The New Leaders of Afghanistan

Ladies and gentlemen, meet the new Taliban government in Afghanistan!

They're lean.  They're keen.  And they're really mean.

Their new government allows on the the most devout Talib Muslims to serve.  They are all men.  They have terror commandos running their most sensitive ministries.  They tolerate no opposition to their policies.  They abhor pluralism.  They plan to stand for pure Taliban Afghan values.  They plan to put women in their place, which is nowhere in Afghan professional society. .  hey plan to show ethnic minorities who's boss.  They are making it clear that the Afghan people must learn to obey.  And those who resist will be snuffed out.

And the Republican Party is taking notes.  😠

Biden's Afghanistan Speech

President Biden's speech yesterday on the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was effective at explaining the reasons for the decision to bring the troops home from that country as the Taliban take it over.  But it completely fell short of what Biden had to do to reassure Americans of his stewardship - assume full responsibility for the way the withdraw has been spiraling out of control.

Biden spent much of his speech pointing the finger at Afghan political and military leaders while passively claiming responsibility in a non-committal manner without expressing specific gratitude toward the veterans of the war who did their tours of duty and have since made it home.  The only saving grace of his speech was his lack of regret for getting out of Afghanistan completely, saying there was no alternative but to quit.  I agree.  Again, we lost whatever chance we had to establish a permanent government that could have held its own against the Taliban long, long ago.  But Biden's overall tone was so self-righteous that it must have Democrats - already struggling in Congress to pass his domestic agenda at a time when the fourth of possibly many (a double-digit number of?) COVID waves is surging - looking nervously at the 2022 midterms.

We're in trouble, folks.   

Mutiny and the Bounty

Let me say one thing that have nothing to do with the topic of this blog post before I continue. First of all, I'm okay with tearing down Confederate statues and Columbus statues but not statues of the Founding Fathers, and I'll get to that in greater detail later. But when a report comes out that the Russians were paying the Taliban bounties for American and British soldiers in Afghanistan, Donald Trump's dumb-blonde press secretary emphasizes the statue issue in a press conference?

And when reporters pressed her on this, she all but brushed it off, even though Trump was reportedly briefed on this and denied ever hearing heard of this intelligence.  He even suggested that the intelligence was phony.  How appropriate, coming from a phony President.  And yet seven Republican members of Congress were briefed on it.  The Russians, of course, deny all of this.

Trump is clearly in Vladimir Putin's pocket, and anyone with a pair of eyes can see that.  Russian bounties could have led to additional deaths of U.S. and U.K. troops in Afghanistan. The White House later said that the information they got was not thoroughly vetted and so did not forward it to the Oval Office.  Trump is betraying the country and mutinying against the national security interests of the country, as well as the world.  Now more than ever, we need to get rid of this guy, although I'm afraid that anger over George Washington statues from Boston to Denver (and every town in between) being toppled will help return Trump to office.  

Talibonkers

Donald Trump made a smart decision this past week, but of course any smart decision Trump makes is more by accident than by design, and the accident that prompts it is usually a disaster of his own making.

Trump had allowed American diplomats to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan in an attempt to get U.S. troops out of the country that has ended many an empire (we're next).  The Afghan government objected to Trump's gambit, fearing that it would be shortchanged.  But after the Taliban bombed an American installation, Trump said he was canceling not only talks with the Taliban in Afghanistan but also talks with Taliban leaders at Camp David that were to be secret . . . until Trump let the secret out.

Let me let you in on a secret: Trump gets no points for his smart decision because he should never have made the dumb decision of inviting the Taliban to Camp David in the first place.  Trump probably had delusions of grandeur by achieving the same sort of foreign-policy coup that Bill Clinton (Trump is obsessed with all things Clinton) had when he got PLO leader Yasser Arafat to come to America to negotiate peace with Israeli Prime Minister Yihtzak Rabin.  But the idea of having the guys who gave shelter to Osama bin Laden to plan his attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon - and for all this to come out around 9/11! - is so boneheaded that I needn't say any more.  Except to say that Arafat, once deemed a terrorist, never perpetrated an attack on Americans - indeed, 9/11 sickened him.  On September 11, 2001, when I was stranded in a railway station in Wilmington, Delaware, someone said to me that Arafat was a good man who couldn't control the radical elements under his leadership.  Somehow, I couldn't imagine anyone saying that about the Taliban chieftains.

The only good thing that came out of this is that John Bolton has been fired as national security adviser.  Now there won't be a war with Iran.  Don't expect Trump to answer for his blundering; he'll find another shiny object to distract us.