Biden’s six Afghanistan Big Lies
Those are not his only lies about Afghanistan, either. But they’re certainly important ones. Biden really is one of those people who is used to lying, has lied his entire life, has almost never been called on it or suffered bad consequences for it (except for the plagiarism charges that knocked him out of the 1988 presidential race), and knows he will almost certainly be protected by his party and the MSM for every single lie he tells.
Although Biden has some cognitive challenges, he’s not so far gone that he has forgotten how to lie. It is that basic to him. I also noticed that, in the transcript of his call with Ghani that was leaked to Reuters, he sounded relatively in command of his mental faculties and just as duplicitous as ever.
One oft-repeated statement – not by Biden, but by members of the press and by a lot of other people too – is that we were defeated in Afghanistan. No, we were not. While it’s true that we failed to obliterate the Taliban, that was because we only wage limited wars these days and because this was an asymmetrical and ideological war as well. But when Biden announced his pullout “plan” (in mid-April of 2021), the country of Afghanistan was not being ruled by the Taliban, and there had been no large-scale Islamic terrorist attacks in the US since 9/11.
Biden and the Democrats chose to surrender, and they chose to surrender in this manner. Their hand was not forced. They removed all conditions from the agreement, set a hard time limit no matter what, and stuck to it. And they certainly were not required to withdraw in the worst possible way, although they managed to accomplish that dubious feat. They thought they would get away politically with the surrender because the American people had tired of Afghanistan, and they knew the MSM would ultimately back their decision up (even if there was a bit of a kerfluffle for a while).
And maybe they will get away with it politically. Maybe they won’t. But this was an unforced surrender.
(except for the plagiarism charges that knocked him out of the 1988 presidential race)
See Pat Buchanan: the plagiarism motivated people who write professionally to go after him, because these are firing offenses for them. The context, however, was a contest between Democrats and that Biden was not a respected figure among the Washington press corps; see Brit Hume’s take down published in The New Republic in 1986. Had it threatened to benefit a Republican opponent or had it been someone the press respected, their eagerness to expose him would have been vitiated.
Apart from the plagiarism was something that Buchanan summarized quite succinctly: only the hollowest man appropriates another man’s family history. John Sasso’s split screen video made Biden look as ridiculous as any national politician of that era; the only pair who came close would be Wilbur Mills with Fanne Foxe and Gary Hart with Donna Rice on his lap.
(FTR: the last several generations in Biden’s family have been agreeable petty bourgeois: salesmen, office managers, and first-line supervisors; you have to repair to the last quarter of the 19th c. to find a blue-collar worker in his pedigree. The replacement story that his father was a patrician who lost all and then rebuilt is also fictional, though it appears his father did suffer financial reversals in the 1940s).
Biden has been lying about getting all the Americans out. About a week ago, I pointed out on another thread that we have not seen any video of tearful families being reunited at the airport. Sundance has suddenly recognized the same thing. The situation in Afghanistan must be really bad and the media has been covering for Biden.
https://theconservativetreehouse.com/blog/2021/09/02/something-missing/
We were defeated in Afghanistan. We left, and the Taliban took over. That is a defeat, by definition.
The Chinese defeated us in Korea after we had beaten the North Koreans. And we were defeated in Viet Nam.
We will be defeated in Iraq and Syria.
I agree that there was a decision by the Biden Administration to surrender Afghanistan to the Taliban. People speak about the deal Trump made with the Taliban, but that deal had Ghani and his government in power and control of Afghanistan. The Trump deal was the US wouldn’t continue hunting down the Taliban and the worst aspects would allow safe havens for the Taliban inside Afghanistan. The Trump deal kept Bagram as a US stick, if the Taliban failed to live up to the deal. The Biden “Plan” (Biden claims they had one and executed it to success) removed the Bagram stick first. At that point, the Biden and Ghani Administrations lost the capability to stop the Taliban, and the former never helped the latter to regain that capability. That was the starting point of the surrender.
The Merdia has been busy selling the idea that Trump made the deal and thus it’s all Trump’s fault.
I know my aunt, a lifelong Drooling Democrat, believes that.
It is not just the horror that is falling onto the Afghani people; it is also that Biden and the Democrats will get away with this awful choice of surrendering that is so nauseating.
Just the other day, as I was getting off the train from my commute, I overheard someone say: “well, thank God, the war in Afghanistan is finally over!” They clearly were referring to the U.S. totally pulling out.
As if that means the war is over – no concern whatsoever for how it was done, no concern for what will happen to the ordinary person in Afghanistan now. This person only seemed to see it through one viewpoint – the war is over because we (meaning the U.S.) are no longer involved.
We have seen this kind of ego-centric thought before – and it is what will be Biden’s saving grace. There might be just enough people who don’t care or are not aware enough to want to see what a disaster it all really is.
bob sykes:
Not defeated in Afghanistan. Nor were we defeated in Vietnam. “Defeat” in a military war means a military defeat. Nothing of the sort happened. We voluntarily left Vietnam because were weary of being there, and then we cut off air support to the South, and then we reduced their funding to such a low amount that it would guarantee their loss. In Afghanistan the American people got tired of being there, but it was this administration that “masterminded” this extreme SNAFU of a retreat. Completely voluntarily.
Giap maintained that we defeated him militarily, but it didn’t matter, because Congress handed Vietnam over to him.
Bob Sykes China beat us? Isn’t there a South Korea? If China won the South Korea would be gone. China was a medieval army compared to the UN, that the China remained fighting is a disgrace. Truman totally failed.
It is not just Biden who is lying. The entire left is lying on a scale and range of issues, never before seen.
Truth does not change and so it’s still true that, “Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive'” Sir Walter Scott’s epic poem, Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field.
When people consistently lie and act dishonestly, they initiate a domino structure of complications, which eventually run out of control. So too with what today’s democrats are doing. It doesn’t matter that this does not appear to be so, in 1939 Hitler’s Nazi regime appeared unstoppable. In principle, the same fatal errors in judgement are occuring.
On the most fundamental of levels, they’re disconnected from reality and in the aftermath of the unimaginable harm they are facilitating, the consequence will be a disaster from which they can never recover. They are in the process of permanently delegitimizing themselves.
Not that mushy headed thinking and malevolent intentions will disappear but for a few generations they will be beneath contempt.
What we lost on Afghanistan is the Gender Studies war. The Harvard faculty was running the place and seems to be running this country, as well.
SCOTTtheBADGER,
Wasn’t the tombstone ordered when we elected Richard “Honorable End to the War” Nixon. Isn’t that loser speak for “get out with the least loss of face”.
Wasn’t the coffin ordered when the PAVN, who had been rebuilt into a Soviet-style tank army to support the new strategy of straight up invasion and conquest vs insurgency, was allowed to keep the territory captured in the 1972 Easter Offensive by Richard “Peace with Honor” Nixon (who hadn’t even told the RVN, much less gotten their agreement).
Wasn’t the grave dug when the North violated the cease-fire and extended their SAM umbrella over a large part of the RVN where as the RVNAF didn’t have a single aircraft capable of operating in a non-permissive environment. Surely it was obvious after the beating that the Israeli Phantoms and Skyhawks had taken in 1973 that the RVNAF had no chance at all.
Seems to me that Congress merely shoved in the corpse.
Very interesting thread here about the entire Afghanistan escapade.
https://twitter.com/cryptochondrion/status/1433917591651770375
Thread Reader version of the link Griffin posted above.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1433917591651770375.html
Apropos of Biden’s first lie:
“As many as 29 students from Sacramento, California, remain trapped in Afghanistan. This has been known since at least the date of the August 31 deadline, but hasn’t gotten much notice in national media for reasons which should be obvious.
Biden left children behind in Afghanistan. This should be a permanent stain on his record.”
https://legalinsurrection.com/2021/09/almost-30-students-from-sacramento-remain-trapped-in-afghanistan/
@ Griffin & geoffb > Amazing information. I checked out Amazon’s book blurb (it was just published 8/31):
In the book, Obama comes in for his share of the blame, although Amazon apparently doesn’t want you to know about that before you buy it.
The anticipated block-buster is in all the news; here’s a People’s Broadcasting Syndicate interview from 8/31, which had to have been set up weeks beforehand, as with all the prepublication reviews.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/the-afghanistan-papers-exposes-the-u-ss-shaky-afghanistan-strategy
Here’s the headline at the London Times online: “The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War by Craig Whitlock review — a catalogue of American failures”
Interestingly, I’m down to the third page of hits at DDG, and there is only one noticeably conservative site talking about it (The Thinking Conservative, the blog of The American Thinker), and none of their pages will load. This post isn’t even in the blog’s Table of Contents today at AT.
https://www.thethinkingconservative.com/the-afghanistan-papers-a-secret-history-of-the-war/
Obviously, none of the Right wing outlets got an advance copy to review.
I suppose we’ll hear from them eventually.
The critical point IMO is that this book had to have been years in the making, the writer is a WaPo “Big Name,” and yet none of what Whitmore “revealed” ever made it to the public in his newspaper — at least, not that I remember hearing about. Why did he decide to publish NOW?
I think it was supposed to be part of Biden’s Victory Parade on 9/11 – his choice of dates – but the timeline set for printing and publicity didn’t take into account that he would blow his big chance so abysmally.
However, based on commentary here at Neo’s Salon and elsewhere, Democrats are buying into the Victory narrative anyway, and this will just buttress the belief that we needed to get out of Afghanistan (as we did) and completely ignore the way it was done (as many are doing).
https://www.thenewneo.com/2021/09/03/bidens-six-afghanistan-big-lies/#comment-2574876
charles on September 3, 2021 at 6:07 pm said:
“It is not just the horror that is falling onto the Afghani people; it is also that Biden and the Democrats will get away with this awful choice of surrendering that is so nauseating.”
Pursuing the interesting stonewalling of The Thinking Conservative.
This URL loaded, but the most recent listing is from Feb 2020.
https://thinkingconservativeblog.wordpress.com/category/politics/
These URLs didn’t load; I got a navigation menu, but can’t get anything to load from there either.
https://www.thethinkingconservative.com/american-thinker-blog/
https://www.thethinkingconservative.com/the-national-pulse-articles-by-raheem-kassam/
However, they loaded just fine on Edge with Bing, including the Afghanistan Papers post, which is just a copy of the Amazon blurb, published on 8/17 – back to the timing issue.
I don’t think it’s the same blog as the one at the more familiar “American Thinker,” because the archives of the two sites don’t match up at all.
https://www.americanthinker.com/archives.html
End of digression.
Excerpts from the commentary of Cryptochrondrion aka S. McMetal:
(PS to Griffin: what led you to this Tweeter? and to geoffb – thanks for the Unrolled thread, so much easier to read, especially with the screen-grabs of the book’s text.)
“The war was characterized by incredible levels of mendacity on all government levels from the very beginning. Donald Rumsfeld was lying about progress in Afghanistan as early as late March, 2002:”
https://web.archive.org/web/20210817084701/https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-us-government-lied-for-two-decades
“The war effort suffered from aimlessness and vague goals. To the people involved, it was unclear what the US’ aims were; nation building? women’s rights? defeating the Taliban? defeating groups who worked with the Taliban? Nobody could tell.”
“A significant blunder was the way the US lumped al-Qaeda and the Taliban together, foregoing nuance in its prosecution of the war:”
“Afghans are the most hardcore libertarians on earth. Not only do they firmly believe that taxation is theft, the US couldn’t even convince them that a central government was necessary. Some State Department officials couldn’t help but agree.”
The Taliban may run into the same problem, but they aren’t going to coddle any Resistance.
“Afghans learned early on that the easiest way to eliminate a rival or to grab a piece of land was to tell the Americans that he was a member of the Taliban:”
“Others learned how to make money exploiting US aid efforts. One guy had his brother blow up a bridge, the Americans rushed in to get it fixed, hiring a construction firm owned by the first guy to do the job:”
And other counterproductive measures, here and elsewhere in the book.
See Mao’s Sparrow Eradication problem.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign
“The supply chain of US forces fueled corruption like no other. Fat bribes were paid to police chiefs, warlords, and Taliban commanders to get supplies safely to their intended targets, fueling a vast network of corruption in the process:”
See Lee Smith.
https://www.theepochtimes.com/lee-smith-botched-afghanistan-withdrawal-the-culmination-of-20-years-of-corruption-and-failed-leadership_3963784.html
“Now to the really spicy part: the criminality and comical incompetence of the Afghan armed forces.
Afghan soldiers could flunk their training or go AWOL and still make it out of boot camp anyway. They had no conception of marksmanship whatsoever, wasting away all their bullets during firefights:”
Not denying that some of the special forces were good; there have been testimonials from American vets about them.
“Another thing they had no grasp of was time. Many of them had no watches and did not care what time it was anyway. The idea of preparing in advance for future events was completely alien to them. Getting them to prepare for winter was impossible.”
The book excerpts demonstrate why the contractors ran everything.
“Afghan soldiers had to be taught the concept of caring for their own weapons, instead of just grabbing whatever weapon was available at hand. Some couldn’t count how many siblings they had. teaching them to drive was a nerve-racking experience:”
“Desertion was endemic among Afghan soldiers, many of whom sold their weapons on the market. If you called the Afghan police after your house got robbed, they would come in and rob it again. As early as 2005, it was clear the Afghan army wasn’t going to fight once the US left.”
May explain why the Taliban was not looked on as being worse than the government when they came around with bribes or offers to provide community services.
https://tnsr.org/2018/05/unbeatable-social-resources-military-adaptation-and-the-afghan-taliban/
Serial disasters in the policies on opium.
“Ironically enough, the Taliban were the only people capable of actually curtailing Afghanistan’s drug industry. In July 2000, Mullah Mohammad Omar declared a ban on growing poppies [as being un-Islamic]. As a result, poppy cultivation declined by 90%.”
“Ryan Crocker was told point blank by the head of the ISI that Pakistan was aiding the Taliban:”
“What did Obama admin officials do when failure stared them in the eye? They prevaricated, skewed data, manipulated statistics, and straight up spun facts out of whole cloth. The whole thing amounted to a disinformation campaign worthy of a third world regime:”
Because Afghanistan was The Good War.
“Trump raised the tempo of US airstrikes, killing record numbers of Afghan civilians in the process. In retrospect, this was a truly sad waste of life, given that the US was going to withdraw anyway, and that these strikes failed to alter conditions on the ground.”
It was at the Pentagon’s request, then they stabbed him in the back when he quit going along.
Tucker Carlson is on that case. Special edition today, and details with video clips the serial lies about “progress” in Afghanistan. Doesn’t mention this book, but he’s probably aware of it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMyLcy-Trls
This was an interesting perspective on Kabul & Life After America Leaves.
Not exactly what we are getting from most of the media, but worth considering.
https://notthebee.com/article/life-in-afghanistan-a-peek-at-what-its-like-for-the-average-citizen-after-the-taliban-takeover-and-it-might-not-be-what-you-think
2021-09-02 PlanetMoron
PM also includes excerpts from a NYT article, giving quotes from people who are not unhappy at the change in regime, but since the Times is pushing this as a Win for Biden, I put an asterisk by those.
@AesopFan:
Thanks especially for that last PlanetMoron post from Not The Bee!
It needs to be hammered home again and again that the ‘locals’ doing the most bleating and woe is me wailing on CNN are usually (to put it mildly) Unrepresentative. Most people don’t want to change their ways of living that much. All they usually want is more of ultimately Other People’s Stuff whilst carrying on their lives in their own time-proven manners. You can see that in just about any Third World ‘Refugee’ dumping zone in the USA.
William S Lind makes the point that there is this Western Elite mental disease of thinking that because something has a name and an org chart it must be real, viz. Nominalism.
https://www.traditionalright.com/nominalism-and-the-defeat-of-afghanistan/
“But how could the whole Washington defense and foreign policy establishment get it so wrong? One answer is that, if you want to become and remain a member of the establishment, you must never make waves. Since almost all the people in question want to be something, not do something, they follow that rule regardless of where it leads. A defeat in war is but a small matter when compared to a risk to their careers.
Another answer is that members of the establishment are almost all nominalists. That is to say, if they give something a name, it takes on real existence in their minds. The Afghan National Army offers a perfect example. Because we called it an army, gave it lots of American money, equipment and training, and knew its order of battle, it was an army. But it wasn’t. Apart from a few commando units, it was a ragtag collection of men who needed jobs and had little or no interest in fighting. Those men seldom saw their pay, because it was stolen before it reached them. Rations and ammunition often suffered the same fate. That army collapsed overnight because it never really existed outside the minds of establishment nominalists.
That same nominalism applied to the entire Afghan government. Washington nominalists thought it was real; Afghans knew it was not. A Marine battalion commander just back from Afghanistan put it best. He said, “Talking to a 14th century Afghan villager about the government in Kabul is like talking to your cat about the dark side of the moon. You don’t know what it’s like and he doesn’t care.”
We see nominalism running all through American policy-making. Washington nominalists think Iraq is a state. It isn’t, because real power is in the hands of ethnic and religious militias. The state is merely a facade, but since it has a parliament, elections, cabinet ministers, etc. it is real to nominalists. Not surprisingly, our policy there has been a series of disasters ever since the initial disaster of invading the place.
The Washington elite’s nominalism is not restricted to foreign policy. It looks at the U.S. military the same way. If you call something an army, it must be able to fight, even though you have filled its ranks with women, made promotion depend on Political Correctness rather than military ability and given it bureaucrats for generals. When it loses a war, as it just did in Afghanistan, it must be a matter of bad luck. The fact that it ceased to be a real army decades ago is not recognized.”
I know it’s fashionable to hail the end of the “forever war” in Afghanistan but the US has had troops in Germany, Japan, Italy for some eighty years and in South Korea for seventy-five years. In recent years, there was little combat involving US troops in Afghanistan. There were no major Moooslim terror attacks on the US homeland in many years.
But none of this excuses the way Biden & Co. left Afghanistan. Total screw up.
AesopFan:
Of course for most people life goes on in Afghanistan without too much difference, at least at the moment. That excerpt reminds me quite a bit of what the left was writing about South Vietnam after it fell to the North. The idea that people didn’t care about the North taking over was the gist of it.
The boat people cared, but of course were never a majority. The re-education camps only ever housed between 500,000 and a million. There were about 49 million people in Vietnam in 1975. Hard to say how many were in South Vietnam, but obviously the vast majority of that population never went to re-education camps. But the camps were horrendous and affected enormous numbers of people.
In any tyranny, most people aren’t killed or tortured. It’s not necessary. I don’t see what point is being made by stating that – it’s obvious. Also, the Taliban are just getting started again in Afghanistan, and they know the eyes of the world are on them, so they are on relatively good behavior now. Also, they’re not dumb, and are not necessarily doing whatever bad stuff might be going on in front of the cameras or in public.
Young people in Afghanistan – those under thirty, for example – have grown up with the American presence and in a society with greater opportunities for women and in general at least a modicum of liberty. That’s not the goal of the Taliban. I’ve read plenty of interviews with younger Afghans saying how awful it is for them and how fearful they are. Kabul is a relatively modern city, and before the Taliban took over in 1996 it was even more modern.
These are the early days for the Taliban redux. The Taliban have not yet, as far as I know, instituted sharia law. But that’s what they did last time they took power, which represented a big change for the people of Afghanistan. The Taliban were not just instituting Afghan culture. Nor were they instituting a regime that just wasn’t quite up there with South Dakota. It was repressive by any standard except maybe medieval ones. Some history from that time:
The important part to know is that this sort of thing was NOT Afghan tradition prior to the Taliban:
The Soviet years in Afghanistan were during most of the 1980s. So it was not just under the Soviets that Afghanistan instituted these modern measures, it was earlier as well.
I have zero doubt that the Times can find people to interview who are happy about the Taliban taking over or indifferent. What percentage of the population that represents I don’t know, but my guess is that most people and in particular most young people are quite upset. I am sure the MSM will continue to seek out the ones who are not upset for its interviews, at least for a while, till the entire Afghanistan story goes away and the Times can again focus on how oppressed minorities and women are in the US, and how awful the right here is.
Said it before but….notthebee presumes a substantial proportion of our effort was to nation-build and relates all the reasons it wouldn’t work. Didn’t work.
To some extent, that’s a straw man.
What proportion of our effort–other than fighting–was designed to provide a relatively stable environment for a forward presence in Central Asia? That’s not the same as nation-building.
Perhaps a proportion of what looked like nation-building was designed as eye-wash to make it harder for the democrats to insist we’re a bunch of fascist imperialists and we need to hand the place over to their friends (see Viet Nam and others since).
Point is, describing how nation building failed may be addressing a big fat nothing.
This is not to say we didn’t, or shouldn’t, try to bring the folks up a couple of centuries. But we’re not leaving because we couldn’t get them to pose for a Norman Rockwell calendar.
AesopFan:
And if that writer has no idea why we stayed in Afghanistan, I can answer that question: to prevent it from becoming a terrorist stronghold and center again for attacks.
I’m sure that over time, other reasons came to be part of the reason we stayed. For example, our presence there was lucrative for some people and some companies. Also, there were aspects of “nation-building” (such as more liberty, particularly for women) that appeal to Americans. But the basic reason we didn’t leave shortly after getting rid of the Taliban, and why we tried to “nation-build” in the first place, was to keep the Afghanistan from becoming a big terrorist base again.
The Taliban certainly seemed to understand that, because one of the first things they did was release the prisoners held at Bagram.
Now, it can certainly be argued that our presence in Afghanistan wasn’t worth it, that in the end we would have to leave and it would revert again, etc. etc.. But to state categorically, as that writer did, that it wasn’t in our interest to stay after the initial fighting, is to be ignorant of many of the reasons we stayed and that some of them (preventing of large-scale terrorist attacks such as 9/11) seem to have been successful.
In addition, Richard Aubrey makes some good points in the comment above this one.
AesopFan:
Re the Whitlock book – I have read about the war in Afghanistan for 20 years, and I don’t think anyone really believed we were “winning” there in any real way, whatever the propaganda was. I think most people felt it was stalemated, had helped some of the people of Afghanistan (especially the women), and had prevented large-scale terrorist attacks like 9/11, and that was about all we could hope for. A majority of Americans felt we should get out, and under Trump we were almost all out.
The author of that book clearly wanted it to be like the Pentagon Papers – for example, the title. The MSM’s glory days. I just don’t see that what he’s saying is news – if he’s saying the government painted a considerably rosier picture of what was going on in Afghanistan than what was actually happening there, then didn’t everyone pretty much know that already?
By the way, the Pentagon Papers were somewhat mischaracterized by the MSM to make the government look worse. I wrote a post on that – you can find it here.
Chases Eagles:
Please see this post about the last years of the Vietnam War.
Perhaps a proportion of what looked like nation-building was designed as eye-wash to make it harder for the democrats to insist we’re a bunch of fascist imperialists and we need to hand the place over to their friends (see Viet Nam and others since).
Richard Aubrey:
That was some of my impression. Certainly in Iraq where Colin Powell stated the “Pottery Barn Rule”* — “You broke it, you bought it.” It seemed to me that some of that rubbed off on Afghanistan. I think we were also playing to the UN.
neo has looked into Afghanistan deeper than I have. Perhaps she has some thoughts.
___________________________
*Amusingly enough, Pottery Barn denied the “Pottery Barn Rule” was true of their stores.
Seventy thousand Afghan troops have died in this twenty-year pseudo-war, as compared to 2500 US troops.
Our overnight abandonment of Bagram meant the Afghan troops no longer had any air cover at all, so they melted into the night lest they be killed in combat. But the Taliban will hunt them down and kill them, nevertheless, as they will interpreters and others on the biometric profile list Biden gifted the Taliban. Along with untold billions worth of military equipment.
We, no, the Democratic Congress, not we the people, blew Vietnam.
We blew Iraq because of MSM/Democrat hysteria over Abu Graib, a truly trivial occurrence.
Now we’ve blown Afghanistan.
Taiwan is probably next.
We have Joint Chiefs of Staff who are rotten soldiers who do not know how to fight. We have a black SecDef whose greatest concern on taking that office was “systemic racism” in the military, though he himself had achieved the rank of General.
We have a Sec. of State, Blinken, a former nothing, who makes Hillary look thoughtful and conscientious.
We have become just another crappy socialist country. Defense budgeting is squeezed by the inexorable demands of the ever-expanding entitlement programs. If that’s not socialism, I do not know what is.
Neo,
I have read this before. I was quite aware of the end of the war. By 1972 I had already an extensive military history reference collection and I paid close attention to military activities. During the ’72 offensive and counter offensive and the Linebacker II B-52 raids my father was at SAC HQ and he kept me well informed. I thought the ceasefire was an atrocious betrayal at the time and knew even at age 15 once the POWs were returned, we would never go back. From mid-73 to mid-75, Father was at five-sided Puzzle Palace. Again, he kept me well informed during the Yom Kippur War and the Fall of Vietnam. My opinions were formed real-time and nothing has changed them. I would have become a military historian (my true love) but my life got derailed.
Chases Eagles:
Actually, I agree with you that the ceasefire was a betrayal. But by then the American public had very much soured on the war and Nixon wanted to hurry things up.
Also, didn’t Nixon secretly pledge to give the South a lot of support if the North attacked? But Watergate ultimately intervened.
AesopFan,
Sean Davis retweeted Max Abrahms who retweeted this guy.
The awful JCOS chief, Gen. Milley, speaks of the future of Afghanistan, but, but, but the US hadda get outta there ASAP. Right, General? “But I was only following orders” will be his response.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/milley-says-civil-war-in-afghanistan-likely-after-us-withdrawal-could-lead-to-reconstitution-of-al-qaeda