The person whom I've seen on television who knows something important about Afghanistan was a guest on PBS Newshour tonight. Sarah Chayes, whom I've heard speak previously, worked as an aide to the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and completed a book about corruption in Afghanistan. It was legion, thoroughly permeated the whole government. When I was there, I only saw government types who had clearly received financial support in operations from too many countries and agencies. But it was indicative of the huge prevalence of corruption that she reported with much documentation.
Sure, maybe this exit could have been handled better. Even if the U.S. had started a while ago, and slowly transported Americans from Kabul, how long would it have been before the Afghan government would have stepped in to either stop it or throw down their responsibility and flee the country as their president did earlier this week. All the military aid--eight times the civilian amount--didn't create an Afghan army that wouldn't disappear the second the Americans were finally pulling out their last relatively modest complement. Tonight Chayes pointed out how Karzai had helped get the Taliban going originally.
Media coverage has been the worst kind of reporting with images. Hordes of people at the airport. If we started trying to get Afghans who worked for the U.S. out earlier, would there have been fewer people there then? Don't bet on it. Biden was right as one of the first to oppose Obama's expansion of the operation to capture Osama bin Laden into a nation-building expedition into Afghanistan, where the British and the Russians had failed over the last decades and century. Our involvement never should have expanded beyond that. Instead we spent a trillion and twenty years wasting it all on a government that was riddled with corruption so that a lot of Afghans thought that the Taliban wasn't any worse and might be better.
Sure, they're wrong about that but we don't hear about how the U.S. totally tolerated the rank corruption that undermined all of our efforts until Biden came along and said, "Enough!" This was an impossible job to pull off without a lot of problems. Biden came in where the three previous presidents had done the wrong thing. We never should have been there. We had chances to get out. They didn't list en to him. How would you have slipped 75,000 people out without anyone becoming wise to it? The media feasting on Biden with the idea that this could have been finessed by some good planning--what idiocy!
