A US and UK Media which has utterly failed in covering Afghanistan for 20 years - started by cheerleading Bush/Cheney - is now peaking as they push GOP propaganda media releases and revisionism
Biden can't be attacked for 'failure' then utterly ignored for the remarkable change and reorganization which occurred in days.
I’ve been exchanging comments on a couple pro though reasonably progressive military sites on Facebook with regards to Afghanistan over the past week and want to share some of that writing.
Besides here in the US, the UK media to include The Economist has continued to be vociferous in its condemnation of the US and, especially, Joe Biden without recognizing what is historically happening and not taking any responsibility of it’s own.
This was, of course, after Tony Blair blithely followed Bush/Cheney into Afghanistan then a criminal war in Iraq thereafter which then immediately started to drain and minimize the US and allied military already in Afghanistan.
In fact, Blair wrote a commentary just over this weekend where he also piled on the US and Biden - still - crying it was the US who should not have left Afghanistan. Blair used the already worn argument that since the smaller US/allied presence had generally curtailed the Taliban, that there was no reason why the mission should not have been extended indefinitely. In his comments, we see the exact illogic which helped Blair drive the UK military into Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq at the time.
The US military should have moved out of Afghanistan within the first few years at the most after it had chased out the then Taliban government while then working to strengthen the new secular Afghan government. The continued presence of US/allied military and the blood of US/allied military wound up serving only as an extended band aid which allowed flagrant corruption by successive Afghan governments that permeated throughout everything connected to include the incipient and growing Afghan military.
Of the very many things the US and affiliated allies have never understood is that Afghanistan’s politics are not like that of the West. Instead of directing loyalty towards centralized government, the strongest affiliations of a majority of Afghans are more tribal with a primary focus on their respective communities and villages.
They have historically even been known to ‘switch sides’ as one or another predominates in their immediate region. When the shit hit the proverbial fan over the past month or so, and after dying by the tens of thousands in their fight with the Taliban, members of the Afghan military decided that they were no longer going to die to prop up the deeply corrupt government of President Mohammad Ashraf Ghani with its non stop feuding over political positions and corruption done with total indifference to Afghanistan. Ghani then fled the country under a secrecy which even caught his primary allies in the Afghan government off guard even as they were attempting negotiations with the Taliban
The numbers of commenters across social media who blindly parroted the pile on Biden and the US rhetoric of both the US and UK media even astounded me. So many appeared to be writing from a wholly ahistorical point of view while simply ignoring the complex politics of Afghanistan and the ‘never ending war’ started and stroked by the GOP but, certainly, also maintained by both the Clinton and Obama presidencies.
What I’ve copied (and edited) below was one of my longer responses to a couple of commenters from the UK who, sadly, kept parroting the truly bizarre, disappointing and wholly inaccurate reporting in The Economist most of which was paralleled in US print and broadcast media from the New York Times to CNN
Among other mistaken references was the focus that the ‘cowardly’ US had simply ‘ran out’ of Afghanistan as allied military (i.e., the UK) covered. That just watching coverage from Kabul and the addition of about 6000 US military who, after a chaotic first couple days, reorganized quite well under Joe Biden’s leadership didn’t seem to faze many or change the absurdity of media rhetoric despite the reality of facts on the ground.
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The UK only escalated their involvement in the evacuation of Kabul only after the Americans committed large numbers of troops. The UK was also more than welcome to make up for the loss of a few thousand US military and continue to remain in Afghanistan but chose not to do that either.
So many continue to deeply confuse the United States with Trump and his privately owned GOP. Trump and his Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, engaged in the horrific Afghan government-free faux negotiations with the Taliban where he had Abdul Ghani Baradar, a co-founder of the Taliban, freed from a Pakistani to participate.
Despite the repeated inaccuracy that the current withdrawal was facilitated by Biden’s ‘negotiations with the Taliban,’ the reality is that Biden had absolutely nothing to do with that element whatsoever. The present Afghanistan wholly and only belongs to Trump and Pompeo
Trump had Baradar released from a Pakistani jail at his personal request just to participate in his faux ‘negotiations’ in Doha, Qatar. It was during Pompeo's contact with the Taliban in Doha, which explicitly excluded ANY participation from either the Afghan government or US allies in Afghanistan, that Trump through Pompeo simply handed Afghanistan back to the Taliban regardless of the known and horrific consequences in the false belief that recording a foreign policy 'victory' would help his dying presidential campaign. It didn’t.
The US has hardly ‘ran in panic’ and I still can barely conceive how individuals are writing that which is so obviously inaccurate. In fact, the US now has close to 6,000 military in Kabul who have started to increasingly leave the perimeter of the airport to support American and other evacuees.
Biden just ordered several US commercial aircraft companies to add about 18 planes total to aid in the evacuation. Biden has made it clear that moving out from the confines of the Kabul airport will be increasing in order to rescue as many stranded Americans, allies and Afghan allies as absolutely possible. I’ve been among those strongly advocating such a move which has started but also appears to be soon increasing.
It must be recognized that Trump was ready to pull everything and everybody out by May solely to make the Taliban happy which would have been an unmitigated homicidal catastrophe. That Biden changed the date to August has made all the difference even though the initial days were certainly chaotic.
But the American withdrawal from and still ongoing actively assisted evacuation of so many from Kabul has now far improved and Biden is a primary reason. And despite the nonsensical screaming in the US and UK media to the contrary, America's 'international standing' will be fine.
Most have long agreed that America's primary military involvement in Afghanistan needed to have ended a long time ago. Biden Is now accomplishing that but is still being targeted for political garbage by the dishonest and the hypocrites.
Two helicopters rescued about 170 Americans from a hotel outside the perimeter of the airport just a couple days ago. US military have been shown in photographs creating corridors outside the airport for to evacuees passage into the airport free of Taliban interference. More is coming.
Well over 20,000 people have been evacuated just since July and, I believe, about 9,000 during the past week plus. This while the UK foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, stayed on vacation and refused to even take phone calls as the Taliban entered Kabul. He has since claimed he received ‘permission’ from Boris Johnson to not interrupt his vacation even as chaos ensued in Afghanistan.
It must be repeated, again, that the groundwork for this catastrophe was laid by the still unindicted war criminals, Bush and Cheney, who started the Afghanistan war but immediately lost interest transferring soldiers to their criminal war in Iraq. And doing so still did not faze their many cheerleaders in the US and UK media. In doing so, they sold out Afghanistan, our Afghan allies, the US military and our allies. And the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, was more than happy to actively participate in Afghanistan with the Americans.
For the record, the reality is that Europe still can’t do a great deal without the US who has not been ‘diminished.’ The idea of becoming more independent to include specific investment in a strong EU military would be an excellent idea. But what is the possibility of getting the fractured nations of the EU to agree to a common, unified force? Good luck on that…
Biden, Trump and the missing big picture in Afghanistan coverage