Plenty of "cooks" in this foul Afghan brew, including the media looking for a scapegoat to cover its own complicity

 

Fox News is exclaiming that the Biden presidency is “teetering in the brink.” Most on the extreme right or otherwise have no shred of credibility (like Nikki Haley) have called for Joe Biden’s impeachment or resignation. Others say look, they impeached Trump over a “mere” phone call, neglecting to mention that Republicans started this business by impeaching Bill Clinton over an oral service from a willing intern. The media on most sides in attacking Biden has been giddily taking the side of the architects of failure in Afghanistan. Didn’t former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, also a critic of Biden, claim in 2011 and 2012 that Afghanistan was “safe and secure” and that its government was in full control? Well, if that is true, then something wrong had to have happened between then and now; it couldn’t have just all collapsed in a couple weeks or days all by its lonesome.

It was going to be messy getting out, and if people think that it is “messy” now, it would have been even worse if Trump was still president; with Jewish Nazi Stephen Miller calling the shots, it would have been a humanitarian disaster that U.S. probably could never have recovered its international “reputation” from. Miller insisted to fellow white nationalist Laura Ingraham that it would be a “disaster” to allow Afghan refugees into this country. Miller claimed that “resettling in America is not about solving a humanitarian crisis; it’s about accomplishing an ideological objective: to change America.” In ignoring the fact of how many Afghans put their lives in danger supporting U.S. objectives, people like Miller are completely transparent about what they are: white supremacists—and that is the new “normal” in this country

To underscore the point, Matt Zeller of the organization No One Left Behind told CNN that Miller should be seen as complicit in war crimes in the deaths of thousands of people. When he confronted Miller about the failure of granting visas to Afghan civilians who worked with us, Miller complained that they were all just Islamic terrorists. Miller clearly represents the worst of us, and all Republicans have had to run on for years is stoking fear of any variety of “brown-skinned” people, or at least those from Latin America or the Middle East. European allies who haven’t actually been very helpful in managing the chaos on the ground while leaving out concepts like “relativity” and “context” should just shut up in its criticisms of Biden.

More to the point, Marine Lt. Col. Stuart Scheller was relieved of his duties after posting on social media an attack on military leaders on the ground for bungling the withdrawal and failing to take “ownership” of the chaos in Kabul. A former Mike Pence adviser, James Golby, stated in The Atlantic that “Perhaps by design, perhaps by incompetence, perhaps out of sheer spite or arrogance, Trump created the circumstances for another Bay of Pigs, Black Hawk Down, or Benghazi.” This was back in November. When you heard Trump praising the Taliban as "good fighters," it was his way of "admitting" the failure of his and Mike Pompeo's "peace plan."

The media has shown little interest in illuminating the facts of the slow grind to failure in Afghanistan, yet when this failure ended in the spectacular visuals in Kabul, it had the gall to blame it all on Biden. The media failed because it was too eager to trust the “newsmakers” telling them that everything was just great for years, and because it was eager to believe the lies, it failed the American public, and chose to blame its failure on the most convenient scapegoat, Biden; it couldn’t admit it was complicit in the failure in Afghanistan.

The truth, of course, was that George Bush had promised that Afghanistan would be converted into a “typical” nation state run as a “Western” style democracy, and the media fell for it. The problem was that Bush did not commit the resources either militarily or domestically to achieve that end. After initially having the Taliban and Al-Qaeda on the run—and at one point rejected a Taliban offer to “surrender”—the Bush administration allowed the Taliban to regroup with the help of our “friend,” Pakistan.

With failure imminent, the military assured Barack Obama that a major surge in troops—to over 100,000—would end the war; it in fact only resulted in stalemate in which victory was an illusion. Moreover, then Afghan president Hamid Karzai willfully undermined the sustainability of his government by refusing to sign a security agreement with the Obama administration, which included assistance in paying the salaries of Afghan security forces. Biden observed all of this and learned a lesson. The media and know-it-all pundits did not.

It was all bound to failure. The mountainous terrain, which the British and the Russians learned, was difficult to attack and hold, and U.S. forces did little except to occupy “strategic” points. The British called Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires” after the disastrous withdrawal from Kabul to the British garrison in Jalalabad in 1842, in which only one person, a badly injured surgeon, out of 16,000 soldiers and camp followers (including family members) actually made it to alive. The British invaded Afghanistan again in 1878, but they had learned enough to stay only long enough to achieve a limited goal (to curb Russian influence) and withdrew after two years.

The tragic airport bombing that resulted in a dozen American military and scores of civilians dead underlines the cost of 20 years of failure, and how ultimately the country never could have been “managed.” The Taliban has its own problems now with ISIS-K jihadists, who claim the Taliban mortal enemies because it has supposedly abandoned worldwide jihad, for mere Afghan “nationalism.” And if another less Islamic extremist “northern alliance” takes root, one can imagine what real “chaos” looks like.

And let’s not forget the past history of this country. Remember the Beirut Marine barracks bombings that killed 241 Americans and 58 French soldiers in 1983?

 

The Marines were unprepared despite an intelligence warning three days prior that an attack of some kind on the barracks was imminent. Guards at the entry gates would watch the bomber roar past them helplessly because they had been told not to load magazines into their rifles. After all, they were only there as “peacekeepers” and to oversee the withdrawal of foreign fighters who had been driven out of most of Lebanon during the Israeli invasion. Marine commanders excused their inaction by claiming that the warning of an attack was “imprecise”—that there was no “shred of evidence” that a “prudent” commander would have acted on. And nobody claimed that Ronald Reagan’s presidency was “teetering on the brink”; we lived in a different time then.

And then there was 9-11. Just as nobody wanted to believe that Reagan knew about the secret sale of weapons to Iran—a treasonous act given that Iran was the paymaster for the Beirut bombing—hardly anyone was willing to believe that George Bush was aware of intelligence reports that warned of the potential for aircraft being weaponized for attacks on U.S. targets. Not even knowledge of the foiled Bojinka Plot, conceived by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and intended to bomb 11 aircraft, kill as many as 4,000 people, and send a plane into the CIA headquarters in Virginia in 1995 was reason enough to suspect such a plot was afoot. In fact the sheikh wasn’t done yet: he would be the accused “mastermind” behind the 9-11 attacks, just “altering” the original plan a bit. 

Beginning in March 2001, the Bush administration had received many warnings about the potential for such an attack by Al-Qaeda, from Italian, Jordanian, Egyptian, and UK intelligence services. A month before the attack Israeli intelligence provided the names of 19 terrorists in the U.S. plotting a major attack soon. In early September, the Egyptians again warned the Bush administration that a major attack on U.S. soil was imminent. The FBI had received reports from at least one flight school concerning the suspicious intent by four Middle Eastern “students” who only wanted to learn to fly and not land an airliner. The CIA tried to warn Bush and Condoleezza Rice that the country needed to go on a “war footing” right “now,” but no one was taking it seriously. Cofer Black, then chief of counterterrorism at the CIA, slammed his fist on a table in attempt to knock sense into the heads of Bush officials about the seriousness of the threat.

But nobody was listening, because of a complete lack of imagination and the arrogance in refusing to give credence to the competence of “towelheads” to conduct such an attack—or perhaps that Bush was willing to allow what he thought would be a “minor” attack with “acceptable” casualties that would be sufficient cover to launch an invasion not necessarily in Afghanistan, but in Iraq. Given what actually happened, is it any wonder about that look of “oh no” on Bush’s face when he was told about the attack in that classroom? But again, nobody wanted to believe that this country was “unprepared” for 9-11 even though there was  foreknowledge that something like this was about to happen.

And the media was treating Bush like a “hero” instead of claiming his presidency was “teetering on the brink,” and he should not be held responsible for the death of 3,000 people and be impeached or forced to resign. So eager was it to whitewash Bush, the 9-11 Commission refused to include in its report that fateful July White House meeting with Black.

There were a lot of “cooks” in this foul Afghan brew, and they are all piling on Biden out of pure convenience—the media especially, which save for the Washington Post’s “Afghanistan Papers” expose, has been complicit in not questioning why this country was in Afghanistan for 20 years and still the Taliban was far from subdued, and that the Afghan government still only controlled major cities at best. Or why the Afghan military and police were just taking a paycheck and mailing it in, ready to run as soon as they had to fight on their own. Is that Biden’s fault after being in office just seven months? No, it is the fault of anyone who thought we would have any more success in that country than the British or the Russians did.