This is a political crisis so far beyond what we're prepared for. Even if it's not Biden's fault, we just gave Republicans a battle cry for 2024 that sounds completely rational and legitimate, even if their claim about a botched leaving isn't true (and no matter what those bloodhounds yell, the fact is, maybe we should have just stayed...). The shock that America is narcissistic about foreign affairs is something progressives are always completely unprepared for. Lo and behold, there are places around the world, many of them, which suffer in ways we can't possibly fathom. One day, maybe relatively soon, we may get a taste of what that's like, and we'll get it because we didn't have the stomach to concentrate on anything but the small potatoes issues you have when you live as a superpower, all the while there's a whole world at your doorstep of 7 1/2 billion people, soon to be 9 billion, all of whom, for whatever reason, are jealous of us.
So my dear fellow liberals, if you haven't figured it out yet, I will spell it out:
This is exactly what happens when liberalism gets so far into bed with social justice that they start believing social justice rhetoric, and it is far far from the first time in history this happened. Withdrawal from forever war became such a high priority that even Joe Biden, the 'foreign policy Senator,' forgot how easily foreign affairs dissolve into chaos. So congratulations are due to all my SJW friends. You so convinced Joe Biden, for half a century a moderate's moderate, that peace and justice are the way we can run the world that he clearly started to believe our country could live in the world without keeping our hands dirty. Well, now instead of dirt we're about to get more blood on our hands in the next year than we have in the last twenty.
And even the lives of a hundred thousand innocents would be worthwhile if it spares billions. But the Republican party is literally the most dangerous political movement on earth. Not even the Chinese Central Committee has the power to wreak the havoc an authoritarian Republican administration can over the entire planet. If they are in power when it comes time to react to Global Warming, there will be a century of ramifications, just like after World War I. Only this time, it will be truly global, and with a world population that is 4 times what it was a century ago.
So even if Republicans' current reaction to our withdrawal is completely irrational, we have just given them the most rational battle cry for 2024 they could ever dream of having. If we play it right, it will only be a million moderates who just went over to Republicans for the next four years. If 3,500 troops actually and truly prevented a Taliban takeover, it honestly wasn't that high a price to pay...
The lesson here is not that we should never have been in Afghanistan. Imagine 9/11 going unanswered, we'd have seen January 6th twenty years sooner, probably much worse.
We should and could have killed bin Laden by 2003 and gotten out, but the Bush administration found it useful to keep him alive in Pakistan as a way of justifying the Iraq invasion, so Pervez Musharraf gave him asylum the whole time and the Bush administration pretended not to know.
Afghanistan was never going to be a democracy, and 90% of Americans knew it, including the Bush administration. What we hoped for is that we could find a corrupt kleptocrat like Karzai who would at least be competent - like Hosni Mubarak was in Egypt, or, believe it or not... Tayyip Erdogan is in Turkey (remember when he was a US ally?), who could glove varying degrees of liberal tolerance over a fist of blood and iron. Whatever the future of Afghanistan or 100 other countries in the world, that is still the very best they can ever hope for in my lifetime.
There is only one lesson here: if Biden or any Democrat wants to win in 2024, we're probably going back into Afghanistan by the end of the year, and possibly with ten times the number of troops or more. America is a very broken place. It may be different by next week, but it seems right now as though Biden will probably have to admit he made a colossal mistake and put the troops back in. And a lot of people on the left are going to be furious. If we give them some version of a Green New Deal and revamp Obamacare, they should be ameliorated for now.
But how... how are we going to get 9 billion people on earth to live together on a burning planet without billions getting killed?
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