Some Random Thoughts on the Afghanistan Fiasco

Some Random thoughts on the Afghanistan Fiasco

August 22, 2021

It's important to remember that everything Trump did regarding Afghanistan, the Taliban, and every area of policy both foreign and domestic, was a function of one thing. His desperate desire to get reelected in order to keep the Presidency as his shield from impending criminal and civil charges.

He needed the agreement with Taliban because he wanted the  Nobel Peace Prize to help his reelection, and to try to outdo Obama. End of story.  That's why he wanted a big showy Peace conference at Camp David to announce it on 9-11 two years ago. That's why he deployed his "amateur hour"  Son-in-law to run around the UAE and Israel for months cooking up Peace accords between Israel and Arab Gulf States which they weren't even in conflict with. It was all for show, all for reelection, and as with everything he did, all about him. 

The question we should be asking is "where was the failure in judgment which caused Biden to honor the agreements made by this charlatan, who was known by our military command and intelligence community to have been a Russian Intelligence asset"? Why carry out the policy of someone who never read a Presidential Daily Briefing? Why would they say that the "US honors its agreements" when the person making them was denied access to CIA intelligence because they were afraid he would leak it to his buddy Putin, who was arming the Taliban at the time. Was this Joe Biden's call, or was there someone in his National Security team with a political agenda who set Biden up?

 Yes, it was an intelligence failure, and worse. It is a strategic humiliation which benefits only the Imperial geostrategic goals of the resurgent Russian Empire. We need to know if someone on Biden's team set him up for this catastrophe and why,  because this is what will bring us a GOP House and Senate and fuel Trump's return to power, as well as jeopardize the efforts to bring the US back onto the world stage as a reliable strategic partner.

What could Biden have done differently, one might ask. Start with those things which were the biggest mistakes.

1. Continuing attempts to contour his policies to the bankrupt political strategy of "Triangulation" with the Trump dominated GOP, in the name of unity and bipartisanship. This is at the core of the administration's failure to get the full infrastructure budget, get rid of the racist filibuster, defend voting rights, use the full powers of the Federal government to force the compliance of the States to contain the Pandemic, and to prosecute Trump, his family, his allies, and the Sedition Caucus for the fascist Coup attempt on January 6th. 

2. Ask yourselves how our continued immoral strategic partnership with the hostile Saudi Monarchy, the actual perpetrators of 9-11 which started all of this,  which funds jihadist terrorism globally and violates the rights of women and minorities is related to our strategic disorientation in Afghanistan. In other words, you cannot look at the policy on Afghanistan in isolation. It has to be seen in context of a pattern of politically driven compromise with a destructive ideological lunacy, and a political "Fifth Column" which intends to sabotage everything in its drive to return to power. 

3.  The policy announced by Trump, continued by Biden was conducted almost unilaterally, without input from our NATO and other allies. Remember that Trump as a Putin agent was out to destroy NATO and isolate the US in an "America First" posture. Why would Biden stick with this orientation and freeze out the Europeans, thereby failing to seek their help in extricating ourselves under a negotiated International framework. There was a pathway for allowing an orderly evacuation and transition to the Taliban government which was ignored for reasons still unknown.  Economic inducements could have been the "carrot" in bringing about a new agreement and new timetable, with a more gradual phase out. Europe could have helped with this.

4. Did the White House political advisors play an inordinate role in shaping our withdrawal? Remember that the projected date is September 11 to end US presence, the 20th Anniversary. Have we considered that this date was entirely arbitrary, symbolic, and politically driven to shape the coming election cycle? That would in part explain the harried and myopic failure to anticipate the speed of the Afghan government collapse.

5. Did Biden and his advisors see this "symbolic date" for withdrawal as an opportunity to "take the wind out of the sails" of Trump's fascist militias, comprised heavily of burned out Afghanistan and Iraq Veterans? Did the administration want the credit for ending the "forever wars" which Trump used to fuel the anti-government rage of his proto-fascist base? If so, then they have badly miscalculated. This will make them incalculably worse, as it will resonate with them in similar fashion as did Hitler's claim that the German Army was "stabbed in the back" by the "treasonous" German government.  The Veterans will be told that their sacrifice was for nothing because of Biden's failure. 

6. And just a general question and observation. Biden, who is well informed and well intentioned has been reading extensively about the Presidency of Franklin Roosevelt, with respect to his economic program. I think he might want to look at FDR's wartime leadership and plans for the postwar period and learn some things from that. Think about FDR's conflict with Wall Street, and his Machiavellian maneuvering of the shaky wartime alliance with Churchill, Stalin, Chiang-Kai Shek. And ask, did Roosevelt ever get played? Did he fail to anticipate strategic events? Did he compromise with the Nation's enemies, foreign and domestic? If he did make that kind of mistake, it was only once,, and he never did it again. (Excepting his role at Yalta, where he was so sick as to be only half present in mind) Repeating one's mistakes is far more catastrophic when a world leader does it for the same reasons.

7. Consider that the US is now so politically divided because of Trump and his attempts to bring fascism to America, that we are susceptible to knee-jerk partisanship and being manipulated by pundits to play the blame game, and simply try to defend Democratic policies and administrations in an attempt to refute the Right Wing's talking points. This is a conceptual error, which causes us to look at policies and events as single issues in isolation, and to play tit for tat fact checking games which rarely get at the issues of substance which caused the crisis to begin with. Are we being conditioned to thinking in a certain way which limits our purview? Sometimes critical thinking begins with asking those questions which no one else is asking, and then to see where it leads. On that note, what's for breakfast on this beautiful Sunday morning? 😉