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August 28th, 2021 
Awake Goy 
Ever since the United States began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the mainstream media has implemented a full-court press in support of continued occupation.
If you turned on the Sunday news shows you encountered all the usual suspects making the usual cases for perpetual war. Liz Cheney. Ryan Crocker. Nikki Haley. Ben Sasse. Pompeo. Cotton. Gingrich. Journalists continue to report on the feelings of those most responsible for the destruction. George Bush is filled with sadness. Tony Blair whines about the “moral obligation” to stay in Afghanistan. The White House press have grown more comical than usual. A reporter asks Biden if he trusts the Taliban. Another guy cries about bases in Tajikistan.
On Twitter various mainstream reporters have taken the mask of objectivity off completely. Jim Sciutto posted a picture of people in a prison. “Hanging on my office wall: Al Qaeda fighters imprisoned in northern Afghanistan after the US invasion,” he explained. “One of them smiled as he told me he’d kill Americans. Disturbing to see these prisons now emptied.”
Why would anyone have this picture hanging on their office wall?
CNN Pentagon correspondent Barbara Starr has been posting pictures of U.S. soldiers cradling Afghan children. “Ok yeah I have had this career for a few years. I have covered Bosnia, Desert Storm, Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria,” she tweeted. “But I have never seen a national level military response struggle like this one. It’s that Marine holding a big water bottle for a small Afghan boy I hold onto. Of course so many parts of the US govt are struggling to get it done. But what we all know it is the American soldier, Marine, sailor and airman the world sees and THEIR individual efforts are pure heroism.”
Here’s Starr’s Twitter bio: “A free press is a national security imperative.” Uh, yeah.
Over the last couple weeks New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker has distinguished himself as one of our more shameless imperial scribes. In a piece of “news analysis” at the paper Baker explains how Biden is the same as Trump because he’s getting out of Afghanistan.
“But the tumultuous endgame of Mr. Biden’s withdrawal has nonetheless undercut some of the most fundamental premises of Mr. Biden’s presidency — that unlike his erratic, self-absorbed predecessor, he brought foreign policy seasoning, adults-in-the-room judgment and a surfeit of empathy to the Oval Office,” he writes.
What exactly does any of this mean? Biden said he’d get out of Afghanistan while running for president, he won, and now he is. You can agree with the decision, or disagree with it, but what premise is being undercut?
Sciutto goes on to quote former Obama adviser David Axelrod: “The way it’s ending, at least thus far, is more problematical and cuts against some of his core perceived strengths: competence, mastery of foreign policy, supreme empathy. It’s as if his eagerness to end the war overran the planning and execution.”
Why should anyone care what Axelrod thinks about this? The guy’s former boss said he’d get out of Afghanistan too, but lacked the political courage to actually go forward with it. Here’s Axelrod talking after the troop surge in 2009:
Fundamentally, what we need to think through is what is the best way to achieve our goals, which is to disrupt and dismantle al-Qaida, so they can’t stage operations against the U.S. and our allies…this is a complex issue. As an American, I’m happy the president is diving in as deep as he is and gathering information so he can make the right decision.
He made the wrong one of course.
By Axelrod’s own admission Biden was skeptical of the war back then, even when people like Hillary Clinton were pushing for more troops. Here he is recalling the Situation Room talks:
The Pentagon, Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton strongly advocated for sending 40,000 troops to repel a resurgent Taliban. They said it would create space for democracy and civil society to take root.
Central to the strategy was training the Afghan army and police so they could defend the country themselves.
Biden didn’t buy it. In an animated conversation in his office before the meetings began, he told me that the mission was drifting from its origins and that the Pentagon plan, pointedly leaked to the media before it even hit the president’s desk, would result in a quagmire.
Our objective in going there was to destroy al Qaeda so why the hell are we plunging into COIN here?” the vice president asked, using the acronym for the type of elaborate counter insurgency program the military was proposing. “The president asked me to play the bad cop here and that’s what I’m going to do.“
Remember the early days of the Obama administration when everyone was reading Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln book and claiming that the President was assembling a team of rivals? That was always a curious narrative. For starters Lincoln presided over a brutal war for his entire presidency, so there were obviously many political rivals he didn’t care to debate. Obama was always much more forgiving. Millions of Americans chose him over Clinton because he opposed the Iraq War and she didn’t, but he gave her one of the most important jobs in the world. Being wrong about the biggest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam obviously wasn’t a dealbreaker.
Like the Clinton choice, his selection of a Vice President was also a nod to the hawks. Here’s the late, great Alexander Cockburn on his pick at the time:
“Change” and “hope” are not words one associates with Senator Joe Biden, a man so ripely symbolic of everything that is unchanging and hopeless about our political system that a computer simulation of the corporate-political paradigm senator in Congress would turn out “Biden” in a nano-second….His “experience” in foreign affairs consists in absolute fidelity to the conventions of cold war liberalism, the efficient elder brother of raffish “neo-conservatism.”
Thirteen years later U.S. history has produced one of its more peculiar ironies, as that hawkish former-VP defends withdrawal in the kind of concise terms Obama never offered. Here’s Biden being interviewed by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos:
STEPHANOPOULOS: So would you have withdrawn troops like this even if President Trump had not made that deal with the Taliban?
BIDEN: I would’ve tried to figure out how to withdraw those troops, yes, because look, George. There is no good time to leave Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago would’ve been a problem, 15 years from now. The basic choice is am I gonna send your sons and your daughters to war in Afghanistan in perpetuity?
STEPHANOPOULOS: That’s–
BIDEN: No one can name for me a time when this would end. And what– wha– wha– what– what constitutes defeat of the Taliban? What constitutes defeat? Would we have left then? Let’s say they surrender like before. OK. Do we leave then? Do you think anybody– the same people who think we should stay would’ve said, “No, good time to go”? We spent over $1 trillion, George, 20 years. There was no good time to leave.
The United States actually spent over $2 trillion in Afghanistan. Beyond that, where’s the lie?
Last week CNN Chief International Correspondent Clarissa Ward told viewers, “I’m sitting here for 12 hours in the airport, 8 hours on the airfield and I haven’t seen a single US plane take off. How on Earth are you going to evacuate 50,000 people in the next two weeks? It just, it can’t happen.” That was on August 20. By the morning of August 24 58,700 evacuees had been flown out of Afghanistan. By that evening the number was over 70,000. This was all done in ten days.
Stuff like this has been reported on, but who cares? It’s safe to assume it’s effectively been drowned out by the cacophony of pro-war punditry. People believe everything is suddenly going to hell and why wouldn’t they? Let’s say you’re an American looking to be informed about the world. Maybe you turn on one of the major networks every evening to watch the news. How much coverage did ABC, CBS, and NBC devote to Afghanistan during their nightly news shows last year? Thanks to the Tyndall Report we now know the answer: five minutes. Five. Minutes. The preceding five years added up to 362 minutes. That’s an average of 24 minutes per network per year.
“The network nightly newscasts have not been on a war footing in their coverage of Afghanistan since 2014,” explained Andrew Tyndal at his blog. “For the last seven years they have treated the role of the military there as an afterthought, essentially a routine exercise in training and support, generating little excitement, no noticeable jeopardy and few headlines.”
If someone has been getting their Afghanistan updates from these networks, they probably assumed that things were going swimmingly for the country. All of a sudden their televisions are flashing terrible images and showing videos of a resurgent Taliban. They’re not viewing all this recent chaos as a continuation of the last two decades, they predictably see it as a shift. Things have suddenly taken a turn for the worse, they conclude.
What did this hypothetical person miss? Nick Turse has a fantastic thread on Twitter rounding up Afghanistan stories that were largely ignored by the mainstream media. Here’s a small sample but I recommend checking out the whole thing:
‘I Remember Them Screaming’: Afghans Detail Alleged Killings By Australian Military
Targeted Killings Are Terrorizing Afghans. And No One Is Claiming Them.
Despite the public’s opinion on how the withdrawal is going, a majority of Americans still support getting out of Afghanistan and reject the logic of unceasing occupation. This view is bipartisan and the media has failed to change it in any meaningful way. Not for lack of trying though.
The author of a recent Morning Consult/Politico push poll must have thought they finally had a layup when they asked people this leading question: “Do you believe the U.S. should still withdraw its military presence in Afghanistan if it means it creates an opening for Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups to establish operations in Afghanistan?” Essentially asking people if they support terrorists would surely fetch the desired result and help shift the narrative, right?
Wrong. Despite two weeks of propaganda the media couldn’t even get net opposition for withdrawal with that ridiculous inquiry. This morning two explosions rocked Kabul, killing dozens of civilians and US personnel. The media will undoubtedly exploit this tragedy as argument for more war. However, the recent polling shows us how the American people will probably view it. Support for withdrawal could increase even more by this evening.
The United States lost in Afghanistan but so did a large section of the press. Their reactions make more sense when you realize they’re grieving both setbacks.
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