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credit: M. Ramirez, Las Vegas Review-Journal; Wackydoodle axes: Will they serve drinks?
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While the Swamp enjoys its usual game of finger pointing after a foreign policy disaster, US Person wants to know how long the Taliban will allow the Kabul airport to operate? They clearly do not want Afghans to leave, taking their skills and treasure with them, yet as long as there is a safe way out, some Afghans will line up to get on board. One lever the US still has over the Taliban is the $7bn in Afghanistan's reserves it hold in its banks. Airports are notoriously easy to cut off because the runways are vulnerable to shelling. The cargo jets (c-17) the US has been using to transport out its nationals and collaborators may be able to take off on bomb damaged strips, but that is a perilous proposition especially when your cargo bay is full of passengers.
The consensus pundits and intelligence officials seem to have reached is that a Taliban victory was inevitable, the only question being how long the government should have held out without direct US military involvement. The former guy negotiated (badly) the withdrawal, a fact conveniently forgotten by professional administration critics; talk is so cheap. Biden is getting blamed for a hasty force extraction. Yes, it could have been planned better, but the government collapsed much more quickly than even the usually overoptimistic CIA expected. Facing a no-win situation, the Afghan national army simply walked away along with its president. Sadly, the same factors--lies, delusions, ignorance, cruelty and greed--that contributed to the Vietnam defeat are present in Afghanistan. The invasion was premised on self-defense from terrorism, so US leaders ignored the Vietnam experience in nation building. Here is the lesson US Person doubts will be taken away from America's twenty-year inhumane attempt to modernize Afghanistan into a liberal democracy: America is not the exceptional nation. Its leaders' messianic obsession with global policing must end, or this nation will destroy itself from within.
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| credit: N. Anderson |
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Reinstate him to the locked ward!
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