassador had been, so I commented with something like the following: Did you ask him about the years the Pakistanis coddled the Taliban and hid bin Laden and other al Qaeda members? Like Saudi Arabia, Pakistan is no friend of the US, and it’s probably more dangerous because they have nukes! (The ambassador from India might have something to say about that, Senator Grandstand.)
Sen. Ted “Mighty Mouth” Cruz went after the Biden administration about abandoning Bagram AFB, implying, I suppose, two airbases are better than one for the withdrawal? (Yeah, it’s probably futile to look for logic in anything Mighty Mouth says.) Does he realize how far Bagram is from Kabul? Does he have any room in his pee brain (that’s not a misspelling) that allows him to understand that defending two airbases is at least twice as difficult as defending one? Does he realize that the Karzai airport is a more central point? I know the answers to those questions. Does he?
You’re going to see a lot more second-guessing going on about Afghanistan, and the Good Ole Piranhas will try to use it to their political advantage to win back the House, Senate, and presidency that the “f&^%ing moron” and big-loser Trump lost (the quote ia from SecState Tillerson before Narcissus le Grand fired him). They will distort, sling the mud, and paint Biden and all Dems as ogres, even though they know Biden’s one-hundred times better than Trump (they have to at least know that, right?). Of course, they just use Trump as much as he used them to continue to promote their fascist agendas in service to America’s plutocrats…and the Big Lie. They don’t give a rat’s ass about the US citizens and soldiers in Afghanistan, and they don’t care about the Afghans who helped the US there either—they just wring their hands, Nazi Stephen Miller among them, about all those immigrants now coming to America. They don’t really care about anything except keeping American plutocrats happy so the latter will continue to support their power grab: Fascism in service of plutocracy.
While it’s true that Biden could have organized the Afghan withdrawal a hell of a lot better, it’s also easy to extrapolate the situation Biden inherited from Trump. Il Duce aka Trump would have completely failed if he had handled that withdrawal; that big loser’s failure would have been many times worse than Biden’s. After all, Trump was the biggest loser in the history of the US presidency! (Tillerson’s comment was made to generals after a meeting in the Pentagon where the fool claimed to know more than they did. To quote the inimitable rabbit, “What a moron!”)
Many wanted the US to withdraw from Afghanistan. I did too. Common sense dictated the plan: Keep enough troops there until US citizens and Afghan allies who wanted to leave that hellhole could do so safely, and then withdraw the troops. Trump already failed at that, or purposely set Biden up for failure, which would be yet another traitorous act of the former president. What number of troops did Il Duce leave there? Not enough to do the job, obviously; otherwise Biden wouldn’t have had to send them back there to defend the withdrawal!
Moreover, the Trump administration only negotiated with the Taliban and gave them most of what they wanted. (Trump and his cronies probably admired the Taliban as much as they do Covid-at least the evidence indicates that.) The Afghan government wasn’t invited to the negotiations and was abandoned, so they abandoned their country. The Afghan troops were also abandoned by Trump—no air support—so they surrendered en masse. (Maybe all part of Trump’s plan. I can Narcissus le Grand laughing and saying, “Take that, Biden!”) That all started long before Biden became president. By the time he did, the Taliban already controlled a large portion of Afghanistan, and they continued with their blitzkrieg after. That alone should have given Biden and other US leaders the clue (SecState Blinken, are you just incompetent and stupid?) that they had to get civilians evacuated before the military…but Biden and the Pentagon were desperate to get US forces out first.
How do you measure human stupidity? (Einstein might have had the best estimate.) How do you measure the value of human lives? US citizens, Afghans who helped the US, and US service personnel—they’re all of equal value, but the latter know much better how to defend the former than vice versa. The withdrawal process has been done ass-backwards, to put it crassly, because Biden and his administration, including the Pentagon brass, failed to use common sense. (Or maybe the US military, like the Afghan military, turned tail and ran?)
This is me doing the only second guessing I’ll do. Graham, Cruz, and the other fascist Good Ole Piranhas who, like Trump, supported an insurrection on January 6 using non-existent election fraud as an excuse, have no right to second guess anyone. They lost that right, so they should just shut the f&^% up!