Everyone with a pulse and interest in this country should be aware of the disaster that has unfolded in Afghanistan over the past week. The U.S. supported government collapsed in record speed, allowing the terrorist group, the Taliban, to regain control of the country with disastrous consequences:
Thousands of American civilians are trapped behind Taliban road blockades with no way to get to the Kabul airport which is now the only way to get out of the country, leaving their lives at the mercy of some of the worst tyrants ever.
Already there are news reports of American civilians being stopped and beaten on the streets as they try to get to the airport.
The Taliban are going house to house to look for foreigners and those Afghan citizens that helped the Americans during our stay in the country, with news reports coming out that those folks are being killed on the spot by the Taliban.
Defeated terrorist groups, al Qaeda and ISIS, are regrouping in the country with likely dire and fatal consequences for the rest of the world quite soon.
Billions of dollars of high tech military equipment has fallen into the hands of the Taliban that will obviously be used for nefarious purposes down the road, either against other Afghan citizens or other countries’ citizens.
Women and girls are already suffering under the Taliban with reports of women being accosted or, in at least one case, shot down in the street for not wearing a burqa in public.
What a mess and disaster (in fact, “disaster” is the exact word used by a CNN reporter on site, which is extraordinary since CNN is not prone to call it like it is when it applies to a Democrat like Biden.) And the incompetence of the Biden administration is much too great to go into detail today:
Biden says the Taliban are freely letting Americans go to the airport for evacuation but then someone in his administration said, about ten minutes later, that is not the case.
Biden says he will not withdraw our military forces until every American is evacuated but at about the same time his Defense Department is saying that is not the case.
Biden says the Taliban are not harming American civilians but news reports claim that Americans are being beaten on the streets.
Again, we could go on for days regarding the completely inept and fatal plans and actions of the Biden administration regarding the failure of protecting Americans in the country. It is simple logic in a military crisis that the order of action is to first evacuate civilians, the next act is to remove or destroy military equipment and then the military evacuates itself. Biden got the whole thing ass backwards, withdrawing American armed forces first and then everything fell apart, civilian endangerment and military equipment not destroyed.
We will get into his disastrous handling of the whole affair in future posts. But today, let’s do a little history lesson and review how the American political class, and the U.S. military and Federal government bureaucracy it is responsible for, led us down a twenty year rat hole that has left us worse off than when we began:
Recall that George Bush ordered military operations into Afghanistan with the sole purpose of finding and killing Osama Bin Laden, the mastermind for the 9-11 attacks that killed almost 3,000 Americans.
The secondary objective was to destroy the Taliban, the terrorist group that had protected Bin Laden and the group that was running the country.
But even after Bin Laden was hunted down and killed in Pakistan and the Taliban were removed from power, the U.S. military presence continued in Afghanistan.
According to Brown University’s study of the twenty year debacle that has occurred, the American taxpayer paid out about one TRILLION dollars for the American presence in the country, thousands of American soldiers were killed and wounded, and hundreds of thousands Afghan civilians were killed.
And where do we stand today:
The Taliban are back in control of the country and appear to be just as ruthless, violent, and deadly as they were twenty years ago.
The Taliban actually control more of the country now than they did twenty years ago, back when there was a pretty robust counter Taliban faction in the country.
The Taliban, courtesy of the American taxpayer, are now much better armed than they were twenty years ago.
The Taliban now have potentially thousands of American civilian hostages, something they did not have twenty years ago.
While Biden absolutely butchered the withdrawal from the country, the entire American DC political class shares responsibility for twenty years of wasted wealth, wasted lives, and wasted opportunities. How many homeless Americans could have been sheltered with that TRILLION dollars over the past twenty years? How many hungry American families could have been fed with that TRILLION dollars over the past twenty years? How many drug addicted Americans could have been treated with that TRILLION dollars for their addiction over the past twenty years? How many bridges, roads, and other infrastructure could have been fixed with that TRILLION dollars over the past twenty years?
Any member of Congress who has been in their Congressional seat over the past twenty years is responsible for the currently unfolding disaster today in Afghanistan and the wasted resources spent in vain over the past twenty years. Every President every Vice President, every Defense Secretary, every Secretary of State, every member of the intelligence community that worked on this effort over the past twenty years is guilty of wasteful spending, neglect, failure, the deaths of American service people, and quite possibly the deaths of the thousands of Americans currently trapped behind Taliban blockades.
Not a single one of them had the insights, the guts, the courage, or the desire to see the waste and deaths end. While they lived the good life in DC, while they enjoyed the perks of office, while many of them enriched themselves beyond what they could have reasonably gathered in wealth, given their Congressional salaries, a TRILLION dollars were being wasted in Afghanistan, thousands of Americans were being killed, wounded, and maimed, and the Taliban were continuing to function.
Yes, Biden failed on a historical basis getting us out of Afghanistan with incompetence and ineptness that is hard to believe. But there are hundreds of people in Washington that did little to avoid the crises we are facing today, the potential harm that 10,000 or more U.S. citizens face today, more than three times the number of Americans that died on 9-11, the very reason we jumped into Afghanistan.
Twenty years later, a TRILLION dollars later, thousands of deaths later, and the American political class accomplished nothing except death and waste. We are right back where we were twenty years ago. There are no other examples of political class waste and deaths that come to mind in the history of this country. Every member of Congress, if they had any integrity, would resign their seats today. They do not deserve the honor of serving this country and its citizens, given their failure in Afghanistan.
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