Michael Walsh:
“…To the surprise of only the Biden administration and its top brass, the Taliban retook control of Afghanistan last week after 20 years of frivolous American adventurism. It was a spectacular failure of American diplomacy, statecraft, intelligence and, most of all, military capability. In short, mission very much not accomplished.
But that’s pretty much standard operating procedure for the nearly useless behemoth called the Pentagon, which hasn’t won a war since the kinder, gentler American government changed its name from the War Department to the Defense Department shortly after World War II. If you’re always on defense, you’re losing.
Largely thanks to the CIA and special forces, the punitive expedition against the launching pad of 9/11 was swiftly completed, the primitive Taliban scattered, and an example made. But then that soft-headed American notion of mission creep and “nation building” took hold, abetted by a succession of weak presidents and a careerist military utterly unfamiliar with the sweet smell of victory.
The result? Thousands of dead Americans and trillions of borrowed dollars down the drain. The demise of a sham “nation” that never existed in the first place. And another military humiliation as the world’s major superpower piteously is reduced to begging Islamic fundamentalists not to abuse our nationals trapped in the country and please, pretty please, don’t be beastly to the Afghan women and, by the way, please put one or two in your cabinet…”
