President Biden to declare that the war in Afghanistan will end by September 11, 2021
President Biden to declare that the war in Afghanistan will end by September 11, 2021
Biden to extend the Trump regime's timetable for withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan by several months, but intends to honor the policy of withdrawal
President Biden will announce his intention to remove U.S. soldiers from Afghanistan by September 11, 2021, nearly two full decades since the beginning of the longest war in American history. From CNN:
On Wednesday, Biden will formally announce his decision to withdraw all American troops before September 11, the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon that led the US into its longest war.
"We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan hoping to create the ideal conditions for our withdrawal, expecting a different result," Biden will say in his remarks, scheduled for 2:15 p.m. ET on Wednesday.
"I am now the fourth American president to preside over an American troop presence in Afghanistan. Two Republicans. Two Democrats," he will say. "I will not pass this responsibility to a fifth."
In a sign he views his remarks as a historic bookend to the prolonged conflict, he will deliver them from precisely the same spot in the White House Treaty Room that President George W. Bush announced the start of the war on October 7, 2001. Afterward he'll visit the section of Arlington National Cemetery where many of America's war dead from Afghanistan are buried.
Biden’s immediate predecessor, Donald Trump, often talked about ending “stupid wars” in the Middle East, but never actually did anything about it aside from moving a small number of troops around the map every so often. The best that can be said for him is that he didn’t end up starting a new war, despite potentially coming close when he illegally assassinated an Iranian general. As for Biden’s former boss, Barack Obama, he has an even worse record on foreign policy, having ramped up the war in Afghanistan, having started a new war in Syria, and having lied about ending the war in Iraq only to turn around and start a brand new phase of that war against a new enemy, the Islamic State (Which was made up of the same terrorist elements that he was actually arming in Syria to overthrow the government in that country).
Joe Biden now has the chance to do what neither of his predecessors has been brave enough to do before him: Begin the process of ending George W. Bush’s disastrous, civilization-destroying “War on Terror” once and for all.
The New York Times, “The Newspaper of Record,” that record being one of constant warmongering, took little time to begin stoking fears about the possibility that a war could end as two blocks at the top of their homepage on the morning of Biden’s scheduled address indicate.
Note the cynical exploitation of liberal values like “women’s rights” to try to convince people that ending a war with a group of people, the Taliban, who did not attack the United States on September 11, 2001, is a bad thing. What goes unmentioned are the women in Afghanistan who have had their lives ruined by America’s military occupation of their country, or whose children have been killed or who have been killed themselves as “collateral damage” in America’s war. The rights of those women to their lives or their property don’t matter because they were violated in the name of “freedom” or “democracy.” No, the only “women’s rights” in Afghanistan that the NYT, or neocons like Max Boot, care about are those that are trampled on by the religious fundamentalists in the Taliban because they’re “the bad guys.”
It’s also ludicrous to claim that the U.S. government under the Obama regime simply “found itself” pulled back into Iraq, as if it was an inevitability and that the most powerful government on Earth lacked agency entirely in the matter. No, they made the choice to ramp up the U.S. military presence in that country again, despite having the option and many good reasons not to do so.
This is not the first time that Biden has declared that the war in Afghanistan will end, however, as then-president Barack Obama endorsed then-vice president Biden’s claim that American troops will be out of Afghanistan in 2014 during their 2012 reelection campaign.
So the war that President Biden is saying will end in September of 2021, was already supposed to have been over, according to him, seven years ago. “Period.” This fact makes it hard to take Biden seriously when he makes the same claim almost a decade later, but it is something to hope for regardless.
If President Biden does what he says he’s going to do, and withdraws American troops from Afghanistan, and if it’s not a ploy like Obama’s “withdrawal” from Iraq, then Biden will have done the best thing that any president has done in my lifetime: Ending a horrible, pointless, destructive war. The problem is in trusting a politician like Joe Biden to have the courage of his convictions, or to tell the truth.
When questioned on whether his support for ending the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq immediately was irresponsible, Ron Paul, who ran for the Republican nomination for president in 2008 and 2012, once quipped that, “We just marched in, we can just march out.” Unfortunately, Joe Biden is no Ron Paul, but he doesn’t have to be for it to be a good thing for him to end the war. The old axiom of “Better late than never” is absolutely true in this case, unless delay is merely an excuse to find a reason to stay, as the cynic in me fears it probably is.