Jack of Harts

So reports are that the Taliban is stopping people from going to the airport if they want to. Checkpoints. Random attacks. Some people getting kidnapped on the road. And there are thousands of Americans there. The British and French are going in and removing their people with special forces. Other reports are that the Taliban got the government records and are tracking down people who worked with us to kill them and their families. Women are handing their babies over barbed wire fences to get them out of the region. Things are getting worse each day, while Biden and his tame media are doing their best to tell us exactly the opposite.

Like most Americans, I am in favor of leaving Afghanistan. We should not have stayed as long as we did. We should have supported the Northern Alliance against the Taliban twenty years ago, destroyed Al-Qaeda, and left no more than a residual or support force there. Like we do with the Kurds in Iraq. Give them air support from secure bases, but let the locals fight in and for their own country. It is their land to hold and defend, not ours. I’m perfectly fine with us keeping small forces in the area, inside secure bases, helping the locals when they want help, but we should not have large scale armies taking the region over. The fact is that there are good ways and bad ways to reduce or remove our presence. The plan we see in action now is not one of the better ones, if you wish to support a peaceful region.

I made an honestly snarky comment on Sunday about generational choppers lifting people out of Saigon and now Kabul. I was quickly schooled by a friend who knows choppers better than me. The old heavy lift choppers the Navy used to evacuate Saigon were retired years ago. The military uses an entirely new generation of craft. Then he came back with some interesting news. If the people who know things are reading things correctly, based on pictures, aircraft identification numbers, and service histories, at least one of those old Navy choppers that evacuated Saigon was reactivated and turned over to the State Department. They took it to Kabul. Where it just helped evacuate the embassy. If I wrote this in a story, people would think I made it up.