Coming on the heels of my recent post about the botched withdrawal from Afghanistan under Biden, I have a few additional thoughts.
First, what happened under Biden would not have happened under Trump. Regardless what you think of Trump, he tried to get out of Afghanistan. In fact, Biden loves to blame Trump for the major fuck-up he orchestrated in regard to the withdrawal. The blames are all total BS, anyone with any sense knows that.
If nothing else, Trump didn't like to be embarrassed. He would have gotten us out without embarrassment. Plus, he tried for more than two years to get his Department of Defense and State Department to obey his orders to get out of Afghanistan. They ignored him.
Remember when it was cool for the DOD and three letter agencies to ignore Trump when it suited them? They were media heroes. They were the famed Resistance. Even the Forest Service was hailed as heroes for "resisting" Trump. Never before in history has resisting a sitting president been a virtue. Normally, ignoring orders gets one thrown in prison. Not under Trump.
More than one person lost his job over this refusal to follow orders, most notably "Mad Dog" Mattis. My Marine veteran friends loved that asshole until he ignored Trump. Yet, he wasn't going to get out of Afghanistan no matter what his commander-in-chief told him to do. His buddies in the defense industry were making way too much money to get out. Guess where that asshole is now? Back at General Dynamics, of course, on the Board of Directors. As an aside, the Wikipedia entry on Mattis has been almost completely sanitized, as so many entries there are to suit political purposes.
Oh, the irony. What is funny is that all this deep state resistance evaporated completely the second Biden came into office. So transparent, really. So they withdrew from Afghanistan without doing a single thing to make it a proper withdrawal. No resistance there at all, the media would have destroyed them as much as they destroyed anyone who worked for Trump and actually did their jobs properly.
In my last article, I outlined what we should have done. We should have held Bagram Air Base and used it until everyone had been evacuated. Instead, we left it in the dead of night over a month before our final withdrawal. Possibly the worst military decision made in my lifetime or that of two or three of my lifetimes.
And no one, zero, nada, people have been held accountable except those American citizens and Afghan allies left behind. They don't count, though, do they? The media paid attention for maybe two weeks, if that. The only people who still care are those like me who were there over the years and worked with those left behind. The Biden Afghanistan withdrawal is one of the biggest stains on American credibility in decades. Biden should already have been impeached over it. Yeah, I am not holding my breath. Not to mention the 25th Amendment should have been invoked as soon as he took office.
But, now that it has happened, what should we do now? I have thought long and hard about it. I am essentially anti-war, yet I served in Afghanistan. I know some of the folks left behind and even have pictures. I sell my black and white prints, but I won't publish any of them with our Afghan allies.
I don't know who will see them and I don't know where all these people have landed in the new Afghanistan. I am simply not willing to risk showing pictures of any of these folks. I will publish one here, with the face obscured. This one is not for sale. These were our allies in a tough war in a tough country.
Me and one of our Afghan allies
So, what should we do now. I hate war, but I have thought long and hard about this. I don't trust the US government, including its military, to do a job like this. They would fuck it up either intentionally or just from the political correctness and incompetence that rule them. Especially with the senior officers. The rank and file would be fine and do their jobs. The leaders are the issue, as we saw during the withdrawal. The troops are led by political operatives in uniform. Note that I will happily be on the first plane into Bagram to make this mission happen. I have slept in some pretty crappy places in Afghanistan, this would not be the worst.
I am not sure what the status of Bagram Air Base is these days (if anyone wants to actually implement this plan, I will do a lot more research, but for now it is a pipe dream). I imagine that the runways are still operational (or enough of them to permit air operations). I would fly in 5,000 - 10,000 veterans on a few transport planes (C-130s would work fine, civilian charter jets, it doesn't have to be Galaxy C-5s, but that would be nice). We would need small arms and mortars and possibly light artillery. We would need some drones, mainly for observation. And as many helicopters as we could manage. A few armored vehicles. Food, medicine, radios, ammo, and jammers.
The objective would be to control and defend a portion of Bagram Air Base, not all of it. Enough to control runways and house and feed people. Next step would be to establish one or more secure corridors to Kabul, as well as establishing gate control for those arriving on their own. I could go on, but you get the idea, this isn't rocket science.
We need a presence on Bagram and a way for people to get there. Beyond that, a steady stream of any aircraft possible to fly them all out. Unlike with Biden, the LAST flight would be the veterans leaving after every damn US citizen, green card holder, and Afghan ally is on a flight and out of Afghan airspace. That is what real military people do.
That is it. It is what Biden should have done in the first place. I think it is what any Trump withdrawal would have done. It is the least we can do. It is imperative that we do it. And fuck the US government if they don't like it. Let Biden and Blinken and Milley and Austin stay in their holes at home. I think that, once they knew what we were about, the Taliban won’t even put up much resistance. All they would want is for us to get the hell in and out as soon as possible. And we wouldn’t be there to mess with them, they already won. All we would be doing is fix the mess that the current administration caused.
Watching all this shit continuing to happen in Afghanistan while the average American forgot about it after a week makes a person like me crazy. And no, Neil Young and Joni Mitchell are not more important news, they are has-been assholes. Maybe Joe Rogan could put me in touch with some real Americans who could make this happen. One can dream.