Joe Biden, who says the buck regarding Afghanistan stops with him in the White House, claims that the Taliban’s final takeover of the capital, Kabul, provoking mass panic reminiscent of Saigon, 1975, happened more quickly “than anticipated.” If that’s true – spoiler alert: it ain’t – then we taxpayers should demand the mass firings and resignations of anyone in the America intel apparatus having anything to do with Afghanistan. We should also demand our money back. Intel isn’t cheap.
The U.S. government has been in that country for nearly 20 years with a political, military, and Intel presence. The American taxpayers are forced to cough up about $85 billion a year for the lying, spying, killing, and torturing agencies benignly called the “Intel community.” I realize that not all of that targets foreigners; some of it is devoted to spying on us. But still…
So even if Biden were telling the truth, it would mean that we’ve just witnessed a colossal failure and the clearest demonstration of incompetence imaginable.
What will be the consequences? There will be none.
Of course, Biden was lying, just as Trump, Obama, and Bush 2 and their people systematically lied to the American people about Afghanistan. This has been documented over and over. About this there can be no doubt.
Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute, senior fellow and chair of the trustees of the Center for a Stateless Society, and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies, former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education, and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest book is What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.
