Being a sore loser about his defeat and incompetent retreat in Afghanistan, US President Joe Biden seems okay with stealing money from grieving mothers and putting children at risk.
Afghans, including even the Taliban, had nothing to do with 9/11 or international terrorism. However, American neoconservatives need targets to attack, and the Afghans seemed shootable to them.
Now, yet another neoconservative-stuffed administration finds it okay to take money from Afghans and hand it to 9/11 victims in a demonstration of what they really represent. This is intended to perpetuate the belief in American righteousness and victimhood, even as these neoconservatives stand unapologetically over the bodies of those they killed.
Twenty years of defeat
The United States occupied Afghanistan for twenty years, supposedly to hunt down Osama bin Laden, who was dead for half the time of that occupation. When the US entered the country in 2001, Afghanistan was in civil war, with the Taliban holding the capital but facing substantial resistance. The US allied themselves with the Northern Alliance, who were resisting the Taliban. According to the righteous neoconservative logic, an American presence would bolster a powerful coalition and secure inevitable victory.
When the United States departed Afghanistan in 2021, in despair and shame, the Taliban held almost total control over the country before US forces had even exited. With barely a shot fired, and with American troops forced to watch and be humiliated in front of the world, the Taliban were able to overtake the country in a way that had not been possible even prior to the US intervention. The US, or at least those who still maintain control over its foreign policy right now and faced no consequences for their careers, failed all their objectives and were kicked out of the country.
To give some idea of what that failure meant, let us consider the words of Joe Biden:
"We spent over a trillion dollars. We trained and equipped an Afghan military force of some 300,000 strong. Incredibly well equipped. A force larger in size than the militaries of many of our NATO allies. We gave them every tool they could need"
Every moment, every dollar spent, and every soldier killed in both Iraq and Afghanistan was a waste. The strategies and predictions of US think tanks and foreign policy experts all failed to materialise. All the propaganda and self-important rhetoric about democracy and freedom, which continues unabated but has shifted to other conflict zones like Ukraine, led nowhere.
Rewarded for creating misery
Rather than firing the people who caused the biggest foreign policy defeats in their history, America and its allies listen even more to the instincts of neoconservatives such as Antony Blinken and Victoria Nuland, who maintain a familiar aptitude for false claims, false expectations, civilian casualties, and slow defeat. It is as if they have no thinkers with an interest in foreign policy other than these quacks who have a hundred percent chance of being wrong.
When hearing US Secretary of State Antony Blinken saying the US is acting differently in #Ukraine than #Iraq because the US is trying to prevent a war this time, remember that he directly supported the Iraq War.
— Lordre (@LOrdreNet) February 20, 2022
He is literally the liar he is trying to contrast himself with.
By punishing the Afghan people when they needed help, Biden makes it clear that twenty years of alleged support for them was a sham as the US attempted to spread its own influence and power in the region. We should not forget that it is under moral pretexts and international media fanfare that the US coldly murders civilians and tries to station soldiers in every strategic region of the world.
We should be thankful for the end of the war in Afghanistan, but be under no illusion that it marks the end of American cruelty and oppression. The neoconservative (or interventionist, if you like) army at the heart of American foreign policy is continuously re-hired and sent to all conflict zones in the world to get more civilians killed, drag America further through blood and mud, and then fail.