Leaving Afghanistan
Plus a question we failed to ask...
Not the first time I’ve mentioned this and unfortunately probably not the last, but in David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest – a book about the origins of the Vietnam War – some character (whose name totally escapes me) said before entering that war we failed to ask a fundamental question:
What do we do if we win?
You invade somebody else’s country and win, how long do you stay? And while you’re trying to figure out how to escape the corner you’ve painted yourself into, who runs the country?
Some military guy (whose name also escapes me, as does the current location of my garage door opener) once said the military is really good at two things:
Killing people
Breaking stuff
And if what you want isn’t on that very short list, maybe you’re talking to the wrong department.
But despite that bit of very good advice we ask military people who aren’t trained for the job to act as policemen, politicians, mediators and whatever else the invaded country needs to continue to exist or maybe we get somebody to pretend to run it for us and we’ve got a pretty good track record of picking people who are hated by their fellow countrymen and/or countrywomen and those puppets get thrown out about half-a-millisecond after we depart or, if they’re really on the ball, half-a-millisecond before we depart.
When the Taliban entered Kabul, President Ashraf Ghani made a run for it and said he did it to prevent “a flood of bloodshed” and I suspect he was mainly thinking of his blood.
Hamid Karzai – a snazzy dresser, but apparently a bit of a crook…which is kind of like saying Pretty Boy Floyd was a bit of a gangster – is now trying to weasel his way back into power and become BFFs with the Taliban, which really solidifies our reputation for hooking up with charlatans who will suck up to anybody in charge whether they’re godless heathens from the West or some Batshit Crazy local boys.
About three minutes of research (which totally over-estimates the amount needed) reveals that Afghanistan is a mess, but give us a break, we only had 20 years to get things straightened out and our country is also a mess that we’ve been working on since 1776.
Now here’s a significant quote I found on the internet:
“The UN Charter is a treaty ratified by the United States and thus part of US law. Under the charter, a country can use armed force against another country only in self-defense or when the Security Council approves. Neither of those conditions was met before the United States invaded Afghanistan. The Taliban did not attack us on 9/11. Nineteen men – 15 from Saudi Arabia – did, and there was no imminent threat that Afghanistan would attack the US or another UN member country. The council did not authorize the United States or any other country to use military force against Afghanistan. The US war in Afghanistan is illegal.”
So basically – if you choose to go down this rabbit hole – we couldn’t attack Saudi Arabia because that’s where we get our oil so we attacked a couple countries we’d been wanting to attack anyway which is pretty much like getting insulted by your boss and deciding to punch out his secretary. (OK, “executive assistant” because “secretary” is now politically incorrect which is another subject for another day.)
Just in case you’re interested and have nothing better to do, here’s a link to an article about the Bush Administration’s justifications for invading Iraq:
You can argue that Biden’s withdrawal was poorly planned or timed or a clusterfuck in general, but according to this Associated Press article, it was the longest war in our history, killed 2,448 U.S. soldiers through this past April, not to mention 47,245 Afghan civilians, will cost $6.5 trillion by 2050 and was never a declared war by U.S. lawmakers which used to be the way we got into wars, but we’ve figured out how to work around that minor flaw in our ability to do dumb stuff whenever the mood strikes us.
https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f
Feel free to disagree
I cannot tell you how many times someone has found out who I am and that I’m the guy that pisses them off every morning and they say something along the lines of, “You know, I don’t always agree with you.”
Which makes me want to ask, “Who do you always agree with?”
People marry other people and buy houses and have kids and grow old together and still disagree about numerous topics every single day. (Like who’s responsible for keeping track of my garage door opener.) So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that you disagree with some cartoonist you haven’t met, much less married. (BTW: If you have someone in your life you never disagree with and his name is Tucker Carlson, you probably need to get out of the house more often.)
If you couldn’t disagree with my cartoons they wouldn’t be opinions, they’d be facts, which – come to think of it – a disturbing number of Americans have no problem disputing because they read something on Facebook or got sketchy medical advice from their next-door neighbor or listen to Tucker Carlson way too much.
Anyway…
We say we want politicians who aren’t spineless and are willing to do what’s right even if it costs them votes, but then get pissed off when a politician does something unpopular and Biden could have kept spending money and killing soldiers and the same shit was going to happen whenever we left, so even if he did this in a messy way I give him credit for saying this crap can’t go on forever just because nobody has the balls to put an end to it.
You can disagree and argue until you’re blue in the face about how we end wars, and we generally do, but maybe we should spend a little more time thinking about how we start wars and ask ourselves an important question:
What do we do if we win?
P.S. Been three weeks since I’ve had to think about this stuff and right now I wish I was on the Northern California coast, sipping a Manhattan, watching the sun go down…or come up (I might be an alcoholic, but I’m a very flexible alcoholic) and I’m guessing pretty much all of you feel the same way.
Politics suck.
The ICU cartoon is sheer brilliance.
If only so many things weren’t sucking simultaneously.