The race is on to blame Biden for the dramatic fall of Saigon…er…Kabul over the weekend. Politicos who’ve been most responsible for the 20 year disaster continuing are now pointing fingers elsewhere. The truth is there is plenty of blame to go around…but will we finally learn the lessons? Also today, new threats according to Homeland Security…you’ll never guess what they are? On today’s Ron Paul Liberty Report:
Reprinted from The Ron Paul Institute for Peace & Prosperity.
I think Trump and Biden should share the blame. And for punishment we should have a parade in their honor.
You mean we should have a parade in their dishonor.
For ending a war? When I said “blame” I meant credit in a sarcastic way, since that was in the title of the article. Nothing but praise should be heaped on them for finally ending the war.
The same story the World over : it is always POLITICIANS who start Wars !!
I think the entire argument about “blame” is misplaced. Instead of talking about “blame” we should be talking about “causes.” What caused this moment to happen? Well, in my view, it was the fact that the US had a completely unrealistic objective in the first place (transforming Afghanistan into a stable, friendly liberal democracy akin to Germany) and the fact that the US backed a government that had no legitimacy among the Afghan population writ large. The second problem is related to the first: the objective of turning Afghanistan into a stable liberal democracy was unrealistic because the population of that country is deeply divided along ethnic and linguistic lines and does not have a very well-developed sense of national identity. Ironically, the Taliban retaking power might help them promote a version of Afghan national identity based on the “Graveyard of Empires” narrative of modern Afghan history.
Of course, everyone in the military-industrial-NGO complex got their hands in the trough too, bilking the federal government (aka you and I via our tax money) for billions of dollars. The Kabul government did much the same, as evidenced by the videos that Taliban fighters are now posting online of the decadent palaces of Afghan government officials. Ex-President Ashraf Ghani was reportedly on the first plane out of the country, along with suitcases full of cash. It is little wonder that the Afghan army laid down their arms without fighting against the Taliban, because the soldiers didn’t believe the regime was worth defending.
Of course, the military bureaucracy was horribly complicit in lying about the state of the Afghan government throughout the whole ordeal. Much like Robert McNamara used cherry-picked statistical data to paint an unrealistically optimistic picture of the America’s “progress” in the Vietnam War, the military used exaggerated, manipulated, and outright false data to consistently suggest that the Afghan state was “improving” or “turning the corner” or other vague platitudes. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan said that the army constantly shifted the goalposts by reducing the statistical thresholds for “progress” on all kinds of key metrics like army recruitment, and when they weren’t able to shift the goalposts anymore, the army simply classified the data. High-ranking officers presented BS data to their bosses because they were concerned with advancing their own careers rather than objectively assessing the situation; lower ranking officers learned that telling their bosses what they wanted to hear would get them promoted while telling them the truth would get them in trouble. Hence optimistic projections of the Kabul government’s “progress” were based on lies that nobody had any incentive to correct.
I start with “cause” rather than “blame” because when we start with “blame” then we just figure out what person or institution we don’t like and reason backwards. I don’t “blame” anyone for being unable to achieve an impossible goal (though I suppose I blame people for deluding themselves about whether they were getting closer to that goal.)
American military and political officials also willfully failed to understand the history and the culture of Afghanistan. They tended to see things from the perspective of Kabul and had virtually no understanding of how rural Afghans felt about the Kabul regime, including whether they felt any sense of identification with it at all. I would be surprised if any American general or journalists could give the names of specific leaders and political parties in Afghanistan in the post-WWII period (hint: Afghanistan had a Shah, then a couple of socialist governments, then a warlord period, and then the Taliban in 1996). It is bad enough that we invaded a country with a modern history that we do not understand; it is inexcusable that 20 years after the fact, our key decision makers still didn’t think they needed to know it.
After the Bay of Pigs, JFK famously said “victory has a thousand fathers while failure is an orphan.” This sounds nice, but it’s the wrong mindset. In reality, failure has a thousand fathers as well. If it has one central cause, it’s the fact that we had an unrealistic goal in the first place.
Blame Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell, Obama, Biden, Trump, Pence, Harris, and every single member of congress that voted to go in, voted to stay, voted to increase troop funding, voted to increase any spending in the country, and every member of the military who willingly enlisted, willingly re-enlisted, and happily waged this senseless war of aggression, and every member of the CIA, Xe, Haliburton, and others that profited from the war, the opium/heroin trade, etc. But instead of just blaming them, put them all on trial for war crimes.
It is a good thing Biden decided to withdraw from Afghanistan. If he were more honest, he would have voted against that war and all other wars including the one in Libya and would not have been Obama’s VP.
Viet Nam, Afghanistan, Korea were never declared wars by our Congress they were police actions., or I like to call them money wars for the Military complex? The United States hasn’t won anything since ww 11. We have to stop being policemen the world over now. Take care of our back yard should be number one on everyone’s list. I have to thank President Trump for starting the ball rolling to get out of Afghanistan & I honestly don’t think the Taliban would of behaved like this under Trump because they knew what he would do, but Biden they knew he was a weak. They watch TV just like the rest of the world , they saw how he was behaving??????? I do feel bad for President Biden and wouldn’t wish his sickness on anyone!
I’m a words-in-a-row person and skipped the video, so this comment is strictly about the headline.
The answer obviously “no”, but Biden did manage to muck up what the saker site said should have been seen as a victory for him.
Biden forfeits his Afghan victory by defending his Deep State advisors
Maybe he felt he had to do this, for if he properly dumped on the Deep State’s work in Afghanistan, how could he possibly defend staying in Iraq and Syria? Or his putzing around with Venezuela, Cuba, and Ukraine.
Didn’t Trump also have plans to end the war in Afghanistan but the Democrats stood in his way? Bush and Obama can share the blame for continuing the war in Afghanistan that Obama called “The Good War”.