An Ignominious End
Just because you want to stop fighting does not mean your enemy wants to stop.
I don't blame Bush for starting the Afghan war. It was necessary. Even Obama classified it as the "good war".
I blame the political class in Washington for stripping the will to win, thinking it could be "managed", turning the war into a political weapon, those in the Obama administration who traded terrorists for traitors, and in compliance with the Powell Doctrine (you broke it, you bought it), I do blame Biden for the ignominious, disorganized, cowardly withdrawal.
And it was a withdrawal - not an end - just because you want to stop fighting does not mean your enemy wants to stop.
20 years of death, destruction and trillions of dollars spent to end up right where we started - except for one thing, we set the table for China to take over. China doesn't care what the Taliban does to the people, they just want the rare earth minerals and the Taliban wants the money from them - a marriage made in Hell.
Biden, Harris and their administration are responsible for the moral debacle that now comes to the men who believed in our promises, the women who will now be raped, subjugated and turned into ignorant slaves, and the children who have only known American backed freedom, only to have it now stripped from their grasp.
And do not be fooled, America lost more than a war. We lost air bases close to our enemies, China and Iran. We lost intelligence networks, we lost the ability to project force in the area.
But perhaps the most tragic lesson from Afghanistan is one we should take to heart because it applies to us.
It is this:
A nation of people who won't fight for themselves is a people without a nation.
That has always been true.
Fighting for people who won't fight for themselves is always a losing proposition.
America gave to the Afghani's every single modern, advanced tool they needed to fight the Taliban except the will and courage to fight.
This is what happens to a people who become totally dependent on a sugar daddy to take care of them. You better have a plan for when your sugar daddy tires of you and moves on to a younger, prettier sugar baby or you beg your sugar daddy to stay.
The Afghani government knew America would leave one day and yet they were not prepared to stand on their own. An Afghani friend once repeated to me what I had already heard - "You Americans may have the watches, but the Taliban has the time."
To our soldiers who served, sacrificed and died, your service was not in vain - you served America, not these idiots in Washington.
Any failure is ours as citizens for not electing competent, committed, clear-eyed, wise leaders who valued and protected you from idiotic initiatives that never had anything to do with making you the best, most efficient, most disciplined, deadliest and strongest fighting force in the world.
We owed you better. We owed ourselves better.
Your mission should have been to get in, kill terrorists and break things, and get out. Instead we tried to turn you into social workers. Your mission became "Defund the Police" before it was cool to say that out loud.
Biden, Austin and Milley should go. The Directors of the DIA and the CIA should go.
The end of Afghanistan shows a preview of one possible future for America if we don't stop depending on feckless leadership and learn to fight for ourselves.
A nation of people who won't fight for themselves is no nation at all.
I personally know four young men that never returned from Afghanistan alive. Almost two dozen, including my oldest Son who were irrevocably changed by injuries suffered there. Two weeks before my oldest's LAVE was blown up by a command det IED, he called and told me, "We know who the bad guys are, but they won't let us eliminate them until they've already done their worst."
His platoon suffered 19 wound, 4 killed in 12 days. Two of the dead and 4 of the wounded, gave me a very personal tour of the LAV's they lived, ate, slept and died in. They did me the honor of letting me make chili and cornbread at Camp Pendleton in February, 2010. 6 months later, they suffered the worst two week period in the history of the 1st LAR. They'd had better success, though not without a few casualties two years previously in Al Anbar, Iraq.
Blaming Joe Biden for this is akin to blaming a car for the deaths of those killed in a collision with a reckless driver. Biden isn't running or calling the shots on anything. He's not mentally fit to make any decisions. All of the suffering and heartache we've experienced as a nation since January 19th of 2021, can be laid at the feet of the Soetero wunderkind, that brought us the 8 disastrous years, from a guy I truly believe was born in Hawaii, but if he shares Obama DNS, I'll eat my damn hat.
We're being played on a scale I never thought possible and maybe that's why it's happening, but eventually people are going to wake up to the warm liquid running down the back of their necks is not a warm summer rain, but the piss ofr those who believe themselves untouchable. It won't end well for anyone.