Today is the 43rd anniversary of Elvis Presley’s death. The last person to see him alive outside of his inner circle was the security guard of a building where he’d just got some dental work done. This was around midnight, Memphis-time. Around the same time, astronomers Ohio State monitoring a radio telescope aimed at the constellation Sagittarius noticed a blast of radio waves that had all the expected hallmarks of being sent by an extraterrestrial source. In recent years, doubt has been cast over the possibility of an intelligent source for The Wow! Signal, but as far as I know, no one has been able to disprove that it was in fact a signal for Elvis to return to the deep reaches of Space. I’m just saying.
And so much for whimsy. Things are still in motion, but we’ve all had a good 24-hours to process President Joe Biden’s order to pull U.S. forces – both military and diplomatic – out of Afghanistan after 20 years of pretending to fight the War on Terror or stabilize the government or whatever the hell we thought we were doing. Let’s start with what we do know. For the most part, we are out of there. There’s still something like 14,000 troops over there to facilitate the evacuation, which could have gone smoother.
Despite promises it wouldn’t be like the last days in Saigon, pictures surfaced of similar helicopters taking off from crowds looking for an in and there are reports of videos showing people losing their grip on and falling from airplanes. No, I am not going to link to those videos as it’s ghastly. There are also reports of Taliban forces blocking off exit routes for refugees and something like seven people have died. The group’s new public face, one Abdul Ghani Baradar, says he and his group plans “no revenge” and pledges as peacefully as possible. It should be noted that plenty of folks in Afghanistan are extremely cool with the U.S. finally bugging out and leaving them the hell alone.
But of course, we Americans really don’t care about what the Afghan people think and really haven’t given them that much thought in the past 15 years. Here in the U.S. of good ol’ A., the reaction is mixed but predictable. Democrats are cool with, Republicans are madder than wet hens, and public reaction is fuzzy. For the most part, we’re all glad we’re not going to spend the 22nd year in Afghanistan to accomplish not much of nothing, but it might could’ve been done better. Anytime you have this sort of situation, you have refugees and a whole lot of folks who worked with the U.S. military figure it’s best for them to split.
Surprising actually no one at all, the same Republicans raging about abandoning our Afghan allies are pushing back like bastards on the idea of maybe letting them resettle here. A lot of this was put into gear in February 2020 when Trump cut a deal with the Taliban – without the input of then-Afghan President Ashraf Ghani, mind – which would get a ceasefire for the release of 5,000 militants being held in Guantanamo Bay, including Baradar allegedly. He initially planned to remove troops by Christmas but kicked it down the road to this past May once he lost the election. This lead to a surge in Taliban forces early this year and delegitimization of the current government.
Once Biden got into the White House, Congressional GOP was hot about him keeping that May deadline. These same people are saying the dumbest shit about the actual withdrawal this weekend, naturally. Florida lich Rick Scott says this is reason enough to invoke the 25th Amendment while Lauren Boebert outright said that the Taliban were the only ones “building back.” Man, I’m so old that I remember when disagreeing with George W. Bush’s education agenda meant you were “objectively pro-terrorism.”
After what some consider too long a silence, Biden addressed the nation today to take responsibility for the pullout and say he didn’t regret it not one bit. He did admit that they didn’t expect the Taliban to have taken over so completely so quickly, but noted that the Afghan army didn’t seem inclined to do much about it. He noted that talks with the then-government this summer went nowhere and President Ghani split the first chance he got.
As we said, the public’s reaction is still too fuzzy to judge. A poll last week showed 70% of the country in favor of the pullout while a poll today showed the same amount of folks thought we screwed the pooch a bit on this. Credit where credit is due, Trump got the ball rolling and Biden agreed to eat this particular shit sandwich. Given the way American politics works, the latter will probably catch more shit than the former, at least until the public moves on in a couple of months.
We discussed this yesterday, but it bears repeating. There was no good out for us in Afghanistan, and the Beltway media that completely blew their cred 20 years ago about going into Afghanistan really want us to take them seriously when they say we should stay longer. There was no point in going there and the Beltway media did all they could to obfuscate that as much as possible. It was pretty pathetic. And as far as the government goes, there is plenty of blame to spread around. Not just Trump and Biden, Bush got us into this mess and Barack Obama punted when it came to him. There ain’t nobody with clean hands on this one.
This could’ve been done differently. I haven’t seen anything that says the U.S. has been working towards getting everyone out since the February 2020 agreement. I don’t know if taking a couple more months would’ve helped too much but Biden wouldn’t have gotten credit if he waited two or three years as some claimed. Again, the past four presidents didn’t want to catch this particular hell and Biden took it on. That’s something.
But we shouldn’t have been there, especially not for 20 years. Had we actually accomplished anything, the Taliban wouldn’t have retaken power as quickly as they did. One hopes this mess will teach us to stay out of this sort of situation in the future, but we didn’t learn anything from Saigon so who knows.
Dear Y'all 