The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

We left Afghanistan last night with our tails between our legs. Twenty years, two trillion dollars, thousands of lives, tens of thousands of casualties. The President is taking heat from all quarters that the exit strategy was too little too late, botched completely, so friends and foe alike proclaim. But not me. The man was the only one with the guts to pull us out of there. Was it a mess at the end? Oh yeah, it was a chaotic reprise of Saigon. Could it have been handled more adroitly? Personally, I doubt it. Course, I’m not a military strategist.

The military strategists had twenty years to figure out Afghanistan so don’t talk to me about screwed up exits. We had two decades of slow motion screw-ups. By the end Trump negotiated with the Taliban without even bothering to bring in the Afghan government. We’ll be leaving May 1st, he said, and then swapped out the hundreds of Taliban fighters held in custody, no doubt plenty of them waiting at the airport for the last days of the war. There’s plenty of blame to go around so sure, blame the guy who finally said enough is really enough. It was a hopeless cause and where that two trillion dollars went, your guess is as good as mine.

What I know is that we didn’t spend it on curing cancer. We didn’t spend it on health care. We didn’t use it to shrink down income inequality. We weren’t spending it on better schools or education. We didn’t build up our infrastructure, fix our bridges, bring the internet to rural communities. Hell, I don’t know, maybe we could’ve used that money to make America great again, why not???

Most of the critics of the exit really just want to stay there, keep a garrison or three, protect the women the Taliban treat like dogs, bring some kind of democracy to their war torn country that essentially is engaged in a civil war. They would spend another two trillion, hire contractors like Blackwater and Eric Prince, sell armaments and keep the military industrial complex fat and happy because, well, it costs plenty to keep an empire running.

So when you hear folks say we just don’t have the money to fix some of our own problems, might cause debt, might cause runaway inflation, might have to raise taxes, tell them Sleepy Joe just saved you a couple trillion on an endless wasted war. Not bad, Joe, not bad at all.

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