More than 800,000 Soldiers, Airmen, Marines and Navy Sailors served in the war in Afghanistan. I am one of them. I worked the streets of Kabul on my last deployment. Day, and night we trudged the mind- bending, stomach- turning streets of the overcrowded streets of Kabul. It amazed me how many people could fit on the back of one motor bike, and how daring civilians were to jump right in front of an armored vehicle with the horn blaring with seemingly no regard for their personal safety.
I became a man there too. I learned a lot about myself. I fought hard there. I fired a weapon at another man whose only goal in his entire sad, misguided life was to kill me. As the fight raged on, the man’s body just stayed there after I put him down. For nearly Eighteen hours, I watched as other fighters stepped over this man, took his weapon, and stripped him of his ammunition. At the end of the day, all he was to them was another dead fighter, there to be stripped of his supplies and forgotten.
It is fitting that the 10th anniversary of that day is upcoming. It's September 13th. I remember it well. It was 2 days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11 and just a year before the uprising in Benghazi, Libya.
I got to peek far behind the war curtain on that year-long deployment. I was in a leadership position. I agonized over every one of the thousands of decisions I made that year. There is nothing worse to a soldier than the feeling you get when you may have flubbed something and put another man who wears your unit patch in danger. It is indescribable. You would rather die yourself than to get someone else hurt.
That’s why I cannot fathom the missteps, the almost pathological behavior of President Joe Biden’s administration, and the decisions surrounding ending the Afghanistan conflict. I have to imagine that this is all by design. Nobody could be incompetent enough to give away our most strategic staging area in country: Bagram Air field.
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Bagram is so important positionally. It is easy to defend. It sits Three-Hundred miles from China and Iran, who are serious adversaries to the United States on the world stage.
General Mark Milley has come out and said that Bagram was not important tactically to the Afghanistan pull-out. Milley has had some idiotic moments, but he is not a stupid man. General Milley does not believe that Bagram isn’t important. The worms and pencil-necks of this administration have clearly gotten to him. Think tank guys like Jake Sullivan and Anthony Blinken have talked General Milley out of his good senses.
The plan had to go forward without Bagram. The plan was to add to world de-stabilization. Demoralize completely the military, and make sure that a plane load of fresh democrat voters would be en route to a United States city near you. It is the only logical conclusion that I can draw. Even Joe Biden, who had been a failure for Forty-plus years as a senator could not have screwed this up, like this. It has to be by design.
Read any communist playbook. Most communists like Barack Obama and soon to be President Kamala Harris see no use for an American military as currently constituted. Much like the police force, they want to break them down and build them up as their military. One that does their bidding and holds their ideals.
Step one: Demoralize. Step 2: Throw it into disarray. That has happened as well.
Enlisted men do not trust their leadership. Find them incompetent, and want them tried for murder after the death of 12 Marines, a Corpsman and a soldier last week in a suicide attack.
The military is a complete mess right now. Everyone wants out. Everyone is completely embarrassed and is ready to throw their rank on the table and head off to make solar panels like John Kerry promised.
To the ruling class, this is a fantastic result. They do not want good, red-blooded Americans who find what happened over the past 7-10 days as reprehensible.
They want ideologues who will go along to get along, and do their bidding. Like Mark Milley, who was looking for "White Rage" In the halls of the Pentagon before this pesky Afghanistan issue cropped up. Or Lloyd Austin, who was never a bright General, who was giving political purity tests to lower enlisted upon his installation of Secretary of Defense last January. They are nothing more than lackeys with no moral compass, or honor. They are just right for this administration.
It should not surprise you that Americans are stranded in Afghanistan, behind enemy lines, yet plane load after plane load of refugees left Kabul ear-marked for the United States. The people left behind could be or maybe will be again Trump voters. Hell, they may not even be vaccinated (Gasp!) These refugees will be so happy to be in the States that they will vote for the ruling class forever. Which is all that matters.
Oh, and one more thing: You should not be surprised at how callous the President acted when receiving the remains of our honored war dead at Dover Air Base yesterday. These patriotic kids are not his constituents. The president nonchalantly checked his watch at every casket that was unloaded. Casualties of his bungling of the surrender. Nobody will really hold him to account. He is literally here to be the patsy. A Grandfatherly idiot, who is barely coherent enough to understand what he is being used for. There was no happy ending to the war in Afghanistan. No Sailor kissing a girl in Times Square, in a pretty white dress while fireworks go off in the background. It ended like it started, with American blood, and so many unanswered questions.
David McGrath is a war veteran with 13 years of service with multiple deployments to the Middle East. His work has been published in multiple outlets covering a variety of topics from sports to military life. He is a conservative activist with a wife and 2 sons and a 2022 graduate of Brown University.
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