Monitoring Biden and other Contemporary Events

Trump was the worst president in our history, no competition for the title.

Biden is a pisspoor excuse for a president

It was always going to be a shitshow.

Everybody wringing their hands and crying about it didn't show much concern for 20 years,

no matter who got killed.

Now it's suddenly pile on Biden over it.

Another reason why America can't win this war is other Muslim nations don't even mind becoming chummy with the Taliban behind the scenes, particularly Saudi Arabia and Qatar, despite being rivals in the Middle East.

But the Afghan security forces and the Afghan government were plagued by corruption. They don't even want to fight for its own nation unless they receive financial backhanders from America. Translation: they join the army simply because it's a chance for them to get paid and receive protection.

You know you can't win any war when soldiers lack the will to fight.

In Afghanistan the world is witnessing disastrous consequences associated with a rare area of agreement between President Biden and his predecessor, Donald Trump.

Both presidents saw the 20-year war in the remote and rugged country as an unwelcome inheritance and an albatross. For Trump it was the prime example of the "forever wars" he promised to end, a salient promise of his "America First" campaign. Frustrated in his initial efforts to truncate the U.S. mission, Trump finally bypassed the Afghan government to negotiate directly with the Taliban. The deal with them that he signed on Feb. 29, 2020 promised to pull all U.S. troops out by May 1, 2021.

Biden did not reverse this course when he took office, although he did push back the pull-out to September. He wanted more time to remove U.S. forces and, if necessary, evacuate U.S. civilians as well as Afghan interpreters and others who helped the U.S. war effort. He was advised he would have a period of weeks or months to do this after September

Since I resigned [10 September 2019] Trump resumed talks with the Taliban, which were just as detrimental to the United States as before. Combined, however, with the October withdrawal debacle in Syria, a clear unforced error by Trump personally, political opposition to surrendering in Afghanistan grew stronger. Nonetheless, on Saturday, February 29, 2020, the United States and the Taliban signed an agreement that, in my view, looked very much like the agreement that had come unstuck in September.

This still being the Twitter presidency, I tweeted my opposition that morning: “Signing this agreement with Taliban is an unacceptable risk to America’s civilian population.This is an Obama-style deal. Legitimizing the Taliban sends the wrong signal to ISIS and al Qaeda terrorists, and to America’s enemies generally.” Trump responded in typical fashion at a press conference a few hours later, saying of me, “He had his chance; he didn’t do it.”

The preceding chapter demonstrates, to the contrary, that this Afghanistan deal is entirely Trump’s. Time will prove who is right, and the full effects of the deal may not become apparent until after Trump leaves office. But there should be no mistaking this reality: Trump will be responsible for the consequences, politically and militarily.

The war was a cottage industry for weapons makers and others