Fourth day of banner headlines, scarcely less dire. “Terror” to “Panic” to “Fear”; “Scramble” to “Race”. The U.S. military air traffic controllers have restored orderly departures. “Wanna get away?” The New York Times disputes that U.S. soldiers killed 10 Afghan civilians at the airport according to “multiple eyewitnesses” per Bilal Sarwary for France24. The Quasis put the number at two.
Somebody has an opinion column in the Times today, “Will the Taliban restrain or support Al Qaeda?” What David Sanger wrote on Saturday or Sunday is going to be true, “Rightly or wrongly” Joe Biden is going to be stuck, not only with the inages if the evacuation, but with the aftermath. And that is just life as president. Withdrawal has been Biden’s goal for years and years. He has game-planned the fallout. He has known and knows now that the Taliban will have an Islamist state.
But the president could have provided himself a softer transition to the aftermath with a drama-lite withdrawal. If he had gone out with a bang and pounded the Taliban with boots on the ground and F-17’s in the air so that the Taliban could not overrun the country while we were leaving then there would not have been “hard and messy” but, relatively, easy and orderly. We would have been long gone when the Taliban overran the country. Then, you see, he wouldn’t have to eat the whole thing. The president said yesterday that he and his team had “plans…to respond to every contingency, including the rapid collapse we’re seeing now”. Bullshit. The president was on vacation for several days when this blew up. He had not anticipated it at all.
It probably is not going to matter now if Afghanistan is Islamist Lite or Islamist-Islamist. It will not matter that Saudi Arabia is worse, and is our “ally.” It’s all bad, there’s just “our” bad guys and Al Qaeda. If the Taliban does support Al Qaeda then Biden’s going to have to attack Afghanistan again.
