… which kind of sounds like a really dumb knock-off of a Robert Ludlum title.
As with all things, there is the smart way to do a thing… and the Joe Biden way. “Never underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up” is the way the always eloquent Barack Obama put it. Oh and by the way, Biden has only spoken to us once since this all began and he’s answered no questions. Kamala Harris is completely AWOL. This administration is an unmitigated disaster.
As for the Afghans themselves, if somebody trained my dog as well as we “trained” the Afghan Army, I could probably get my money back. Although it’s safe to assume they were trained to operate under U.S. air cover, which was denied to them weeks ago by Biden. So no one should be surprised that they folded like a cheap suit.
The problem is that Biden sees this as a messaging problem and not a humanitarian crisis. He can only see this in terms of how it affects him personally. We know this because the entire disaster stems from his decision to move the pullout date to 9/11 (right in the heart of the Afghan fighting season), which he ONLY did so that he could appear before the country on 9/11 and say “many Presidents have tried to get us out of Afghanistan, but here on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, I am proud to say that I am the President who actually got it done.” And because he reduced Afghanistan, in his mind, to a cap feather, he cannot now see it any other way. The lives of Americans and Afghans are secondary to his panic about what this is doing to his popularity.
I’m building a house in a small town in a Red State… the kind of State that proudly sends its young men and women to fight for their country in numbers disproportionate to the size of the State. In this small town there is a park, and in that park is a memorial to a young man (I believe he was 19) who died in Afghanistan. He was murdered, really, killed by an Afghan Soldier he was training in a “‘Green on Blue” incident.
I didn’t know him, nor do I know his family, but I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately. What do they think of this? What do they think it means about their son’s life and death? I can’t even imagine what must be going through their minds. But I will say this, there are a lot of families in America who would have enthusiastically recommended mililtary service to their sons and daughters who radically changed their minds this past Sunday. That, more than anything, is the real damage Biden has done here. Because there will be another war, and I don’t know who will fight it. It’s certainly not going to be the blueblood kids pursuing their Humanities Degrees at Harvard, and as long as these clowns are running the show, Red State Americans are going to begin saying “thanks, but no thanks.”
The long arduous task of the military over the next 20 years, as it was after Saigon fell in 1975, will be to repair its image and convince America that it is once again worthy of our Sons and Daughters.