Rant #2,714: Goodbye

We had to get our troops out of Afghanistan, and while the visuals don’t look too good, the time had come.
 
We have still not learned that we cannot police the world, and that we should not be fighting other peoples’ wars, wars that they should be fighting themselves.
 
We can support them in these conflicts, but we shouldn’t be actually fighting their wars for them, and consequently losing our war fighters to death and despair.
 
The visuals are bad though, what we see on the evening news about the aftermath of us pulling out, where the Taliban look like the savages that they are in taking back town after town in record time.
 
The visuals are also bad when we see the video from the airport, where we are trying to get out as many people as possible, and people hanging onto planes on the outside as they take off.
 
If this all reminds us of what happened in Vietnam when we finally pulled our service people out of there, that is a valid comparison, and it makes us look like we lost that war and this war too.
 
It is also a slap in the face to the thousands of troops who were deployed there to assist the Afghans fighting the Taliban, and it is certainly a slap in the face to those who made the ultimate sacrifice there.
 
And much like what happened in Vietnam, their deaths might have been in vain during a war that we had no right to be in.
 
Our forces did everything they could there to keep the Taliban at bay. We taught the Afghans what to do and how to handle these terrorists, but what evidently happened is that the Afghans leaned too heavily on us, and as was to be expected, we simply took the lead because the Afghans were totally incompetent.
 
So when we legan to pull out, they simply did not know what to do.
 
This reflected their leadership, with their own president fleeing the country to protect himself while his fellow countrymen were getting pummeled.
 
Don’t tell me he didn’t see the writing on the wall for his country with his own people defending it.
 
And with no fighting backbone, the Taliban cut through it, province by province, like a hot knife through butter.
 
We are still airlifting people out of there, mainly people who worked for the U.S. there in a variety of capacities, because if they stay in their home country, and it is found out that they worked for the U.S., well, you can only imagine what would happen to them.
 
Look, we got in there because of 9-11, an act that was orchestrated by the Taliban and their followers around the world, including right here in our own country.
 
We wanted payback, and for 20 years, we did just that, but again, this was not our war to fight, we were only there to support the Afghan people and their own war fighters, not lead the way as we eventually did because the circumstances forced us to do just that.
 
President Biden explained himself yesterday in a difficult-to-watch press conference. Yes, he did not want to pass on this conflict to another president, we all get that, but his stumbles and falls during the speech clearly demonstrated that his speech was fully prepared, and I wonder who really made the decision to pull out now.
 
And he made a strategic blunder beforehand, actually telling the world that we would pull our troops out by the anniversary of the terrorist attack on our country on September 11.
 
Bly doing this, he gave lead time to the Taliban to prepare for the U.S. pullout, ramp up their forces for the end of our participation, and start to steamroll over the country quickly as they knew that the Afghans would and could not continue the onslaught against them like we could and did while we were there.
 
That was a tremendous mistake on his part, and while he apologized for such mistakes, it was simply a bad call by the president. You never give a firm date in a situation like this; you just do what you have to do and then pull out when the time is right, and not by a firm date.
 
That was an error that the president might not ever live down, although his intentions were somewhat correct, and we needed to get out of there as quickly as possible.
 
One can understand why many of those who fought there, and many of the families who had to bury loved ones who died in this conflict, are angry and hurt by our decision to leave there without a victory.

It looks like a surrender more than anything else to them. They feel that their service was short-circuited by our leaving before the job was done, but 20 years is enough time, we have spent billions of dollars over there, sent thousands of troops over there, and lost many in the war.
 
Enough is enough, and maybe as the dust settles on our participation there—we did send over troops with the express duty of getting people out of there, so we are not totally done with this conflict just yet—we will learn that it is not our duty or our job to fight wars for other people, even if we might think that it is the right thing to do.
 
We have enough problems here without putting ourselves in the position we did in both Vietnam and Afghanistan.
 
Enough is enough.