The cost of stupidity

After Donald Trump negotiated our unforced surrender in Afghanistan and Joe Biden delayed implementing it a bit and then carried it out, the idiocy of getting out of Afghanistan has been made clear by the attacks at the Kabul airport yesterday, the bloodiest day since 2011 in our longest but least-bloody war.

Former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Leon Panetta put it bluntly: “Now we’re going to have to go back in and get ISIS.”

This isn’t hard. We’ve left twice the troops we’d need in Afghanistan as a permanent garrison in Korea for SEVENTY YEARS. If anything, stopping ISIS and al-Qaeda is even more important to our security. The only thing that has changed is that pulling the rug out from under the Afghan government and driving the Afghan army into despairing dissolution will now make it harder and bloodier to get back to where we were a couple of years ago.

Trump would have ignored reality and claimed that everything was fine and that he’d done the right thing no matter what the consequences turned out to be. We will now see whether Joe Biden suffered a temporary lapse of judgment in following through on the Trump surrender, and will recognize the mistake and do what our national security and common sense requires despite the isolationist mentality that has seized the nation. If not, the crisis of clueless bad judgment we thought had ended with the defeat of Donald Trump may well continue through another adminstration.

If we’d kept the American people better informed about the fact that in the 48 hours preceding yesterday’s attack we’d lost more American lives to COVID-19 than we had in the entire twenty years of the war in Afghanistan, I have a hunch that public opinion might have taken a different turn. If we stopped to reflect on the consequences of having nowhere at all in the region to use as a base for our own operations against al-Qaeda. ISIS, and their Taliban buddies, yesterday’s tragedy, the ongoing agony of the Afghan people, and the self-inflicted body blow we’ve taken not only to our prestige but to our credibility all over the world due to this bi-partisan blunder could have been avoided.

It’s too late now to save the lives of those who have died due to the combined stupidity of the Trump and Biden bugout obsession. But it’s not too late to stop things from getting worse.

Joe Biden needs to do what Donald Trump could never bring himself to do about anything: admit that he was wrong, bite the bullet, accept responsibilty like a man, and protect our country.

ADDENDUM: Apparently that isn’t going to happen. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says that the military advised President Biden to keep 250,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, a number which might have been enough in a support role to prevent the dissolution of the Afghan army and keep the Taliban and al Quaeda out of power. Mr. Biden denies that.

I see no reason for Gen. Miley to lie. Did the president misunderstand the advice he was given? Did it somehow not sink in? Did he forget it somehow? I’d prefer to think that he isn’t simply doing a Trump and substituting a reality he’d prefer for what actually happened. Even if the malicious claims that the Commander-in-Chief is in his dotage are true, a senile Joe Biden is still more competent than Donald Trump was on his best day. But even so, I’m beginning to about how much of an improvement the foreign policy of the new administration is going to be over the comedy act that preceded it. And I really wish that we had a viable alternative.

That’s the really scary part. Since 2016, we haven’t had a realistic and responsible alternative to the Democrats. The Republicans just aren’t a rational option, and I don’t expect them to become one any time soon. And that puts our nation- and the world, which depends on it far more than contemporary isolationists would like to think- in a difficult bind.