17 April 2021 — 1443 mdt

Biden makes right decision on Afghanistan

President Biden is bringing home from Afghanistan, an Islamic country no Western nation has conquered, America’s sons and daughters — all of them — and by 11 September. It’s the right decision, long overdue. We’ve been there far too long for any good we’ve been doing.

We began this adventure with good intentions and justifiable national security concerns. A month after Al Qaeda terrorists crashed jumbo jetliners into the Pentagon and New York’s twin trade towers, killing 3,000, American forces entered Afghanistan in what should have been a raid in force. Our objectives: destroy the Al Qaeda training camps where 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden was hiding, and punish the Taliban, the cruel and reactionary Islamic fundamentalists protecting Bin Laden.

We blew terrorist camps and their inhabitants to Kingdom Come. We also mistook weddings for terrorist assemblages, doing apart with death young couples before they could exchange their vows. We installed a puppet government led by Hamid Karzai, who was no more corrupt than most Afghani leaders, that sort of controlled Kabul, and pretended to control Kandahar, Mazar-i-Sharif, Herat, and the rest of the countryside. Karzai, who wore beautiful robes, was more the mayor of Kabul than the top dog of the “nation.”

But we didn’t get Bin Laden right away. He escaped to Pakistan, where we killed him a decade later.

That accomplished, we should have withdrawn. There was nothing more we could have accomplished. Islamic Afghanistan always has been, and always will be, a brigand society, more a collection of warlord fiefdoms than a nation controlled by a strong and honest central government. It is not a place where a government and culture based on Judeo-Christian values, Enlightenment derived political experience, and the English language, can be imposted at the point of a gun or purchased with gluts of money. Trying to do so was a fool’s errand. As long as it clings to a reactionary and cruel version of Islam, and it may for centuries, it always will be a terrible place to live, especially for women.

Explaining why he decided to withdraw all of our forces from Afghanistan, President Biden said:

Biden rejected his generals’ advice to leave in Afghanistan a small force of commandos and unconventional warfare specialists. A historical parallel may be French President Charles de Gaulle’s decision to end the Algerian rebellion by withdrawing from Algeria despite his military’s objections. Sometimes political leaders must end wars by summarily ordering their generals to bring their armies home. Not all Presidents have the spine to do that. Biden does.

Afghanistan grinds up and spits out invaders. The Soviet Union learned that the hard way in the late 20th Century. So, a century earlier, did the British, whose experience led Rudyard Kipling to close his The Young British Soldier with these verses: