It's Not a Scary Movie, It's Real Life...

Colbert King, B/black columnist at the WaPo, dissects President Obama's follow-up failures to the Bush administration in Afghanistan.  We must learn from these losses, and permanently push from power the people who made, and perpetuated them.  New America simply cannot afford to continue these costly foreign-policy mistakes:

The evacuation is underway, even as the Biden administration cobbles together an amalgam of international actors to try to dissuade the Taliban from pursuing a military victory that might be its for the taking.

We had to know this day was coming. That longest armed conflict in U.S. history was a war that never was the United States’ to win. Losses sustained: More than 2,300 Americans dead, more than 20,000 wounded in action, nearly $1 trillion gone.

And most of us were along for the disaster.

We were there when President Barack Obama, succumbing to pressure from the military and his own indecision, announced a troop surge into Afghanistan in 2009. “After 18 months,” he declared, “our troops will begin to come home.”

I wrote at the time that the Obama administration “would have us believe that in all of a year and a half, tens of thousands of U.S. troops will be mobilized and sent to Afghanistan, where they will join other forces and in that time deny al-Qaeda a haven, reverse the Taliban’s momentum and reduce its ability to overthrow the Afghanistan government, strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces so they can fend for themselves and stabilize neighboring Pakistan.”

It didn’t happen. We saw the outcome unfold in real time. Afghan security forces didn’t fend for themselves, and the Taliban kept on taking territory and lives. In May 2014, Obama took to the White House Rose Garden to announce, “now we’re finishing the job we started,” promising to reduce U.S. forces by the end of the year and declaring the United States’ military commitment would be over by the close of 2016 — except it wasn’t.

In his book “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of War,” The Post’s Craig Whitlock wrote, “In Washington, fears rose that the Afghan government was at risk of a political breakdown. Calling the situation ‘precarious,’ Obama reversed himself again in July 2016.”

“Instead of drawing down to 5,500 troops as planned, he ordered more U.S. forces to stay in Afghanistan. By the time he left the White House in January 2017, about 8,400 troops remained.”

As it was through all of that, so it is now — an Afghan government enamored with holding power but lacking the resolve to mobilize the people and organize disparate and competing groups to defend and protect their own country, including women, without the aid of U.S. money and warm, well-armed American bodies.