Monday, August 16, 2021

An End of an Era in Afghanistan...

A C-17 Globemaster III aircraft carrying 670 refugees prepares to depart from Kabul Airport in Afghanistan...on August 15, 2021.

Considering the fact that I've been blogging about the war on terror ever since the September 11 attacks almost 20 years ago, it was only fitting that I would lend my two cents about the situation that transpired in Afghanistan over the past weekend.

Clearly, what's going on in the Central Asian country is an absolute clusterf*ck. The Afghan people are so traumatized about returning to the authoritarian rule of the Taliban that they're hanging on the sides of U.S. Air Force C-17 cargo planes and plummeting to their deaths after the aircraft took to the sky just to flee from the resurgent group of religious fanatics now in control of Kabul.

And advertisements showing beautiful women in fashionable attire are now being painted over outside of Afghan storefront windows just so the business owners won't incur the wrath of ultra-conservative Taliban officials passing by. So sad.

With that being said, President Biden was absolutely right in withdrawing U.S. military forces from Afghanistan. 20 years and trillions of dollars later, the American-trained and well-equipped Afghan army didn't even care to put up a fight as the Taliban was sweeping across the country over the past few weeks...easily taking control of every city and province along the way.

And former Afghan president Ashraf Ghani quickly departed from Kabul like a coward—even though his fear of more bloodshed was the reason for resigning from his post.

Just as Biden said in a speech he made at the White House today, why should the brave men and woman of the American armed forces continue to risk their lives in Afghanistan if that country's own national army didn't have the guts to do so as well?

According to Biden, the reason why Afghan translators and their families didn't request Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) to the United States much sooner is because they didn't want to leave Afghanistan yet. The Afghan government also didn't want to convey a "crisis of confidence," and the translators had hoped that the U.S. withdrawal would go much smoother than expected. Boy, were they wrong.

Here's hoping that as many Afghan translators as possible will eventually reach safe haven in the United States...even though 20,000 applicants remain in the pipeline hoping to secure an SIV to this great country. Tragically, it's safe to say that a lot of these applicants won't survive long enough to get an SIV or flee Kabul first now that the Taliban is in control.

I plan on voting for Biden again in three years despite this snafu. He was placed in this position thanks to Donald Trump making a deal with the Taliban through the February 2020 Doha Agreement in Qatar. And Trump himself was placed in this position thanks to another incompetent Republican president, George W. Bush, sabotaging the Afghanistan war by focusing his attention on Iraq less than two years after allied forces ousted the Taliban through a relentless air campaign in late 2001.

The bottom line is that America's longest-running war is now over. The United States sadly joins Britain and the former Soviet Union on the list of countries that make Afghanistan the so-called "graveyard of empires." But on the plus side, our men and women in the U.S. military will no longer be placed in harm's way by being deployed to this beleagured, landlocked nation.

And America will soon be commemorating the 20th anniversary of 9/11 knowing that its mastermind, Osama bin Laden, has been dead for more than a decade—which was the whole point of conducting the U.S. military adventure in Afghanistan. That is all.

Advertisements featuring female models are painted over on storefront windows in Kabul, Afghanistan...on August 15, 2021.







Posted by Richard Par at 7:29 PM
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