Biden and Afghanistan

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it!

I voted for Joe Biden because I respected him for his many years of service to our country. I believed then and I believe now that President Biden is a good man. However, I also voted for Joe Biden because I would have voted for a 4 year old before I would have ever voted for Trump. President Biden wasn’t my first choice but I knew he would settle the country down simply by not being Trump. However, I am very disappointed in President Biden when it comes to his decision about agreeing to Trumps withdrawal agreement in Afghanistan. What he should have done is made the following deal with the Taliban. Since we already knew we were going to give the country back to them anyway. Why not make a better deal that is good for everyone? We should have left a Democratic government in place. We should have said to the Taliban, look, we will let you have most of the country. We don’t want most of the country anyway. However, we are going to specify an area that is defensible and declare it as belonging to the Democratic Government of Afghanistan. As long as you don’t support terrorism, clean up your human rights behavior and respect the autonomy of the Afghanistan Democratic Government, we will leave you alone. Make no mistake about it. The Taliban didn’t want to mess with us any more than we wanted to mess with them. As a matter of fact, we could have offered them support against ISIS as a carrot. I think of Berlin and Germany as examples of how a city and a country can be split and survive. I believe this is the kind of deal that Trump should have originally negotiated. Its been said that only 3000 soldiers would have been required to do something like this. I do not know if that number is realistic. However, I do not believe it would not have taken a whole lot more. Keep in mind that the Afghan military would have been doing most of the fighting. We would have been in a support position which would have meant less casualties for us. Yes I know its not quite as simple as I have stated it. However, I do believe that I am right and I do believe this kind of deal was possible. It would have given safe haven to all of the Afghans that feared the Taliban and it would have also secured a staging area for us should we ever need it in the future. If we would have made this kind of deal, we would not have the current mess that we are forced to deal with. We are now in the same position as Russia after their 9 years of fighting. We lost face, we lost a lot of American lives and we did it for 20 years!

With that said I will now turn my thoughts to President Biden’s performance on this issue. It saddens me to say it but President Biden has already blown it. It is unforgivable that he did not plan this evacuation better. He is now in a reactive mode mess. It is a clear reminder that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it. (Viet Nam) There are a few things that come to my mind when thinking about it. First of all, President Biden needs to fire whoever has been advising him about how to safely remove our citizens, the Afghans that helped us, our military and the weaponry that we are leaving for the Taliban. Second, it is clear to me he is wanting to get too much done too soon. He was so focused on voting rights, Covid19 and his Stimulus plans, he dropped the ball on Afghanistan. Yes, they are all important but its no excuse. He knew that this evacuation was going to take place and he had plenty of time to plan it. His administration has failed miserably when it comes to the withdrawal of Afghanistan. Its really unfortunate that the deal that I spoke of earlier in this commentary never happened. If it had, we wouldn’t have this mess we are dealing with today. As far as I am concerned, I blame President Biden for a poorly planned evacuation of Afghanistan and I blame both President Biden and President Trump for not making the right deal with the Taliban.