The Elephant In The Room 🐘

"To talk, as we had to, about the Afghan 'government' was to imply that there was one, when we all knew that what existed in Afghanistan was not something that merited the label 'government.'" https://t.co/VTEtyJmnLX

— George Conway (@gtconway3d) August 22, 2021

Helene Cooper, proving she’s been hanging around the Pentagon too long, and Andrea Mitchell proving she’s just been hanging around too long, period, told Chuck Todd and assembled that Biden is Trump redux (they never mentioned Trump) because Biden thinks he knows more than the generals.

That would be the ones keeping us in Afghanistan for 20 years.  Presumably they wanted another 20, because it's such a pleasant outing for the troops (Vietnam era joke; never mind).

Cooper and Mitchell think Joe Biden, the only President of the United States we have, is too big for his britches, and needs to listen to the generals and SecDef's who tell him we should have stayed put.  Except we had an agreement, and we had a deadline, and we had to go.  Or we could have said our agreements mean nothing (see, e.g., American history and treaties with the native peoples here), and we could have stayed put, risking blood and treasure for....

...what, exactly?  The elephant in the room here is that there never was an Afghan "government," and there never would be.  The only government we even recognize is the one that runs Kabul, and it collapsed like a literal house of cards the moment the U.S. military had drawn down their troops to a level capable of letting us see the bathtub was empty when the water ran out.  The "chaos" in Afghanistan is not because Biden pulled out the military too early; it's because the only force creating the illusion of order (and only in Kabul, mind), was:  the U.S. military.

So why were we there? To make Kabul the 51st state?  To establish a colony?  To prop up a government that existed in the minds of American pundits and generals only?

Nobody wants to talk about the intelligence debacle that didn't see this balloon deflating so rapidly.  Biden may think he's smarter than his generals, but the information his military and intelligence operations were giving him was obviously weapons-grade bullshit.  Ghani fled to UAE before the military could get completely out of the country.  Kharzai is now proclaiming himself the leader of the Afghan people.  The situation on the ground in Afghanistan couldn't be more of a farce if you turned it into a Gilbert & Sullivan production.  It's perfectly clear that we were pouring money and bodies into Afghanistan for 20 years like it was a giant rathole, and we never even started to fill it up and create a stable foundation.

The other canard, touched on by Todd in questioning his "guests," was whether the military was withdrawn "too soon" (Oh, yes, say Cooper and Mitchell!).  Of course, the Afghan government disappeared in a puff of smoke the moment enough of the U.S. military was out of Kabul (realistically; reporting from the bulk of the country was practically non-existent for 20 years).  How much longer would have been enough to prevent Ghani from grabbing the silver and fleeing in the night?  Two months?  Three?  The government was always going to collapse the moment enough of the U.S. military withdrew, and the Americans and Afghans now crowding the air base in panic were always going to wait until it was obvious there was no government in Kabul (much less Afghanistan) to try to flee the country.  We could have done this in May, or in December.  Either way, the "crisis" (or what Todd called "the disaster") was as certain as sunrise to happen.

That, too, is perfectly obvious to everyone but sycophantic "journalists" who are entrenched and embedded with the very institutions they "objectively" report on.

It's not the emperor who's naked this time; it's the courtiers and their heralds.