When You’re Wounded and Left on Afghanistan’s Plains.
So, the ongoing and depressing saga of the most incompetent Empire in human history continues. I have now lost track of the number of strategic failures that the United States has inflicted on itself since the end of World War 2. The most notable are Korea, Vietnam, the Tehran hostage crisis, Beirut, Somalia, Iraq 1.0, Iraq 2.0 and now of course Afghanistan. It is interesting to note that with the exception of Somalia that all the other fiascos have occurred in Asia. The Middle East is technically part of the Asian land mass. Let’s give the first word to Rudyard Kipling to sum up this latest chapter in the Graveyard of Empires!
The Decline of the West
Now it is not good for the Christian’s health to hustle the Aryan
brown,
For the Christian riles, and the Aryan smiles, and he weareth the
Christian down;
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of
the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear: “A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the
East.”
And, so it goes yet again. I very recently added some comments about the siege of Kandahar and I predicted that the Taliban would be back in Kabul in about six months. I was so wrong. It took them about six days. Why? Pretty simple really. Despite all the hot air emanating from Washington, the long and the short of it is that the Afghan Army that we trained had nothing tangible to fight for. It certainly wasn’t worth their lives to defend a corrupt regime in Kabul created and propped up by the United States when the Taliban were more than willing to let them go home unmolested.
On July 8th 2021, when asked if it was inevitable that the Taliban would retake Afghanistan US President Joe Biden said,
“No, it is not because you have the Afghan troops at 300,000 well-equipped — as well-equipped as any army in the world — and an air force against something like 75,000 Taliban. It is not inevitable.”
Now, there is one interesting fact buried in this quote that I have not heard any of the usual pundits discuss and that is the fact that the United States has now equipped the army The Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan with a plethora of modern, sophisticated military equipment, enough in fact to outfit a well-equipped military force of 300,000! That was well done. The cost of the equipment was about $100 billion. We could have saved ourselves about $900 billion and numerous lives if we had just shipped the weapons to Mullah Omar in the first place. But, as one Turkish General once remarked, “The problem with having the Americans as your allies is that you never know when they’re going to turn around and stab themselves in the back.”
