The Rude Pundit: Afghanistan Done (Part 2 of A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)

[babylonsister]

https://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2021/08/afghanistan-done-part-2-of-country-on.html


The Rude Pundit
Proudly lowering the level of political discourse
8/31/2021
Afghanistan Done (Part 2 of A Country on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown)

snip//

The problem, of course, is that the withdrawal wasn't a catastrophe. It simply wasn't. Yes, there were tragedies large and small, but the airlift of 120,000 people, mostly Afghans, was something of a miracle. It exceeded even the most optimistic predictions about the evacuation, and it made all the naysayers seem like damn fools.

According to so many who understand Afghanistan far more than I do, the end of the war was what it was always going to be: the second the U.S. started withdrawing in earnest, shit was going to go nuts. There was no subtle way to do it. Chaos was going to happen. How could it not? The entire 20-year boondoggle had been a waste of time, lives, and cash, a payoff to military contractors and another woeful experiment in attempting to cram the round peg of democracy into the square hole of another nation and pretend that the stench of colonialism wasn't behind it. There was no way that it all wasn't going to collapse. Nation-building is a Jenga game on a wobbly table on the best days.

Instead of understanding this, what we have gotten, from the right, center, and moderate left, is an outcry, about the withdrawal as a betrayal of American values, about how Biden isn't fit to be president, about how we have some kind of obligation to stay forever in a country that, truly, doesn't mean dick to us. Yes, what's going to happen to women there is awful. But what's happening to women in a fuckton of places is awful. You wanna bomb Saudi Arabia? What makes Afghanistan so fucking special? Because a guy we wanted dead hid there 20 years ago? Foreign policy is about shitty choices. But too many in Congress and in the media are invested in making this whole withdrawal effort seem wrong for reasons that they can barely describe beyond the idea that we should just keep doing what we've been doing. It's ludicrous.

And, as Biden put it forcefully today, the rational choice right now is to get the fuck out of Afghanistan. He's right that it's idiotic to keep putting money and lives into an effort just because we can. Goddamn, we haven't fought a war worth fighting in my entire life, and in the post-Vietnam era, the idea that it took 20 years to come to the same conclusion as we did in Vietnam is depressing beyond words. In many ways, Biden's speech was pro-military and pro-veteran. He was saying that he's not going to send them into places for bullshit reasons. And give the man points for consistency. He's been wanting to be out of Afghanistan for at least a dozen years now.

One other thing that Biden is doing is saying that the U.S. will abide by its agreements, unlike Donald Trump who shitcanned the Iraq nuclear weapons deal and the Paris Climate Accord. With a strengthened Taliban in the wake of Trump's deal with them (helped by 5000 Taliban prisoners released as part of the agreement), the options were to abide by the deal and leave or to go full-on aggressive war, with all the civilian casualties and misery that would cause, as well as the increased US casualties and exploding cost. At least that latter path is foreclosed. Hopefully for good. It's over. It's really goddamn over.

But, hey take comfort, war-humpers. We're probably still gonna drone missile the fuck out of people living in stone huts in some godforsaken rural area of Afghanistan because freedom. My dad would advocate nuking them, but, as I said, he was a bit of a one-strategy guy.

[2naSalit]

1. Aside from the war profiteering...

The additional intent was to get our hands on their mineral resources for tech. And the military intent was also to blockade China from gaining access to these mineral reserves.

It's still all about the Benjamines.

[Moebym]

2. Rude Pundit

Has a way with words.

[gratuitous]

3. And if the mission has drifted to nation building

There's only about a billion better ways to do that then sending in the military.

A few years ago, a Facebook friend (career military) posted an article by a military writer about why the United States uses the military for so many non-military objectives. It basically boiled down to "the military is what we fund." It was the only government program that gets adequate (even excessive), dependable funding from Congress. As such, the U.S. turns to the military to carry out all kinds of non-military tasks. Nearly 20 years of military action in Afghanistan accomplished roughly jack/squat because it wasn't a military operation with a military objective.

I'll leave aside the screamingly obvious question why we do that, except to say that the "right" people make a boatload of money contracting for the military.