John Colson: We all deserve the blame, not just Joe Biden

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I have read, watched, listened to and reflected on what is going on in Afghanistan, and the brutishness that President Joe Biden has overcome with his handling of the United States’ withdrawal from its longest war in the history of nations. , and I say it crystallized my feelings on the hypocrisy and magical thinking that has taken hold of our body politic lately.

For those who have lived in caves or under rocks for the past two weeks, Biden has taken it upon himself to carry out a process initiated by the previous president, whose name will not be spoken but whose initials are DJT, and it was entirely a thankless chore but very necessary.

And this chore is to withdraw our troops from a totally hopeless war launched by a Republican President, George W. Bush, in early 2002, following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 which killed nearly 3,000 civilians in New York, Washington, DC and rural Pennsylvania.

Bush, unfortunately, took our nation’s attention away from Afghanistan after we overthrew its Taliban leadership, who provided a safe haven for the Al Qaeda terrorist group that planned and carried out the 9/11 attacks. Bush has shown his true purpose in terms of the Middle East war, fabricating false claims that one of the architects of the 9/11 attacks was Saddam Hussein, the ruler of Iraq, and that Hussein had a stockpile of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. and was ready for a new attack on the United States

So instead of trying to consolidate our victory in Afghanistan and put our resources to work to help the Afghans shape a democratic style government (never a guaranteed result, I must note), we have spent years, lives and money to beat Iraq just because Bush felt his father, Pres. George HW Bush, was sort of humiliated during the First Iraq War in the 1990s.

The result, in Afghanistan at least, was that the Taliban were able to withdraw into the hinterland and prepare for their return to power. Which only took them about a decade and a half, as they designed what some observers called a shadow government that controlled about two-thirds of the Afghan countryside even as US and NATO forces supported a severely corrupt and crippled puppet government in Kabul, the capital, and other urban centers.

Around 2014, many U.S. military commanders were admitting that we were never going to come out on top in Afghanistan, although it took us five more years of bloodshed, bombs, and chaos to admit it.

It was the 45th president, DJT, who made the deal to withdraw from Afghanistan, and it was a poorly designed deal. He left the elected Afghan government in the cold while promising extremist Taliban leaders to step down on a certain date, and eliciting fragile promises of peaceful transition from the Taliban in return.

Then, when DJT was whipped by Biden at the polls in 2020, he ran into the 46th President, Biden, to either bring the Taliban back to the table to forge a better deal, or simply stick to the timetable and framework of the agreement. was given to him when he moved to the White House. He chose, rightly in my eyes, to do the latter, and is now reaping the ugly whirlwind that inevitably followed our withdrawal.

As Biden has said on several occasions, there were no good options available to him. Oh, he may have done things a little differently over the past few months, like changing the evacuation schedules of our Afghan allies to save them from some assassination by the vengeful Taliban, but the point is, this withdrawal would have been chaotic anyway.

As many commentators, such as Mike Littwin of the Colorado Sun online newspaper have pointed out, you do not wage war for two decades in one of the poorest countries on the planet, supporting the country’s economy and its communities. social structures even if you spend billions. to train and equip the motley army of nations, then expect to withdraw suddenly and easily once you realize you really can’t win this one.

Republicans, understandably, are racking up the abuses against Biden, blaming him for everything that went wrong in the withdrawal, when they know as well as anyone that there is a lot of blame to be shed on both sides, in the army and in the sadly nonchalant voting attitudes and habits of our national electorate. We all share a bit of responsibility here.

And, as opinion writer Jennifer Rubin recently noted in the Washington Post, Biden decided it was up to him to take the blame for it all, simply because he promised he would take us out. of this eternal war and keep his promise.

The insistence (by Biden’s harshest critics) that there must have been a painless way is a fable too insistent on cultivating, Rubin maintained, pointing his accusing polemical finger at the media, Congress and three administrations. presidential elections for being wrong.

The loss of life in the withdrawal process, she said, is heartbreaking.

But, she concluded in general, with mainstream media obsessed with partisan bickering (over who is to blame) and Americans refusing to deal with the consequences of their own choices, it makes one pessimistic about the issue. self-government.

I totally agree and hope you do too.

Email to [email protected].

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