The War for Absolutely Nothing

Although this blog’s primary focus is typically on topics related to the City of Cincinnati and the State of Ohio, it’s time to discuss an issue related to foreign policy. President Biden has ultimately decided to pull American military forces out of Afghanistan, a place that the US has been at war with and/or occupying for 20 years. A brief refresher, this war began in 2001 under the leadership of President George W. Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney. At the beginning, it was all about patriotism, nationalism and punishing the Taliban for the attacks on September 11th, 2001. Once the military went in and destroyed everything the country had, which was very little to begin with, the job of the American military was to rebuild Afghanistan and turn it into a bastion of Democracy in the Middle East.

Obviously, that plan failed. The military had a difficult time training the Afghan forces and getting buy-in from the Afghanistan citizens. Similar to Vietnam, the occupation of Afghanistan just turned into a very long and difficult quagmire. Since Biden has pulled out the American military forces, the Taliban has taken the country back over with very little resistance. The first thing I want to state is that in the short term and on the surface, this may look bad for Joe Biden. Republicans are already attacking him all over news outlets and social media for his failed leadership towards the Afghanistan situation. However, in the long term, this is the right decision. It’s estimated that the American government has spent $6.5 trillion dollars on the war and occupation of Afghanistan. And what to be have to show for it? Absolutely nothing.

The entire purpose of the war in Afghanistan (and Iraq) was to increase profits for corporations like Haliburton and make rich white men even wealthier. Another purpose was to hand out blank checks to military contractors and inflate the defense budget. The cost of handing out blank checks happened at the expense of the Americas who died in the war, the innocent Afghanistan citizens and the American taxpayer. According to USNews.com, 113,245 Afghans have died who were either civilians or Afghan military and police. These are individuals who were not associated with the Taliban. In terms of American service members, 2,448 perished and 3,846 American contractors passed away since the beginning of the war. To make matters worse, 72 journalist 444 aid workers died during this never-ending conflict. The cost of war, in a financial sense is absolutely absurd. But when you factor in the costs of human life, it’s absolutely disgusting. This war just created more resentment for the United States in the Middle East and the US should’ve removed themselves from Afghanistan a very long time ago.

So, who’s to blame? In the end, I blame people like George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Their incompetent and corrupt leadership resulted in an insurmountable loss of human life and they are both war criminals, in my humble opinion. Regardless, George W. Bush currently spends his days painting, doing TV interviews and crying about how he hates Donald Trump which makes some Democrats cheer him on. But here’s the thing, Donald Trump was never directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of human beings and pissing away $6.5 trillion dollars of tax payer money with nothing to show for it. I have very strong opinions that George W. Bush was the worst President in my 31 years of life, and it’s not even close. It’ll take a lot for a President to surpass the incompetency and corruption of George W. Bush. Let’s not sit here and participate in revisionist history, because George W. Bush was far worse for our country and the world than Donald Trump ever was.

For Joe Biden, I applaud him for making a tough decision. Sure, right now it looks horrible to see all the Taliban recapturing Afghan cities. However, this was going to happen no matter what US President decided to finally end the war. If this happened under Donald Trump, I would’ve said the same thing and giving him credit where credit is due. However, he was too weak to make a decision like this. Trump was always so worried about his image and popularity, particularly with the far-right who get their rocks off seeing brown people suffer in the name of American Imperialism. In the end, if you’re blaming Joe Biden for the failure of the war in Afghanistan, you’re about 20 years too late.

Follow me on Twitter for the hottest of political takes.