As the United States completes its pullout from Afghanistan, the usual suspects worry aloud that the country won’t be able to manage without us. What they and other people with a neo-colonialist mentality don’t realize is that Afghanistan is a sovereign country and that we have been interfering with it unnaturally for 20 years.
Progressives say they are disappointed by the fact that Joe Biden is backing away from promises he made in order to attract their votes during the campaign. Though they certainly have the right to be annoyed, they should not be surprised. After all, Biden clearly didn’t have his heart in it.
Joe Biden deserves nothing but praise and support for his decision to honor America’s commitment, negotiated between the Trump administration and the Taliban, to finally withdraw from Afghanistan. After more than 20 years of wasted lives, endless property damage and squandering of billions of U.S. tax dollars that would have been better spent on just about anything else you could think of, it’s incredible that corporate media is still giving airtime to the idiots and warmongers who want to keep troops over there. “I have heard general after general, as you have, say, just give us a little more time,” ABC’s Martha Raddatz said July 4th.
It’s been two decades. There was no legal or moral justification for the war to begin with. They’ve had too much time as it is.
For those of us who have been closely connected to America’s longest war last week’s abandonment of Bagram airbase, the biggest U.S. facility in occupied Afghanistan, makes the long-promised withdrawal feel real.
And the hand-wringing over what comes next has built to a fever pitch. Will the Taliban come back? Will it be like 1997 all over again, with women subjugated and horribly oppressed? Will the Taliban kill the translators, fixers and other Afghans who worked for U.S. occupation forces? Will Afghanistan once again become a staging ground for terrorist attacks like 9/11?
Some of these questions are reasonable. Others couldn’t be less so, based as they are on assumptions fed by lies.
What’s important to remember is the motivation for sewing these doubts. The military industry and its pet media outlets want to change our minds about withdrawal or, if they fail to do so for now, to set the stage for ground troops to invade again in the near future.
Afghanistan will not “again” become a staging ground for terrorist attacks against the United States or any other Western power because it was hardly one in the first place. In 2001 there were four Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan; there were 6,000 in Pakistan. On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was almost certainly in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. The attacks were planned by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Most of the funding came from the royal family of Saudi Arabia, as did 15 of the 19 hijackers; none came from Afghanistan. It is true that the hijackers all trained in Afghanistan but that’s a distinction without a difference; they could just as easily have picked up the same education in Pakistan, where 99% of Al Qaeda’s infrastructure and personnel had been situated.
There is good reason to worry about the immediate future after we leave. It is likely that the Taliban will quickly topple the militarily inferior and wildly unpopular U.S. puppet regime installed by the George W. Bush Administration. Neighboring countries are bracing for flows of Afghan refugees; hundreds of Afghan government soldiers have already fled to Tajikistan. Violence is inevitable: military casualties in the civil conflict, reprisals against political opponents and repressive acts against women and other targets of Muslim fundamentalists. But nothing can change the truth: Afghanistan is not a U.S. colony. It is a sovereign nation. As such, it has the right and duty of self-determination. The Afghan people must sort out amongst each other what kind of future they want to have.
In the event of a Rwanda-scale genocide, intervention could be justified in conjunction with an international force under the auspices of the U.N. At this writing, however, that seems unlikely. The Taliban are far more sophisticated, younger and modern than the regime that took over Kabul in 1996. So is the population that they seek to govern. Afghans are interconnected with the wider world and its culture via the Internet and cellular phones. They are Muslim extremists, but they are far more pragmatic than ISIS. Afghanistan under the Taliban will feel more like Pakistan than ISIS-held Syria. As is currently the case, rural areas will be more conservative—burqas, girls banned from schools, the occasional stoning—than the cities.
Certainly the United States has the moral obligation not to repeat its habit of discarding its local employees after withdrawal. We should offer green cards and economic support to our Afghan collaborators on an expedited basis rather than the shameful foot-dragging that has been reported. Otherwise the Taliban may execute them as traitors.
Be prepared, as Biden’s September 11, 2021 deadline for withdrawal of the last U.S. troops draws closer, for a rising chorus of voices calling for him to change his mind. Don’t abandon Afghanistan again, the war pigs will cry.
Don’t listen to their siren song of imperialism. The invasion was a mistake, the occupation was a mistake, and so was our propping up of our corrupt puppet regime. We never should have been there in the first place and it has taken 20 years too long to get out.
(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.)
Adolf Hitler famously loved his dog, a German Shepherd named Blondi. Joe Biden, another political leader who doesn’t seem to care much about human rights, is publicly mourning the death of his German Shepherd.
Kamala Harris is more than the vice president of the United States, she is clearly the president in waiting for someone who is too old and infirm for the job. He keeps handing off responsibilities to her but she doesn’t seem able to fulfill her many jobs so far.
Joe Biden’s infrastructure bill is the latest example of how Democrats negotiate against themselves.
During last year’s campaign Joe Biden promised to “listen to the scientists.” He repeatedly said his coronavirus-response policy would be “informed by science and by experts.”
On issues from the environment to teaching evolution in public schools to the public health response to the COVID pandemic, liberals often accuse conservatives of putting emotions ahead of facts. While recognizing that the scientific process of acquiring knowledge and putting hypotheses to an empirical test can and often does lead to shifts in consensus, we on the left claim to trust scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious disease specialist and unlikely media icon.
After Dr. Fauci and other authorities like the Centers for Disease Control told us to wear masks, Blue America listened. As of late June 2020, 86% of Democrats wore a facemask whenever they left home, compared to 48% of Republicans.
Now scientific consensus has changed. But lefties are choosing to ignore the new reality—not that it’s new. Beginning nearly a year ago in July 2020 the CDC stated that wearing a mask outdoors was unnecessary unless one is less than six feet away from someone else. Aside from crowded events like rallies, sports and concerts, risk of outdoor transmission is lower than a rounding error; there has only been one documented case of COVID transmission outdoors, between two Chinese villagers.
Clarifying its long-held stance, the CDC said on May 13th that people need not wear a mask outdoors unless we are in a crowd of strangers, or inside with our “pod” of friends and family members. Masking outside is “optional,” Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told The Washington Post. Optional, as in unnecessary.
Let’s pivot toward hope. Nearly half of American adults have been fully vaccinated and Pfizer is vaccinating children ages 12 to 15. We can go outside, have fun and socialize within the new liberalized guidelines yet too many people remain traumatized and grimly coasting on paranoid inertia. “It’s the return of freedom,” said Dr. Mike Saag, an infectious disease expert at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Weeks after the latest CDC guidelines were issued, however, normalcy and freedom are still in short supply in liberal bastions like my neighborhood in Manhattan, where Biden won 91% of the vote. In compliance with the CDC, I walk outside without a mask because it’s unnecessary. Moreover, I’m fully vaccinated. Rules require that I put one on when I go into a store or ride the subway.
Furrowed brows, glares and general stink-eyes still abound. My neighbors are ignoring the CDC as much as right-wingers in West Virginia did last summer.
One would expect attitudes to evolve with the passage of time but that hasn’t been the case so far. When a fellow tenant confronted me recently about my masklessness in the lobby—where I’d been alone prior to her arrival—I informed her that I’d been fully vaccinated. “Everyone in the building has probably been vaccinated,” she said, “but here we still wear them.” I asked why. “It’s just the right thing to do,” she replied.
At a full-serve gas station in Manhattan the attendant demanded that I put on my mask before giving me a fill-up. “We’re outside,” I pointed out. It was windy to boot. “The CDC says you don’t need a mask.” “I don’t care what the CDC says,” he told me. “I’m going to keep wearing a mask forever, like in Asia.”
Half-empty streets in majority-Democratic areas—where people are far more likely to get vaxxed—are still, CDC be damned, dotted with people wearing one or two masks on sidewalks where no one can be seen for hundreds of feet. Many of the bemasked will tell you that they been fully vaccinated. You’ll see people jogging down lonely country roads, riding bikes and driving cars while wearing masks.
“You can understand that when people have been following a certain trend for a considerable period of time that it may take time for them to adjust [to the new mask rules],” Fauci said May 21st. “So I would not say that that’s irrational. I’d say that’s understandable.”
Go ahead, wear a mask indoors if you want to despite being vaccinated. Wear one outside if you feel like it. However, you are—sorry, Dr. Fauci—acting irrationally. What’s the point of the jab if you behave the same way as a year ago when we wiped down our groceries, bleached our counters and wore plastic gloves out of since-debunked worries over surface transmission?
Masks have devolved from medical imperative to virtue signaling. According to a May 5th Ipsos poll 63% of even vaccinated Americans were still wearing masks, outdoors down from 74% in April but still a surprisingly high number. That number ticked up to 65% the following week on May 11th. President Biden has begun appearing in public with his face fully exposed yet his supporters are not following his example.
What’s the harm in a fashion accessory that, as the vaxxed-yet-masked crowd informs you, merely tries to make other people feel more comfortable while also sending a subtle anti-MAGA message? It’s about thinking straight. Democrats can’t credibly claim the scientific high ground unless they adapt to the latest medical consensus.
You have the right to be anxious and illogical, not the right to be catered to. No one should wear a mask outside. Vaxxed Americans shouldn’t wear them at all.
(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.)
Once again, Democrats are selling out their progressive voters. This time, Joe Biden says he’s not going to bother trying for a public option on the Affordable Care Act and there’s no sign of any attempt to increase the minimum wage. What will progressive voters do about it? If history serves, probably nothing.
After 11 days of relentless bombardment of the Gaza Strip, Israel finally signed onto a tentative ceasefire. Joe Biden repeated the standard line that Israel has the right to defend itself. But the extreme disparity of wealth and military power between Israel and the Palestinians makes that line a joke.
Democrats and their media allies are currently comparing the legislative agenda of Joe Biden to the sweeping ambition of Franklin Delano Roosevelt at the beginning of the Great Depression. But there’s really no comparison.
