Bush's Middle East Wars are Ending

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

Today US embassy personnel in Kabul, Afghanistan, are busy shredding documents, destroying computers, and throwing their lives into suitcases and garbage bags as they prepare for a hasty exit from the place that some of them have called home for the better part of the past two decades.  Within the next couple of days they, and some of their Afghan employees and friends, will be flown out of the country in a US military airlift.  And before those rescue planes even make it safely to their destinations, agents of the Taliban will be posing for pictures inside of the embassy offices and homes that the fleeing diplomatic corps have left behind.

Biden officials are worried that the rushed exit is going to look like the horrific images of the United States' frenzied exit from Saigon - and it will.

Joe Biden shouldn't take the impending calamity too personally.  He didn't get us into the twenty-year mess in the Middle East - that was George W. Bush and his evil puppet master, Dick Cheney.  And Biden wasn't the one to actually announce that we would be leaving Afghanistan - that was Donald John Trump. But Joe Biden is the one who had to pull on his Big Boy pants and ultimately make the exit happen.

If Dick Cheney had ever cracked open a history book, he might have saved his country from two decades of death and sacrifice in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan - as well of trillions of dollars in US taxpayer money that has now been effectively flushed down the crapper.  History could have taught him that Afghanistan, in modern times, had survived major invasions three times before - twice from Great Britain in the 1800's, and then the long slog of the Russian invasion from 1979 to 1989.   

The British won some battles and lost some battles before suffering a major defeat in their first invasion (1839-1842), and they also won a few and lost a few during their second foray into the country (1878-1880), but ultimately installed a puppet government and then made a fast exit.  Forty years later the Afghans had regrouped to the point that they were able to come after the British and attack them in India.

The Afghan people are resilient - and not easily cowered.    

When the Soviet government flew divisions of troops and war equipment into Kabul (the capital of Afghanistan) on Christmas Eve of 1979, Afghan fighters took to the hills and committed to a hit-and-run strategy against the invaders that went on for a decade and denied the Soviets effective control of the country.  Many regard the extraordinary Afghani (Taliban) resistance as one of the major contributing factors that played hell with Russian morale and helped to bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union.

And the US government assisted the Taliban fighters  - usually surreptitiously -  to defend their homeland.

Now, more that thirty years after the Soviets were driven from Afghanistan, another invader is being sent packing.

(Yes, the United States shepherded some social advances during the years that it propped up a government in Afghanistan, perhaps most notably in the education of its female citizens, and hopefully some of those advances will take root and help to bring about permanent change.   But during those same years that society was showing some signs of advancement in Afghanistan, America continued to turn a blind eye to the plight of women in the oil kingdoms - like Saudi Arabia - where appeasing a corrupt monarchy was deemed to be in our national best interest - or at least in our corporate best interest.)

US forces are tentatively scheduled to be out of Iraq by the end of this year, and at that point the failed presidency of George W. Bush can officially be put to rest.  Perhaps then we will be able to return some of our national treasure to domestic uses - things like free and accessible health care for all, free college for all, green energy, real mass transit, and a thousand other things which we have been told - over and over - that we cannot afford.  

Maybe now we can afford a few nice things in life.

And maybe now Afghanistan can begin to heal and chart it's own destiny without outside interference.