President Biden should command prime time on all networks tonight to announce a Berlin-style airlift of all Americans and Afghans who supported America’s 20-year war. He should also lay blame for this debacle where it belongs, namely at the feet of the Afghan soldiers who used those feet to high tail it and run when it came time to defend their own country. This, after the United States expended the blood of thousands of American soldiers and a trillion dollars of American taxpayer dollars training them to do so.
And viral images of the homes Afghan generals left behind make clear where far too many of those dollars went. Because they make Saddam Hussein’s notorious palaces look like Bantu huts.
But how does any proud Afghan explain the fact that hardly a woman or child could be found among the thousands who flooded the airport, and hopped on taxiing planes like Indians hopping on rush-hour trains, in a desperate attempt to escape? If chivalry didn’t die in Afghanistan long ago, it died today.
In any event, framing this evacuation as a Berlin-style airlift would evoke more of a humanitarian mission than the Saigon-style evacuation playing out in such humiliating fashion for all the world to see. And Biden should pledge to deploy all the troops and commit all the resources necessary to emulate the prodigiousness and proficiency of that historic airlift.
That said, stop making comparisons to troops still stationed in Japan and Germany 70 years later. Because the obvious difference is that the Japanese and Germans were not continually trying to kill the American troops who were helping them rebuild their countries, respectively, the way Afghan Taliban have been doing from day one.
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