Mr. President, why is it that we are seeing a growing squad of Neocons/Israel-Firsters in your administration? As the only thing most of us have to go on are the past performances of these men, it is hard to see what in the world they would or could contribute to an America First foreign policy. Bolton, Abrams, Khalilzad, and, now, the increasingly interventionist Pampeo are all on hand to cock things up. Is it wise to send men who labored long and hard to cause, and then prolong, all of the desperately stupid and unnecessary wars in which we are now involved? There is not much you can so about the Neocons in Congress — like Senator McConnell — who oppose an America First policy, and want the Clinton-Bush-Obama wars to continue. But why, Sir, would you retain the republic’s enemies to conduct your foreign policy?
Most of these wretches are also men who will do America any harm that is necessary to ensure that Israel’s interests are served. Can Americans really believe that these men will steer an America First course? Mr. President, collusion with a foreign power can be described in three simple words — “Bolton, Abrams, Kahlilzad”. There is always the chance, of course, that you intend to set up these enemies of the United States so that you can fire them on an issue that will demonstrate their war-mongering and alienation from genuine U.S. national security interests. That seems a bit of stretch, however.
The future of your American First foreign policy, Sir, seems pretty grim at the moment. The following paragraphs are simple recapitulations of media stories showing the inappropriateness of putting Neocons and Israel Firsters in the van of the conduct of your foreign policy. Again, here is nothing you can do about McConnell’s war-wanting, but you can ensure that the other men mentioned above and below play no part in prosecuting the republic’s foreign policy
–On Syria: On 29 January 2019, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell announced his opposition to President Trump’s decision to withdraw all U.S. forces from Syria, as well as his intention to pass some sort of Senate resolution on the issue. In the radio-sound clip I heard, McConnell said he wanted the president to halt the withdrawal so that “our friends”, Israel and Jordan, know we were not abandoning them. Once again, the myriad disloyal Jewish-American leaders and their organizations are quietly squeezing the hundreds they have suborned in Congress to do everything possible to defeat the president’s plans and prolong the damage being done to the republic. And, once again, McConnell and his colleagues are showing all citizens that it is ultimately Israel and its Jewish-American friends that decide how long America’s soldier-children remain in harm’s way in the Middle East, endlessly fighting wars that were lost long ago, and ones that have absolutely nothing to do with genuine U.S. national security.
No border wall, no Obama Care repeal, but, for the Neocons in Congress and out, there are always plenty of tax dollars and lives and limbs of U.S. Marines and soldiers to expend on Israel’s behalf.
–On Afghanistan: President Trump’s growing team of aged but still war-mongering Neocons has been augmented by – God help the republic — another Neocon by the name of Zalmay Khalilzad, who is the State Department’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation. Kahilzad is an ethnic Afghan and has been working on “Afghan affairs” almost since the Afghan Mujahedin first took the field against Moscow’s puppet communist Afghan regime in 1977-78. The remarkable thing about Khalilzad is that, although born an Afghan, he has never seemed to know anything about the country except its language. Since the USSR invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Khalizad has recommended policies that have been too often followed, though they have been reliably devoid of commonsense and always damaged U.S. national security.
During the mujahedin’s war against the Soviets and their Afghan communist proxies, for example, Khalilzad and all of the State Department supported those Afghan insurgents who were correctly described as “Gucci guerrillas”. The name was awarded to them because they spent little or no time on the battlefield, being too busy begging for U.S. money, running dope, and slipping away for vacations and personal security in the Gulf, Europe, or India.
The Guccis, however, had the great advantages of being fairly well kempt, usually spoke at least fair English, had traveled outside Afghanistan, and, on occasion, were even known to wear Western-style suits. Khailzad pushed these thieving frauds forward to U.S. leaders and, being the type of foreigners (well-coiffed, English speaking, and tie-wearing) that can always wrap U.S. politicians around their finger, and succeeded – with other democracy-mongers like Robert Oakley, his wife, and Peter Tomsen– in persuading the first Bush administration that these militarily incompetent insurgents were superb politicians who could form a sturdy and durable democratic government in Afghanistan.
As a result, the first Bush administration – which detested the stubbornness and deep faith of the mujahedin who actually fought and died to force the Red Army’s withdrawal – stayed in Afghanistan to build a “Jeffersonian Democracy on the Kabul River”, as the saying then went. Joining it were the UN, the British and German governments, and the lethal plague that fell on Afghans in the form of the myriad Western NGOs who showed up to grab as many U.S. dollars as they could, while teaching Afghans to be good, secular, and libertine Westerners. Needless to say, the end result of the advice Khalizad gave, and his buddies acted upon, was predictable. It yielded the birth and eventual political and military dominance of the Taleban, and created the essential safe haven for Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. After that disaster occurred, Khalizad shilled for international oil companies to persuade Taleban leaders to allow the construction of energy pipelines through Afghanistan. (1)
The only commonsense U.S. government decision after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, and, then, the 1992 defeat of the Afghan communists, would have been to pull up stakes run like hell to North America. With Western diplomats and the UN out of the way, the Afghans would have settled their affairs using the same means they successfully have employed for over 2,000 years. A decision to cut and run is the one President Trump should make today, right after he reaches out and gives Khalizad both a boot in the ass and his walking papers.
As if the idea Khalizad representing U.S. national-security interests is not absurd enough, another Neocon named Ryan Crocker has raised his head and published as stupid an assessment of “U.S. success” in Afghanistan as is possible to imagine. Crocker was the first U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan after 9/11 and, in his 29 January 2019 piece in an outlet called Trib Live, (2) he says nothing about the many billions of dollars that simply disappeared while he and his successors ran the show in Kabul. The same pattern of behavior, of course, occurred during the tenures of multiple U.S. ambassadors in Iraq. He also says nothing about the following facts:
–The Taleban holds more Afghan territory today than ever before.
–After an 18-year U.S. presence military in Afghanistan, the capital of Kabul is largely open to mujahedin attack.
–Afghanistan, today, remains the world’s biggest and most efficient producer/exporter of heroin.
–Since 2001, The Afghan people have proven that no matter how many governments they elect, each will be incompetent, tribal-rivalry ridden, and staffed by a crew of spectacularly skilled thieves, extortionists, and narcotics-and-people smugglers.
–The Afghan military, after 15 years of training and equipping by the U.S. and NATO militaries, cannot defend the country, or even its capital.
–The failed and miserably administered de facto U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, which was designed by Crocker, his ambassadorial successors, and the State Department, has now made Afghanistan a safe and growing haven for the Taleban, the Islamic State, a rebuilding al-Qaeda, and Pakistani and other foreign Islamists.
So, what constitutes the “U.S. success” in Afghanistan according to Crocker? He spends the bulk of his article explaining that the world’s only Superpower worked hard in Afghanistan not to win, but to – wait for it – cultivate women’s rights and feminism. “The Afghan people had suffered enormously through the civil war that began in the late 1970s and the tyranny of the Taliban that followed, Corker writes, “and [n]one had suffered more than Afghan women and girls.” This is Crocker’s justification for continuing a long-lost war in Afghanistan, and continuing the production of wasted billions of dollars and dead and maimed U.S. Marines and soldiers. Crocker continues his justification and even seems to support Joe Biden for the 2020 election.
“I remember taking our first congressional visitor, Joe Biden, D-Del., who was then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to visit a girls’ school that we had helped to open. A first-grade class that Biden visited had students from 6 to 12. The older girls had reached school age when the Taliban was in power, so they had been denied an education. They weren’t embarrassed now to be in a class with children half their age — they were just happy to be learning.”
“At the end of Taliban rule, about 900,000 children were in school, all of them boys. When I left Afghanistan as ambassador in 2012, there were 8 million students, 40 percent of them girls.”(NB: This is likely a lie. The Afghan government does not appear to control enough territory in Afghanistan in which to find eight-million youngsters to educate. You might get to a total of eight-million students if you include the schools run by the Taleban, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the Saudi and Gulf governments, and myriad, mostly radical Islamic NGOs.)
“We also encouraged Afghan women to play their rightful roles in business, in the Legislature, elsewhere in government and in the military, and they did. The implicit message was that if you step forward, we’ve got your back. It was a time when American interests and American values were in harmony. I hosted receptions to recognize Afghan women of courage. Through the U.S. Agency for International Development, we funded efforts to establish shelters for women fleeing spousal or other familial abuse — a reminder that in Afghanistan’s male-dominated society, it wasn’t only the Taliban who threatened women’s safety.”
Crocker clearly is mad – or, more likely, cynically deceitful – when he claims that this kind of achievement amounts to even a marginal success for any genuine U.S. national-security concern. For the U.S. national government, the only place on earth where ensuring women are full citizens is a genuine national-security interest is in the United States. What Crocker has described is a Democratic Party talking point that gives their politicians and the Neocons a chance to hawk Crocker’s nonsense as a compelling reason for “staying the course in Afghanistan”. Reflect for a moment, if you will, on what should be a hanging offense; namely, the sending of U.S. Marines and soldiers to fight and die for the rights the American governing elite wants to impose by force on foreign peoples.
There is, however, one point on which Crocker hits the nail’s head:
“Now, the United States is negotiating directly with the Taliban. A framework agreement was announced on Monday calling for a cease-fire that could lead to the full withdrawal of U.S. troops. The framework was reached without the involvement of the Afghan government. … By acceding to this Taliban demand, we have ourselves delegitimized the government we claim to support. This current process bears an unfortunate resemblance to the Paris peace talks during the Vietnam War. Then, as now, it was clear that we were just negotiating the terms of our surrender. The Taliban will offer any number of commitments, knowing that when we are gone and the Taliban is back, we will have no means of enforcing any of them.”
Crocker is exactly right on this point, but he is blind to its accuracy because – like all Neocons – he wants the republic to stay in Afghanistan and lusts for more democracy-mongering and its only tool of installation, offensive war. A policy that produces, as cover for scurrying home to North America, the creation of “coalition Afghan regime” is exactly the America-First tack that the Trump administration must pursue. Since the Soviet invasion of 1979 there never has been a single point in time at which a credible coalition governing arrangement was possible. Perhaps better than any other people on earth, Afghans realize that power is the only universal value, and that those who have it win and survive, those who lose it are dead or emigres.
Whether it was the Russians, the Afghan communists, the Islamist mujahedin, the claptrap, thieving U.S.-NATO-UN-crafted Afghan regimes, the Taleban, or now the Islamic State, there never has been, nor will there ever be, a powerful Afghan entity that will have the slightest intention of genuinely sharing power with other Afghan entities. Today, as Crocker notes, the Taleban will be happy to accept a coalition with the current Afghan government, play well with its coalition partner(s) until NATO and U.S. forces are gone, and then wipe them out and try – with the help of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, et. al — to hold power against the growing Islamic State presence in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and, just around the corner, the advance of Chinese military power, and the savage and ultimately losing war Beijing will have to wage to try to build the illusory dream China calls the One Belt, One Road Project.
Get out of Syria and Afghanistan, Mr. President. Your instincts were the right ones during the 2016 campaign and they helped get you elected. Stick to them now, Sir, and you will win not only the support, but the affection of those Americans who have long opposed the enormous waste of lives and money in unnecessary and always losing interventionist wars. Unlike the bloated egos and arrogance of the U.S. governing elite, the egos of most Americans do not need to have their republic be “the great, shining city on the hill” for the rest of the world, they only need it to be that for themselves and their families, as something to live up to, not as a commodity to be exported by military force.
So, Mr. President, go ahead, let Syria be for the Syrians, and let Afghanistan be for the Afghans. Let both make of their lands what they wish, to the extent they can. But in the name of God, Sir, for the first time since 1945 let America once again be for Americans, and permit the citizenry to restore the republic as they see fit, and in a form that pleases them. May I say, Sir, that this does not seem to be a lot to ask, and it is in your grasp to provide. End these unnecessary wars.
–Endnotes:
–1.) https://ips-dc.org/un_ambassadors_oily_past/ and http://afghan-bios.info/index.php?option=com_afghanbios&id=884&task=view&total=3424&start=1572&Itemid=2
–2.) https://triblive.com/opinion/featuredcommentary/14557561-74/ryan-crocker-the-us-is-surrendering-to-taliban
