Blame He Who Must Be Named

Donald Trump has not been president of United States for well over six months, yet Democrats continue to blame him for everything that goes wrong. How long will they be able to place blame before taking responsibility?

Good Ideas, Lousy Execution

President Biden was right to carry out the full withdrawal from Afghanistan, a war that was doomed from the start. But his execution of the withdrawal was absolutely abysmal, and his performance before the media is becoming downright 25th Amendment worthy.

Shelter in Place

The evacuation of embassy staff, US citizens and Afghans who worked for the US government from Kabul went slowly and incompetently.

New podcast! Please listen and share

Just dropped the brand-new edition of the DMZ podcast with Scott Stantis and I.

Today we are talking about the collapse of Afghanistan, and how it affects the Biden Administration as the President’s poll numbers continue to slide into the toilet. What’s the outlook for the midterm elections and the next presidential cycle? I continue to talk about my own experiences traveling in Afghanistan and Scott makes a strong case for voting third party.

 

Killing People Is Only Wrong When Social Media Does It

In a remark that he later walked back, President Joe Biden complained that social media outlets like Twitter and Facebook are killing people by allowing misinformation on their platforms. He would know something about killing people…

9/11 Had Nothing to Do with Afghanistan

            Better late than never: most Americans now believe that invading Afghanistan was a mistake. But what good does it do to recognize a screw-up unless you learn from it?

Failure to understand what went wrong, and why, sets you up for doing the same thing later. That’s what happened after Vietnam; rather than face up to the truth that we went there to prop up a corrupt puppet regime and exploit natural gas, we wallowed in ridiculous “Rambo” mythology about politicians stabbing our valiant warriors in the back by not allowing them to win, and libels of vicious hippies who supposedly spat on veterans returning to their hometown airports. (Never happened.)

            It’s tempting to kick the dust of Afghanistan off our metaphorical boots and, as Americans prefer, look forward rather than backward. But an advanced civil society requires an after-action report. That’s what the military and other organizations do after an engagement in an intelligent effort to repeat what worked and avoid what didn’t.

            Unless we conduct a sober reassessment of Afghanistan, ideally in the form of a congressional investigation, there is nothing to indicate that we wouldn’t start a similarly stupid war again in the future. That’s because the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan was based on a big lie — and that lie is still circulating as widely as it was when the first bombs started raining down on Kabul in October 2001. If we want to avoid another $2 trillion war that claims thousands of American lives, we have to drive a stake through that BS narrative.

            Big Lie: Afghanistan and the war against it was revenge for 9/11.

            American voters like wars that are framed as righteous retribution against unprovoked acts of naked aggression, like the Spanish-American War (“remember the Maine!”) and World War II in the Pacific (“remember Pearl Harbor!”). Never mind that we invaded Cuba over an accidental explosion that Spain almost certainly had nothing to do with and that a U.S.-led oil embargo drove Japan to the desperate act of bombing Hawaii. A war that seems to come out of thin air, like the Bush Administration’s 2003 invasion of Iraq, on the other hand, prompts big protests and widespread opposition.

            So it’s easy to see why the White House and its press allies marketed the Afghan war as revenge against Al Qaeda. We were attacked. It was unprovoked (not really, but that’s what Americans thought). We had to strike back.

            Al Qaeda was based in Pakistan. 9/11 was planned in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, the man held most responsible, lived in Pakistan. Much of the money came from Saudi Arabia, by far the largest international funding source of radical Islamic fundamentalism. The hijackers were Saudi and Egyptian. Not a single hijacker was Afghan. The hijackers had attended training camps in Afghanistan for jihad generally, not 9/11 specifically. If we were interested in getting even for 9/11, we would have attacked Pakistan or Saudi Arabia instead.

            This information is well-known and widely available. Yet President Joe Biden, who deserves accolades for sticking to his guns and pulling out U.S. troops, chose September 11, 2021 as the final deadline for the withdrawal and the official end date of the war. “Setting the 9/11 date…underscores the reason that American troops were in Afghanistan to begin with — to prevent extremist groups from establishing a foothold in the country again that could be used to launch attacks against the U.S.,” the Associated Press reported on April 14th.

            “Again”?!

            There it is, 20 years later, the big lie again. 9/11 wasn’t planned by terrorists from a “foothold” established in Afghanistan. It was planned by terrorists from a foothold established in Pakistan, specifically in the city of Karachi, precisely at the home of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

            In total opposition to the facts, Biden keeps repeating the big lie. “As I said in April, the United States did what we went to do in Afghanistan: to get the terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 and to deliver justice to Osama Bin Laden, and to degrade the terrorist threat to keep Afghanistan from becoming a base from which attacks could be continued against the United States. We achieved those objectives. That’s why we went.”

Afghanistan never was a “base” of attacks against the United States; said attacks couldn’t possibly “continue” because there never were any originating from Afghanistan. Bin Laden, of course, was assassinated in Pakistan. Which is an entirely different country from Afghanistan. And no, we didn’t follow any trail from Afghanistan to Pakistan.

Biden piles on the lies. People remember symbolism.

            Choosing the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks as the official withdrawal date was the White House’s way to reinforce the long-standing national slander against Afghanistan, while leaving our frenemies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia off the hook.

We have got to stop talking about 9/11 and Afghanistan in the same breath.

The lie that links Afghanistan to 9/11 is so powerful that even people on the progressive left bought into it. Only one member of Congress, Barbara Lee of California, had the courage and brains to vote against the Afghanistan war. The antiwar left cobbled together a few pathetic protest demonstrations during the September-October 2001 run-up to the U.S. invasion, but their number and turnout was a tiny fraction of those who marched against the Iraq War. Even now that it’s clear that both wars were equally unjustified and based on lies, liberals get much more agitated over Iraq than Afghanistan.

 As usual, the media is the guiltiest cog in the machine of militarism. “Americans like me ignored—or scorned—protesters who warned of an endless quagmire in Afghanistan. Next time, we should listen to the critics,” Conor Friedersdorf kindly acknowledged in The Atlantic in 2019. Perhaps that will happen somewhere somehow. But not in The Atlantic. Like every other corporate media outlet, the magazine refuses to hire me or any other writer or artist who criticized the Afghanistan war when everyone else was all in.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

This Is What the Cult of Militarism Looks like

Fortunately, president Joe Biden followed through on last year’s peace deal with the Taliban and has ordered a complete withdrawal from Afghanistan. A war we never should have been in in the first place is coming to an end. But militarists are waiting in the wings with new ideas for mayhem for profit.

The Worst Countries for Women (Afghanistan Isn’t on the List)

            Concern-trolling over the dismal plight of women in Afghanistan is powerfully appealing to liberals who look for reasons for the United States to maintain a military presence there. If and when the Taliban return to power, the warmongers argue, the bad old days of stonings, burqas and girls banned from school will come back—and it’ll be our fault because we didn’t stick around.

            Outrage over women’s inequality is often only ginned up in the service of some other aim, like invading Afghanistan or banning transwomen from high school girls’ sports teams. Scratch the thin veneer of phony feminism and the true agenda, which has nothing to do with women or girls, is quickly exposed.

            You may be surprised to learn that, according to a U.S. News & World Report analysis of data provided by the United Nations, Afghanistan isn’t among the ten worst countries for women. Which nations do have the worst gender inequality?

A list of staunch pals of the U.S.

But you’ll never see “woke” news media go after the U.S.’ best bros for treating women like dirt, much less the suggestion that these countries ought, like Afghanistan, to be bombed, droned, invaded and subjected to two decades of brutal occupation under a corrupt U.S.-installed puppet regime.

#1 worst nation in the world for women is the United Arab Emirates (“close friends and strong allies…with shared interests and common values,” crows the UAE’s embassy website, which showcases a cute photo of Biden). Common values that we apparently share with the UAE are its form of government (tribal autocracy), the torture and disappearance of political dissidents, female genital mutilation, wife beatings (perfectly legal), marital rape (perfectly legal) and “honor killings” (frowned upon and largely ignored). Women may vote, drive, buy property, travel and go to college. But they need signed permission from their “guardian”—who is usually their father or their husband.

Continuing down the list, we find U.S. “strategic ally” Qatar (#2), U.S. ally Saudi Arabia (#3), U.S. “treaty ally” India (#4), U.S. “partner” Oman (#5), major recipient of U.S. military aid Egypt (#6), U.S. “major non-NATO ally” Morocco (#7), U.S. ally South Korea (#8), U.S. “regional strategic ally” Sri Lanka (#9) and U.S. “key partner” Jordan (#10). Anyone who cares about the oppression of women should backburner Afghanistan, start with the UAE and work their way down this list of misogynist nightmare nations.

Not to say that the women of Afghanistan don’t have anything to worry about as the Taliban return to power. They do. Taliban spokesmen tell reporters that they’ve moderated their views about the status of women since 2001, that they would even allow women to work as judges and will now allow girls to continue their education and for women to work so long as they wear hijab. “Local sources told us the Taliban removed art and citizenship classes from the curriculum, replacing them with Islamic subjects, but otherwise follow the national [U.S.-backed government] syllabus,” the BBC reports from Balkh province near Mazar-i-Sharif. “The government pays the salaries of staff, but the Taliban are in charge. It’s a hybrid system in place across the country.”

 Reality in areas controlled by local Taliban commanders hasn’t corresponded with this relatively cheery and pragmatic vision. There are reports that the Taliban have demanded that girls over 15 and widows under 45 be forcibly married and, if they aren’t Muslim, converted to Islam. Taliban rule will likely be harsher and stricter in more rural areas.

It is perfectly reasonable to worry about the future of Afghan women. Though, to be fair, many were viciously oppressed, forced to wear the burqa, denied an education and even stoned to death, throughout the last 20 years of U.S. occupation. If you don’t, you are morally deficient.

But don’t forget the hierarchy of needs: women are even worse off in a number of other countries, all of which get a pass from the American press and giant chunks of American tax dollars from the American government. So the next time you hear someone affiliated with the U.S. government or in mainstream corporate media talking about how the Taliban mistreats women, remember that their real agenda is oppression and militarism, not emancipation.

(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of a new graphic novel about a journalist gone bad, “The Stringer.” Now available to order. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)

 

Compete with This

President Joe Biden signed an executive order asking the Federal Trade Commission to crack down on spurious “non-compete clauses” in employment contracts. 20% of American workers, including burger flippers, are covered by contracts that prohibit them from working for a competitor.

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