The Rude Pundit: When, After All, It Was You and Me: Spreading Blame Where It Belongs for the War...

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/08/when-after-all-it-was-you-and-me.html


The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
8/16/2021
When, After All, It Was You and Me: Spreading Blame Where It Belongs for the War in Afghanistan

snip//

You wanted war. You already hated the Taliban for how they were making life a living hell for women because of their bullshit adherence to bullshit Sharia law. You wanted al-Qaeda destroyed because you were told, over and over, that 9/11 changed everything. You wanted blood. And you can sit there and try to say you didn't want this, but, really, c'mon, the best you can do is that sometime five or seven years after the war's start, you finally started to think, "Whoa, this is way fucked up."

Or maybe it was even longer. In June 2009, a Pew Research poll showed that 57% of Americans, including 45% of Democrats, still thought that we should stay in Afghanistan. 76% said that it would be a "major threat" to the U.S. if the Taliban regained control of Afghanistan. By September 2009, the support for the war would finally drop to 50% and it continued downward. The surge in troops that President Obama did (against then Vice President Joe Biden's advice), with the accompanying rise in American casualties in the war, seemed to turn the tide, with support, already dropping, bottoming out for Democrats.

Clearly, if we're judging things by public support, we should have gotten the fuck out of Afghanistan in 2009 and not stayed for another dozen years before facing the inevitable. But the American public bears the burden of fighting this war that was misguided from the start. Americans needed pounds of flesh, needed to get repaid for the murder of Americans with multiple degrees of interest on that debt.

I wish we had been wrong, those of use who opposed the war. I wish we had set up a glorious oasis of democracy and freedom, with schools, with alternate crops for the poppy farmers, with modernization of the nation. Yeah, that's my Western mindset at work, sure, but when it comes to the horror that Afghan women in particular are facing, well, fuck it.

This is a tragedy. It was never not going to be a tragedy. Yes, President Biden was brave to decide this was a mistake and it was time to stop making it, even if the speed at which Afghanistan fell was breathtaking (and truly telling). We should be letting in refugees by the tens of thousands, at least those Afghans who helped our troops during this disaster, if not thousands upon thousands more. We couldn't shoot our way to peace. We poured in money and killed so many people and had so many killed. And still we promised more than we could ever deliver. Let's at least own our role in ruining their lives.

(Note: Of course, the real villains here are the Taliban. Fuck those delusional incel motherfuckers.)

(Note: If you want to know what the Afghans were thinking in the first decade of the war, check out this report.)