Afghanistan Was A Bipartisan Disaster, And We Must React Accordingly

There’s no nice way to say this, but somebody has to: There have been a lot of bad reactions on the right to the Afghanistan calamity.

em>(Watch the video for the monologue and an interview with WMAL and The Daily Caller’s Vince Coglianese on the how we can fix our foreign policy.)

The war in Afghanistan is finally at its end. It was a catastrophe and a mess — a mess that some of us saw up close, a mess that some of us are still living through in Kabul — and a mess that cost many lives.

There’s no nice way to say this, but somebody has to: There have been a lot of bad reactions on the right to the Afghan calamity. The great majority of these reactions are simply misguided, but some are flat-out stupid — and a few are truly ghoulish.

What unites all of them is partisanship: The need to hit Democrats, and the Democratic Party, for being the enemy — the reason everything is wrong.

That need is understandable: It’s very difficult to resist that partisan urge when the Democratic Party has politicized everything in daily life, from your church to your bathroom, and from your distant ancestors to the skin color they handed down. But when we gaze out on the ruins of our foreign policy, on the wounded and maimed young men and women growing old around us — and on the graves of the fallen — we need to resist partisanship at all levels.

Why? Because this war — this catastrophe — implicates all parties in Washington.

It started under a Republican who ran as a non-interventionist; it was escalated by a Democrat who beat out Hillary Clinton in part by emphasizing his opposition to wasteful wars abroad. Both those presidents eventually ended up parroting the talking points of pompous, dishonest, and incompetent Ivy League politicians presented to the public as “generals.”

And if we’re honest, President Donald Trump ended up parroting many of those talking points as well. He’s parroting some of them right now.

Trump saw in 2016 how insane America’s endless wars are, but like so many 20th century Americans, great and small, he had a fatal love for the myth of the American general — the Douglas MacArthur, the George S. Patton, the Ulysses S. Grant — never realizing that those men are long gone.

Now, in the last chapter of this 20-year book, a Democrat has forced through a sloppy exit. It was uglier than it needed to be, but it was, mercifully, an end. Now the rush is on to blame him for the entire thing, but we can’t fall for that.

You’ve likely been told about a lot of controversies — things that at first glance fill any American with rage. Some are true, like the surrendering of Bagram, but others, like so much of this war, are missing crucial context.

One example is the list of Americans and green-card holders we handed to the Taliban. That was infuriating, right? Why would we give them such a list? But to quote everyone’s least favorite Democrat, what difference did it make?

The answer is basically none because the Taliban controlled the perimeter of the airport like a nightmare version of the TSA, if there is such a thing. In order to get through that perimeter, American persons needed to show their green card or their American passport. No one else was getting through those lines, and the Taliban were checking the list for us.

Does that sound bad? It is; but it is not made worse by us giving them a cross-reference.

And guess what: They had the information already. They knew who was in country at least as well as the Afghan government knew — and at least as well as the seriously imperfect State Department had communicated to them — because the Taliban had the Afghan government, computers, personnel, and all. At that point, they were (and still are) the Afghan government, so sadly, as one American who’s evacuated dozens of American persons told The Federalist, “the list wasn’t Secret-Squirrel stuff.”

“But now it’s the world’s biggest hostage situation!” Unfortunately, it already was. That ship had sailed; that train had left the station. That government you sacrificed a trillion dollars and 2,300 of your finest fellow citizens propping up? That government fled the country carrying $169 million in cash. (At least they thought to bring their toys with them.)

It was the Taliban’s country, and that gave them power. That is the sad truth about defeat — the bitter reality of losing a war. But it’s better to accept the truth than cause even more harm through denial and misdirected outrage.

All of this was known; all of this had been reported. A lot of people are just angry or misdirected, but some people are lying to you about what happened. They’re lying because they want President Joe Biden to take all the blame for a disaster they did just as much to create. They’re lying because even now, they want to restart a war America was never going to win.

But not everyone is lying. Some mean well. This is a hard one, because any one of us can fall prey to poisonous thoughts if we aren’t vigilant.

Allow me to start with an example. There are a lot of flags in my neighborhood: American flags, Nationals baseball team flags; there’s a Lannister flag from “Game of Thrones,” a few for foreign soccer teams, and one Gov. Ron DeSantis flag (which I love).

More than any of these, there are a lot of rainbow flags — a pennant that keeps getting stranger and stranger. Right now it’s a Black Lives Matter transgender rainbow, and a few really avant garde ones have a symbol for prostitutes too. It’s annoying, but fine — it’s a slice of America.

One day I asked a neighbor, “What do you think about me flying the Vatican flag in June, our only month specifically devoted to a cardinal sin?”

She replied that she thought I ought to fly that flag from time to time and that most people probably wouldn’t recognize it, but before I do anything ask myself, “Where is this coming from? Am I flying our flag out of a Christian spirit? Out of love? Or is it to troll my neighbor?”

I had to think about that. I love the Catholic Church; I love her coat of arms — the triple crown and Peter’s keys to the kingdom; I think it should be represented in Washington; but was that why I was suggesting this? It was a hard question to ask myself. It took looking inward and I didn’t like every answer I found.

Here’s the point: There have been a lot of memorials to our honored dead. They deserve it — “they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old” — and we must ensure that they are not forgotten.

In the last couple weeks, a lot of people put up 13 flags in their yard. It was lovely to see; God bless those men and women. But so help us God, make sure we do this with goodness and with love in our hearts. Did you put out flags when Americans died under Presidents Trump and Bush?

It’s not an inconsequential question: it’s an important one. During the peak of COVID, by RFK stadium (where a good number of people drive by entering Capitol Hill), a city-owned green space was filled with American flags and a counter was put up to number the dead attributed to COVID-19. Was this done to honor Americans who had passed?

We got our answer when they took it down after the election. The answer was no — the people who erected this [quote] “monument” were ghouls, feigning grief for the dead in order to serve based political ends. It reminded me of my old hometown left-wing newspaper, which would print the names and faces of our war dead under President George W. Bush — but dropped the practice not long after he left office.

When we put up flags to honor the dead, we must always ask ourselves why this tragedy is different and what it means to us — and we have to pray on that. We need to always think deeply when we remember them or we do them no service.

Since the deadly attack on Kabul airport, we’ve been flooded with pictures and videos of grieving parents whose young children were killed like so many others in that Godforsaken country. Immediately, and over and over again, I’ve heard good people I know planning political ads around these messages — ads designed to hurt their political opponents, and help their political friends.

It’s gruesome, and I’ve told them that. There might be a place for it, but search yourselves: Do we honor their memory in this way? It’s an honest question — and there are different right answers — but if you think we do so by just throwing out the ruling party and electing the one we like better, I’ve got 20 years of failure to show you.

America will only survive by being an actual country. Its history, its traditions, its institutions, and its heroes can’t simply be the squabbling ground for political factions. That’s one reason the War in Afghanistan dragged on so disastrously for so long: Many people knew it was a sham and a mess, but very few people wanted to take the political hit for ending it.

Don’t let the awful end of our latest war just be another political news cycle proving that this party is smart and good and the other is stupid and bad. Turn it in a positive direction: Demand better policies, better priorities, and better people from both parties going forward. Don’t see this as a way to win the next election — see it as a way to have a better country 10, 20, 100 years from now.

Do we want to honor those brave men and women who laid down their lives, or who came home bearing the scars of that war, both physical and mental? We all know some of those people. They’re having a very difficult time right now.

It’s a hard time for this country. If we want to honor them — if we want to show them their sacrifice was worth a solitary damn to us — we’ll do this right.

This is our chance to right America’s twisted foreign policy. We can’t miss it.

There were different errors of different significance made by GWBush, Obama, Trump and Biden, with some errors corrected and some allowed to languish and continue, initially and in succeeding administrations.

The one giant error was the elephant that was always in the room - Pakistan, and which no administration was willing to really tackle in all its significance. Even as late as July 2020 that elephant was present, and it was mentioned in the July 23rd phone conversation between Biden and the President of Afghanistan. The Afghan president told Biden, directly, that “we are under a massive invasion” and “it has direct support in operations and material from Pakistan” and “includes 10 to 15 thousand foreign terrorists, predominately from Pakistan”. Treacherous Biden had ZERO to say about that in response to the Afghan President, and our “media” as been as silent about it as Biden.

Ignoring that elephant was a major error in every administration, and yet Obama was the first to have direct cause to expose it and alter U.S. course about it when Osama Bin Laden was found hiding in plain sight right near the Pakistan military compound in Abbottabad. The deep state has continued to cover for Pakistan on that score.

Obama was also the first to have the possibility of U.S. withdrawal, at a time when the Taliban was at their lowest point and the Afghan government the most secure since the U.S. invasion. And that was in 2014. Obama blew past that possibility just as in opposite fashion he drew down the U.S. mission in Iraq too quickly, which was readily taken advantage of by ISIS - which at one point controlled more of Iraq than the Iraqi government.

To me Trump erred in making a private U.S.-Taliban deal that excluded the participation of the Afghan government. Nothing said to the Afghan soldiers in the field that they could not depend on their own leaders more than seeing their leaders could not depend on the U.S. to even include them in talks with the Taliban. THAT appeared mto the Afghan government soldiers to say that “the war” was a “U.S.-Taliban” contest and not even about them; though 70,000 of them had died believing it was about them.

But contrary to all Biden’s lies he was under no legal or moral obligation to follow Trump’s private deal with the Taliban, nor to set or keep to any timeline he did not himself want to do.

Biden has also hidden well, via his media friends, that it was all his own withdrawal plan, not Trump’s and not what the Taliban had agreed to. Trumps plan was conditional on success of peace negotiations between the Taliban and the Afghan government, secession of Taliban offensives, benchmarks on those things and our timeline dependent on them, with Trump’s May 2021 date not written in stone if the conditions agreed to with the Taliban were not met. By early 2020 we had all of 2,500 troops left in Afghanistan, had not had a troop death there in nearly a year, and our missions were not “boots” on the ground but in air support and intelligence, both humit and electronic. 1. We could have continued that significant role, which was not at fantastic cost, as long as we chose and 2. when we pulled out of that role closing Bagram it pulled the rug out from under the Afghan troops in the field. [We had tried and failed to get Erdogan’s Turkey, as a NATO partner, to continue the NATO/U.S. role at Bagram, but Erdogan said no.]

The media has also hidden how Biden’s withdrawal was contrary to conditions laid down in the Defense Authorization Act that Congress passed, over Trump’s veto, in December 2020. That law contained an amendment that put restrictions and conditions on any U.S. President’s decision to withdraw any U.S. Troops from Germany, South Korea or Afghanistan. Biden did not even attempt to meet the legal requirements of that law in his Afghan withdrawal operations. And of course, though she could very well do it, Nancy Pelosi is not going to run an impeachment panel against Biden for his disregard of a law Pelosi herself backed in the House.

There is plenty of blame to go around, but at the end of the day, the final errors are all Biden’s and both fact and fate place him and his administration with the legacy of the U.S. Afghan exit, no matter who did what before Biden.

Biden, like Obama and other U.S. President’s set their sites too much on their own political legacy interests than on the best interests of the U.S.

Harry Truman did not let his own political legacy interests get in the way of ending the war in the Pacific. He took the burdensome step of using a nuclear first strike in order to avoid a massive U.S.-Japan ground war across all of Japan, with massive troop and civilian collateral damages along with it.

Biden merely surrendered Afghanistan to the Taliban, when (a) doing so was not necessary and (b) will not end the Islamist Jihadist war in the Middle East, from the Taliban or any other quarter, regardless of all pretenses to the contrary.

There are no good Islamic Jihadists, no matter how much Biden thinks the U.S. should now partner with the Taliban vis-a-vis ISIS. The real U.S. interest is in letting ISIS and the Taliban have their own contests with each other. Maybe then enough Afghans will tire of both groups, seeing as how they are two peas in a pod.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.