Biden deserves condemnation, not for pulling forces out but for doing it in such a clumsy way.
Still, the Taliban agreement was made by his predecessor and after twenty years in Afghanistan, I believe that it is time to stop the bleeding and the money drain and bring our people home.
Trump said he would have done so much better getting our people out, but he said that he would have a better ACA plan too, he said he could do lots of stuff and failed to deliver. In any case, giving the Taliban a list of the names of our people so that they could eradicate them was absolutely imbecilic on the part of the Biden Administration. I hope they don't display the same type of naïveté with the Iranians.
However, if you want to find a person to blame for selling out our Afghani translators, allies and accomplices, look no further than Trump stooge Stephen Miller.
“It’s extraordinarily expensive to resettle a refugee in the United States. They get free health care. They get free education. They get free housing. They get free food. They get cash welfare,” he said on Fox News last week. “If the United States takes the policy that every person suffering under Sharia law has a right to live in the United States of America, we’re going to have to make the room for half a billion people.”
Forgetting the domestic blame game, for a brief second, if that is at all possible in these overheated and hyperbolic times (Biden would be impeached for jaywalking if the GOP had their way) I have a rather heartless take on the situation. I think that the Afghani people have mostly themselves to blame for their national state of affairs and I think the entire country has been playing a dangerous double game on its allies for years, much like the Pakistanis have.
Let them reap what they have sown. Not our job to fix them, nor Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras for that matter. You don't like it at home, rise up. You want to go back and live in the dark ages, have at it. We are plainly not very good at nation building and we need to stop trying. It is a no win proposition. A thankless job and one in which our best efforts are rarely appreciated.
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I met an Afghani Pashtun man at the show in in Albuquerque who told me that he had a shop in Tucson. I brought up the current situation and he scoffed. I asked him why the Taliban were such expert fighters and the Afghan army so pitifully inept and he laughed.
He told me that the United States and the west had been ripping off his country for years. The country was sick of it and sick of western ways. The reason the Taliban have had such stunning and rapid success is because they are supported by the Afghani people. They have buy in. Ex Presidents Karzai and Ghani plundered the office and only thought of enriching themselves.
I asked him about the situation with women and sending them back home and closing the schools and he accused me of western bias. "You see a woman in a burqa and it offends you," he told me. I told him that it did not. He said that what I had heard was lies and propaganda and that I did not understand the muslim faith.
Perhaps he is right. But what does offend me are the killing and subjugation of women and girls, the honor killings, the targeting of journalists. Religious fundamentalists are once again establishing a toehold for Al Qaeda, ISIS and Sharia law. But it is up to the Afghanis to do something about it and if they want to fester forever in their cesspool, so be it.
But they have a definite payback coming regarding the airport killings and if I was Biden I wouldn't make empty promises. I would learn from the Israelis and act first and make all the necessary apologies later.
Honestly, it offended me talking to this Afghan man. I don't know why we allow people like this to live in America, really, people so inimically opposed to our way of life and who support the enemies of Western civilization in such an extreme way. How about a one way ticket back to Kabul?
2 comments:
I'm with you on this, Robert:
"Let them reap what they have sown. Not our job to fix them, nor Guatemala, El Salvador or Honduras for that matter. You don't like it at home, rise up. You want to go back and live in the dark ages, have at it. We are plainly not very good at nation building and we need to stop trying. It is a no win proposition. A thankless job and one in which are best efforts are rarely appreciated."
I've never understood our fascination with occupying Middle East countries. It's a gigantic no-win, except for Defense contractors. Decades of wasted effort, money and lives are finally coming to an end - I give Biden tons of credit for making the hard call and exiting.
We have a democracy in crisis here at home, and that should be our focus.
That Pashtun guy was right, the Taliban took over so fast because the average Afghani, male or female, is against Western culture, they prefer their own.
It *is* a downright crazy culture; according to some Muslim scholars even singing is halal unless it's religious singing/chanting. The Taliban government won't allow musical instruments of any kind. Ever. Except, maybe sometimes tambourines, which only women can play and only at weddings.
That's the culture in Afghanistan, just the way things are. What ever made anyone think we would be seen by Afghanis as liberators? I'm glad we are finally leaving that country. Those people are stuck in the 14th Century, but they're fine with it. We should leave them alone, mind our own business and stop poking hornet's nests
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