Scenes at the Kabul international airport showing
the practical impossibility of quickly bringing everybody home safe are
unwatchable for millions of Americans back in the homeland. But all they can do
is bewilderingly trash a popular president
they just installed eight months ago The
Yankee psyche just couldn’t deal with helplessness and impotence, twin
realities it is now facing with the incredible resurrection of the Taliban.
This motley bunch of turbaned Afghan yokels were
at one point considered a spent force, a Dark Age purveyor of religious
barbarism, vanguarded by a primitive militia that couldn’t possibly bring Uncle
Sam to his knees militarily. But that is precisely what the Taliban did. What’s
more, they did not even do it Rambo-style but just using nothing more than overgrown beards,
piercing dagger looks from deep-set eyes and a shrill voice shrieking “Allah hu akhbar!” all day.
The prospect of 15,000 American civilians trapped
inside Afghanistan is a nightmare equal to 300 times that faced by Jimmy Carter
in 1979. During his watch, just fifty-two US nationals were held for 444 days by Iranian militants in the captured US
Embassy in Teheran. That happened before there was internet and social media.
Most of their days in captivity were shrouded in utter obscurity because media
couldn’t cover their daily plight.
Poor Joe Biden—today these 15,000 stranded Americans are
streaming live pictures of the mayhem on Facebook and YouTube to every
smartphone in the hands of anxious American voters. The
panic and anxiety they are creating is making it an impossible situation for
the Whitehouse to handle, public relations-wise.
Even truth and total candor are not helping the US President
in his messaging to his constituents, as well as to his global audience of
shell-shocked allies. He scored
practically no points for his self-deprecating “The buck stops with me.” Even saying “I stand squarely behind my decision to withdraw” sounds like a
self-obvious roll call of only who’s got his back in this developing debacle.
I’m not an apologist for Joe Biden but he’s really getting
the short end of the stick here. During the election campaign, Trump-weary liberals
touted Joe Biden as the opposite of his predecessor’s buffoonery. His vast
political experience and “been-there-done-that” credentials promised relief
from the loud, proud, arrogant and ignorant incompetence of Donald Trump.
That Joe Biden choir has turned their backs on him,
practically abandoning him to face the wrath of the voters now that he is
having to deal with a political crisis of Donald Trump’s making. What happened
to their faith on the guy? How quickly Americans have forgotten that only one
Christmas ago, it was Donald Trump who was preparing to host Taliban leaders in
Camp David to set up a scheme for a US withdrawal. Trump attempted to do that
without informing allies, all he was salivating for was the sensational specter
of him announcing that he had put an end to the war in Afghanistan just by his
vaunted “art of the deal.”
The problem is the deal involved the US vowing to pull out
14,000 “boots on the ground” in exchange for a Taliban commitment not to harbor
terrorists—which is a revealing snapshot of the shallowness, if not abject
naivete, of Donald Trump. The US jumped into Afghanistan after 9/11 because it
suspected that the Afghan government was harboring the Taliban which it labeled
as a terrorist organization. Now Donald Trump would ask the terrorist
organization not to harbor terrorists? In the scale of world class stupidity,
that ranks way up there with asking the goat to tend the cabbage patch.
Joe Biden’s critics are quick to berate him about channeling
Donald Trump’s “America First” nonsense for ignoring intelligence that
suggested the fall of Afghanistan could unravel quicker than conventionally
estimated. Why did Joe Biden “unilaterally” decide to pull out before obtaining
the consensus of its allies? America,
you’re not paying attention. The British left seven years ago, followed in
their heels by the French. Joe Biden painfully admits there was no good time to
leave, only a best time not to stay. In reality, it would have taken months, if
not years, to completely uproot the American footprint from Afghanistan in
stress-free repatriation even if the Taliban had not overtaken the capital. The
fear is not about the backlash of unilateralism.
Neither was the fear about the logistical nightmare of evacuation,
but the spook scenario about any failure of that effort. These Americans left behind enemy lines, as
it were, would be subject to unthinkable atrocities reminiscent of Somalia,
Libya and Iran—supposedly because these are regimes steeped in human rights
violations and had not a bone of civility in their bodies. At least, that’s the
mainstream media’s characterization of the Taliban, consistent with the primitive
Islamic type that inhabits the western consciousness.
Of course, this type
attribution is never applied by the same media on the crown prince of Saudi
Arabia—or upon the whole house of Saud, in fact—no matter if it deals with a
perceived enemy by chopping up his body into a hundred parts and scattering
them all over parts unknown. True, the Taliban suppresses women’s rights but
even much worse do Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Pakistan and India. Yet US
foreign policy looks the other way on them.
So all these frantic fulminations in the mouth about leaving
no one behind in Kabul is just so much smoke and fury signifying nothing. It’s bravado taking over reality. I thought it
was a pragmatic announcement made by the US State Department that they cannot
guarantee they can bring out all US citizens from Afghanistan in time. Ah, but
the Yankee body politic would have none of that. It’s just like that US Olympic men’s
basketball “Dream Team” that have been inoculated with the tunnel vision
mission never to concede a game.
So instead, Joe Biden and his team have to perpetrate the
illusion that the US remains in control. They are securing the Kabul
international airport, throwing an impregnable perimeter of armor around it,
rushing an armada of warships to the nearest coastline with planes and helicopters
ready to scramble an airlift rescue mission at a moment’s notice.
So why don’t they do it already?
The answer is subtly obvious, to use an oxymoron. The US is not in control, the Taliban is.
There can be no massive rescue airlift mission because the 15,000 stranded
Americans are not in one place. They are scattered every which nook and
corner of Kabul and assembling them at the airport will accomplish nothing but concentrate
the point of constriction should the Taliban really decide to hold back
everybody. The Taliban militia have
taken over the Afghan armed forces, which means they have artillery now. Just a
few hundred well-placed shells lobbed at that runway will pockmark it useless
for landing or launching aircraft.
There’s only one way for Joe Biden—indeed, for the United
States of America—to proceed, and that is to recognize the Taliban
government and invite it to the dinner table of international diplomatic
legation. Demonizing it and calling it a brutal regime—even if accurate—doesn’t
alter the situation on the ground.
Afghan women will return to oppression, to be sure. The only
way that can change is for Afghan mothers to start raising their Afghan boys to
respect Afghan girls. Change will evolve over many generations and cannot be
accomplished by schooling a nation in western core values overnight.
I don’t know who even came up with that phrase “nation-building”
as the central organizing principle of US foreign intervention. But it failed
in Vietnam as miserably as in Afghanistan. But if you listen to the hawks in mainstream
US media today, they sound exactly like their peers in the post-Vietnam war
era. Fast forward forty-six years and
look at Vietnam now. The best thing that ever happened to Captain America and
Vietnam Rose was disentangling from their hypocritical copulation. They should
have done it much sooner, and that is the long and short of Joe Biden’s
argument today for early withdrawal. Funny but the only people who don’t seem
to get it are the hypocrites who voted for him.
Philosopher George Santayana couldn’t be more right: “Those
who refuse to learn their lessons from the errors of history are doomed to
repeat them.” © 2021 Joel R. Dizon
Joel R. Dizon - PARABLES AND REASON
No comments:
Post a Comment