I cannot believe the leaders of the Democratic party have not been able to adequately and, more importantly, succinctly explain what is happening in Afghanistan to the American people in away that prevents the GOP and seemingly 90% of the beltway press from declaring this Biden’s big scandal as if the press learned nothing from Benghazi or Anthony Weiner’s laptop released into the wilds by FBI Director Comey days before the election.
Imagine losing 2,352 American lives, spending over twenty years of the military’s and our time not to mention over a trillion dollars in national treasure to round up tens of thousands of the leaders of the Taliban and its associates learned in the fine arts of munitions, communications, bomb making, clandestine shipping and now in sending the message to the local populace to get into line quick because America is abandoning them sooner rather than later and the proof was coming from those freed prisoners themselves. Prisoners, at great expense and effort, America kept locked away from the Afghani people for decades to allow them to try to be a nation formed on federalist and democratic ideals including such basic things as allowing women the right to learn how to read or to speak their mind without being beaten for it. Then Trump mercurially decides he needs another electoral talking point and the new point he’s decided to focus upon for a few minutes is that he and he alone can bring home the troops from Afghanistan.
If you want a good Sunday laugh, here’s a quick compilation from Vice about the 24 things nobody is better at than Trump is
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YA631bMT9g8
Team Trump’s version of peace talks ensues with the then decaying and thinned out staff of the Taliban. After all Trump is the world’s best negotiator so he then uses his genius to negotiate the release of almost 6,000 of the most battle hardened Taliban fighters and their leaders including some of the founders of the Taliban itself. By August of 2020 over 5,500 of those prisoners had been released. Miscreants the Afghanis prayed were gone from their lives. Instead these thugs formed the vanguard announcing that the Taliban was back and it was all thanks to the stupidity of Donald Trump. All for talking point, Trump was trashing the deaths 2,352 American Soldiers and 47,245 citizens of Afghanistan, over a trillion dollars of US treasure and two decades of America’s military and our time and in return he secured for America the grand victory and privilege of releasing thousands of terrorists into Afghanistan. Now that’s the Art of the Deal!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doha_Agreement_(2020)#Prisoner_swap_negotiations
Why would Trump care what that this would do to the Afghanis? To his twisted mind it was a stereotypical worthless shit hole country he could get nothing from and full of his worst imperialistic cultural stereotypes of the diverse Afghani people. As far as he was concerned either way he won his mission. He had a new talking point: he was bringing home the troops ending America’s longest active war and all the chaos that that would spark was designed to happen after the November 2021 election but the prisoners were released far before that election. So if he had won he could redeclare war on Afghanistan while acting all shocked that releasing the worst of the worst of the Taliban back into Afghanistan could result in such chaos. And if he lost he could blame it all on Joe Biden even though all of this happened under his riddled with holes and paper thin aegis.
Some how the mainstream and especially the beltway press has forgotten these basic facts. No matter how slowly, how perfect our withdrawal from Afghanistan could be its government had already been taken back over by the Taliban. It started with small villages where it took little effort to convince thugs chaffing under America’s western mores to switch sides when time came. From there they worked their way up in size. It was why they could toppled the Afghanistan government so quickly and once in charge of regions one of the first things they did was release all the Taliban fighters being held prisoner swelling their ranks by tens of thousands. They had basically already staged the coup before Biden was sworn in. It also did not help one bit that not even one Afghani unit, that we spent near a hundred billion upon training and arming them, fought back or that that the Afghani president fled in a helicopter so jammed packed with American dollars, estimated around $170,000,000, that he had to leave millions behind on the runway. But this is all somehow Joe Biden’s fault because his hope for a smooth pullout did not manifest.
I can understand why the GOP is doing this, it’s what they do. But the withdrawal could be near frictionless and they’d be wailing about what a disaster it was. What I don’t understand is how much the national press is joining with them. You would have thought things like Benghazi or Comey tossing Anthony Weiner’s laptop into the election days away from it would have taught them how not to be used like pawns. And now because Biden gave the generic, “We expect things to go smoothly,” types of lines this is now magically somehow all his fault because they conveniently cannot see any of the facts connected to this story save that Biden did hope for a smooth transfer of power. This would be dumb as the press blaming what happened on 1/6 on Biden and not Trump. It’s almost as if the press has the long term memory of somebody that eats multiple bags of weed candy a day. That or there is a massive epidemic of coconuts falling onto the heads of journalists.
And yet we somehow do not have a coordinated response to their coordinated Benghazing of this issue. Do better Democrats in leadership positions. Do better.
And folks, it’s time to be your drunk uncle that sends his asinine rants that you politely or not so politely put up with and send this forward to as many people as feasible. We cannot have Biden’s popularity permanently dragged down by a Benghazi nonevent!
tl;dr: Trump released almost 6,000 of the worst Taliban leaders, fighters and criminals by August 2020. Those are the people that frightened the Afghani populace into compliance. No matter what Biden predicted about the transfer of power changes the facts that Trump pooped the bed on this one but is proudly screeching it’s all Biden’s fault.
