Donald Trump warned us about this, and now here we are. On Tuesday, Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, the top general at CENTCOM, told the House Armed Services Committee, according to Stars and Stripes, “that it will be difficult to battle terrorism in Afghanistan without U.S. troops in the country.” See, it would really be so much better if we stay in the country for however long it takes to accomplish the mission. What’s the mission? No one is really sure. How much longer will it take? Could be five years. Or ten. Or 100. Or until there just aren’t any more American troops to send to the “graveyard of empires.”
Stars and Stripes reported that McKenzie said he was “working with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to come up with a plan should a renewed terrorism threat from the Taliban emerge once U.S. troops leave Afghanistan.” McKenzie explained: “Some of the forces are going to remain in Central Command because we are going to look at offshore, over the horizon options.”
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The implication was clear: we really shouldn’t leave at all, because once we do, the Taliban will act up. Will that ever not be true? McKenzie didn’t say, and apparently was not asked. And the general didn’t give a straight answer when Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) asked him whether he had told Old Joe (and presumably his handlers) to leave Afghanistan by Biden’s handlers’ announced deadline of September 11.
“I can tell you,” McKenzie said, “that I had multiple opportunities to have a detailed conversation with the president and give my advice. He heard my advice. I am not going to be able to share it with you here this morning.”
“McKenzie’s comment,” Stars and Stripes added, “came as multiple news outlets reported that top military leaders pushed Biden to keep a small U.S. presence on the ground in Afghanistan to counter the Taliban and prevent the country from harboring terrorists.”
It was Donald Trump who summed up what is really going on with Biden’s handlers and Afghanistan last September: “The top people in the Pentagon…want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy. But we’re getting out of the endless wars, you know how we’re doing.”
Well, no, we’re not getting out of them, we’re diving in deeper, because that same military-industrial complex is deeply embedded among the political and media elites who came together in an unprecedented gang-up of media lies and bias, along with other chicanery, to rid the world of the baneful presence of the American president who dared to put the interests of the American people before theirs.
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Anyway, how long do we have to stay in Afghanistan? Until every school and mosque in Afghanistan holds seminars on critical race theory? Until antifa riots in Kandahar? Until the Afghans elect a trans president? Until the wheels of the last Humvee fall off and burn? How long?
At what point do Biden’s handlers believe that the Taliban will give up its efforts to impose Islamic law (which is already essentially in effect) in Afghanistan? Five more years? Ten more years? And if they reframe our mission there as preventing the establishment of an Islamic emirate, won’t Biden’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked allies in the United States be enraged?
However long we have to stay, McKenzie’s statements show that it won’t be hard for Joe’s handlers to find a pretext for ignoring the September 11 deadline. When he heard that his unwanted guests may be staying even longer than announced, Taliban negotiator Suhail Shaheen declared: “They should go. After that, it will be a kind of violation of the agreement. That violation would not be from our side … Their violation will have a reaction.” Then the Taliban’s reaction will become the pretext for American troops to stay even longer.
The Afghanistan war has no point, no purpose, except to line the pockets of the military-industrial complex. That is made clear by the increasing ridiculousness of the arguments advanced for our staying. TOLOnews reported recently about fear that the Afghanistan negotiations and planned American withdrawal would “jeopardize the fragile gains made for women’s rights and gender equality over the past two decades, says a report by OXFAM International.” Yeah, modern-day Afghanistan is a bastion of women’s rights, guaranteed at the point of American bayonets. If we leave, women might be forced to wear burqas, and denied education, and subjected to routine unprosecuted domestic abuse – oh wait, that’s the way Afghanistan is now, with American troops there.
Our troops should have come home years ago, and our focus there should have shifted to preventing Afghan jihadis from attacking Americans. But McKenzie is now complaining about how hard that will be, which doesn’t bode well for the prospect of our leaving at all. An American president should have no other interest in Afghanistan. But as Biden has informed us, he is not putting America first.
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