Defeat in Afghanistan

This morning, when I stumbled out of bed at what has now become a stress induced "late" time for me of 4:45 a.m., and then clicked on the computer and saw the morning's news, I saw a photograph of a Chinook helicopter landing on the US embassy roof in Kabul.

The Taliban has entered Kabul.

It immediately made me recall the North Vietnamese Army entering Saigon and our embassy personnel being taken off the roof.

There is no reason this had to happen.  And it's going to be a bloody disaster.  

That blood will be on our hands.

There's a lot of reasons this has occurred, and the blame for the disaster goes back to President Bush II and his Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld.  There was never a reason for the United States to launch a war against Iraq in 2001 and the fact that we committed our forces, there, rather than in Afghanistan were there was a dire need to do so, set us off on a half cocked strategy of minimal force that allowed the Taliban to continue to exist and, eventually, recover.

Beyond that, the simple fact of the matter is that the American concept of instant national reform, simply because we are there, is idiotic.  Germany didn't reform at the end of World War One.  It took a second war and the dismantling of the nation to cause that to occur, and it had somewhat of a history of civil government.  Japan, which had a parliament that had been semi functioning as well before it was co-opted by the military, saw its military dismantled and its culture swamped by Americans.  Simply setting up a democratic government and thinking it was going to work right away was naive.

An American general has recently opined that significant forces in the nation combined with an intent to stay until 2030 was what was really needed.  Rather than that, we hoped for a cheap and easy war and that people would suddenly become democratic and peaceful as that's in their DNA.  Recent events should cause us to question if that's even in our political DNA.

If we were going to just go in, get Bin Laden, and not worry about what happened after, we could have done that.  We didn't.  And that was an option. A big raid just designed to kill Bin Laden could have been done. But once you invade a country, it's your responsibility.

There's no excuse for this whatsoever, and every American administration from George Bush II on deserves the blame for it.  There's going to be piles of hand wringing and excuse making, and one of the things we will here is that our actions over the last several months don't really mean that our troops died in vain.

A person should question that.