Like anyone with any kind of beating heart, the Hanoi-ization of Kabul in Afghanistan has been devastating, as we watch desperate people climbing on top of a plane - as if it was a giant overcrowded bus - and then falling to their deaths after takeoff. There are thousands of women and thinking people trying desperately to get to Pakistan or any other place that will allow them to be themselves - and live. For now, the Taliban is holding back for the most part and not interfering with the exodus. Perhaps they're trying to show the world they're not as bad as people say. Color me unconvinced.

The question on everyone's lips seems to be: who is to blame for this?

Not that finding blame will help anything... we've certainly not learned the lessons of the past (Viet Nam), but Afghanistan has always been a forbidding country, populated with hardy men of the land who have little to lose, and aren't afraid to fight to the death. In that regard, underestimating them (the religious extremists) seems to be a common thread over the last 40 years.

It starts with the Reagan administration. At the height of the Cold War, any enemy of the USSR was our friend. As such, Reagan armed the Mujahideen to fight back Russia. After running out of money to keep the fight going, Russia withdrew. This was just the beginning of Afghanistan being a black hole for money, arms, and lives, pouring in and disappearing as they sought to protect their opium trade, and everyone else wanted to transport oil through their fields.

Fast-forward to the Clinton administration. As his ignominious presidency was winding down, they tried to pass along information as part of the transition, warning the incoming Bush (Dubya) administration that Al-Qaeda and other militant Islamic groups would be their biggest threat. Bush was not interested, because he was fixated on Iraq. His administration received a memo titled "Bin Laden Determined to strike in US". It was ignored. We all know what happened a month later.

After 9/11, we had the world on our side as we sought out the terrorists who managed to pull off such a simple yet deadly attack. There are a lot of "truther" theories out there, and I won't get into them, since they aren't relevant to this missive. Nonetheless, Osama bin Laden took credit, and our invasion of Afghanistan was carried out in Dec 2001.

A funny thing happened on the way to military victory and a quick end to the war. Bush - still obsessed with Iraq - lost interest in Afghanistan, and put all his attention - and the might of the U.S. military - into invading Iraq. As early as March 2002 - just 3 months after the start of the war, Bush said (in response to a question about Osama bin Laden) "You know, I just don't spend that much time on him ... I truly am not that concerned about him". Bush was already trying to sell an invasion of Iraq. In March 2003 - just over a year after our invasion of Afghanistan - we were in yet another country, destroying the infrastructure and attempting to settle old scores.

Two months after that - May 2003 - was his infamous Mission Accomplished speech and photo op. The short-attention-span president was ready to move on. We would still be in Afghanistan for another 18+ years.

One feature of this blog is TriSec's weekly "Ask a Vet" posts. We started this blog in 2007, six years after 9/11 and the onset of the War in Afghanistan. He would keep a running tab of lives lost and money spent on both wars. In the list below, I am only including U.S. lives lost in Afghanistan, because that is the one currently on the plate for discussion. Keep in mind, there were U.S. lives lost in Iraq too, and non-U.S. lives lost in both wars:

By the year: Cost and lives (from TriSec blogs) on or near the anniversaries of 9/11
2007: Deaths: 447, Cost: $456,452,150,000. 00
2008: Deaths: 583, Cost: $552,547,900,000.00
2009: Deaths: 829, Cost: $909,603,100,000.00
2010: Deaths: 1,279, Cost: $1,079,812,000,000.00
2011: Deaths: 1,752, Cost: $1,248,858,900,000.00
2012: Deaths: 2,114, Cost: $1,371,694,150,000.00
2013: Deaths: 2,266, Cost: $1,471,264,650,000.00
2014: Deaths: 2,343, Cost: $1,563,656,425,000.00

His latest blog yesterday gave the final tally at $882B just for the Afghanistan war (remember the totals above are for both wars) and 2452 U.S. Service personnel killed. All that blood and money for what?

Osama bin Laden was killed by U.S. Navy Seals on May 2, 2011. We got the "Charles Manson" responsible for the 9/11 attack, but still - we stayed for another 10 years.

President Obama never felt that the Afghan military was strong enough or skilled enough to keep the Taliban at bay by themselves, so we maintained troop levels and stayed. He made an attempt in 2013 to close Guantanamo and repeal the Use of Force authorization, but Congress prevented it. Not that it mattered - over the next 3 1/2 years, he'd draw down troops, the Afghan military would prove ineffectual (and unmotivated) and he'd increase troop levels again.

In 2016 - the Orange Shitgibbon won the presidential election with less than 50% of the popular vote. Not much changed in Afghanistan over the next 3 years, but then in Feb 2020, he and his Secretary of State Mike Pompeo signed the death certificate of the modern-thinking Afghan citizens by making a deal with the Taliban (violating previous precedence of not making deals with terrorists). This agreement was made without any input from the Afghan government. It gives the Taliban all they could have dreamed of. It included the release of 5000 prisoners, including Abdul Ghani Barador, a convicted terrorist, who is now the new president of Afghanistan.

As recently as late June, he was bragging about the deal he put together with the Taliban (apologies for including a video of this asshole):



Of course - once video started coming out showing just how bad this going, he changed his tune (as did all the Republicans and FOX "News", etc.) and everyone is trying to blame President Biden for the horrendous agreement that tied Biden's hands.

As Raine wrote in her blog on Monday, once the focus shifted from removing the threat to "nation building" in a nation that didn't want us there, there was no way this was going to end any way other than badly. Former USSR president Mikhail Gorbachev (who knows a thing or two about the futility of trying to militarily subdue Afghanistan) says as much:

Let us hope that the lessons learned here prevent yet another recurrence of the desire to colonize and force our way of life on other lands. It didn't work in Viet Nam and it didn't work in Afghanistan, and it won't work anywhere in the future should we be foolish enough to we try this futile and wasteful exercise in hubris yet again. Think of all that money and blood blown into mist and dust and sorrow, lost in the sands of a foreign land that could have been spent here on our own people.

Bonus Click: Stephen Colbert adds his 2 cents: