When I read this NYT piece last night, I couldn't recall hearing Mr. Snowflakes drop this particularly chilling bit of colossal wrongheadedness on the world in 2001, in keeping with the colossal wrongheadedness of his boss, George W. Bush:
Taliban fighters brandished Kalashnikovs and shook their fists in the air after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, defying American warnings that if they did not hand over Osama Bin Laden, their country would be bombed to smithereens.
The bravado faded once American bombs began to fall. Within a few weeks, many of the Taliban had fled the Afghan capital, terrified by the low whine of approaching B-52 aircraft. Soon, they were a spent force, on the run across the arid mountain-scape of Afghanistan.
It was in the waning days of November 2001 that Taliban leaders began to reach out to
Hamid Karzai, who would soon become the interim president of Afghanistan: They wanted to make a deal.
But Washington, confident that the Taliban would be wiped out forever, was in no mood for a deal.
"The United States is not inclined to negotiate surrenders," Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld said in a news conference at the time.
A few months ago I listened to a military historian opine that Bush's Iraq invasion was the greatest blunder since Hitler's opening of a second front in 1941. I had to agree. Not even Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower's utter obliviousness to the Wehrmacht's coming, 1944 counteroffensive on the Western front came close to Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld's aggregate miscalculations in the Middle East. (American Pols & Public were forgiving of Eisenhower's misplay, since he was in the same position then as President Biden is today: Ike got bad intelligence. 'Tis a pity that with the rise of the crazy party came a brutal end to the days of bipartisan objectivity.)
So that George, Dick and Donald could look tough, hundreds of thousands of Afghan lives, thousands of American lives and an estimated $2 trillion from the U.S. Treasury have been squandered. But not in a tough war; rather, a foolish war — which George, Dick and Donald soon converted into an even dumber one. And now it's their party dumping blame on President Biden for the absence of a clean, fuss-free exit from an unrelenting, 20-year-old blunder.
Which could have ended one month after its start.