Thoughts at random, worth every cent you paid for them.
 It's hard to get worked up about all the military equipment left in Afghanistan. All that materiel was left to equip the Mighty Afghan Army, and there should have been more in the pipeline. Remember they were supposed to be able to pick up the fight on their own, with U.S. air and intel support. The Ghani government was in "peace negotiations" with he Talibs in Qatar. The Talibs were supposed to have 5,000 prisoners released, after which there was supposed to be a ceasefire, and the two sides were supposed to work out a structure for a transitional government. The U.S. was supposed to be the guarantor of the deal.
- Biden broke the deal by not enforcing our end of it. U.S. troops were supposed to be out by May 31st, not 9/11, which was a technical violation—go to the two sides, get both to agree to the date change, initial, and done. Instead the firm of Winken, Blinken & Nod seems to have merely informed the Talibs of the change. The agreement was the reason we went eighteen months without any casualties.
- The deal, as far as I know didn't cover U.S. contractors, the polite guise under which the CIA operates. Going by my own experience in Vietnam, there were joint intel collection operations, which should have been keeping the Afghan side aware of most things we knew about the Talibs, which would have included the addresses and phone numbers and wives' preferences in birthday chocolates of the Quetta Shura. Withdrawing the maintenance contractors, the guys who kept the aircraft flying and the radars raiding left the ANA high and dry, which was pretty much what happened in Vietnam too, when the Democrats cut the money for the South Vietnamese government and army, which up until that time had been holding its own. Bastards. At least they predictable.
 - The Dems expect all this to have fallen down the memory hole since it happened in an off-election year. Quick! Name something good or bad that happened in 2019! I could be wrong, but I don't think that'll happen. The blow to national pride and standing has been too severe. I think most people realize that there's no way Trump would have let it happen. If the Dems don't take a political beating it will be because people like AOC and Maxine Waters and Ilhan Omar and Harry Reid and Chuck Schumer get reelected because either their constituents like them and their opinions, or the alternative is considered too horrible, or the machine's really greased well. If we had a parliamentary system, Nancy Pelosi would be prime minister. She feels the loss. Believe it.
- As I write these words, it's twenty years to the day from September 10th. That's a day after Massoud was assassinated on September 9th, and the day before September 11th, when nineteen Arabs -- fifteen of them Saudi -- boarded four planes without having their carry-on luggage x-rayed. After twenty years, we're back to a September 10th world. Sure, Afghanistan's in the news, but that's because we're leaving, not kicking the collective Pashtun butt. Expect Gary Condit and his thumbless wife to reappear any time now. Expect Michael Jackson to rise from the grave for a new and makeup-free re-release of Thriller. Expect shark attacks up and down both coasts and the surfing population of Australia to decline by half.
- For most of the past twenty years, the public hasn't known what was going on in the most important aspect of its life. There were howls from the antiwar left when we went into Iraq. The public supported it because we had gone through the fourth-largest army in the world like a hot knife through butter in the Gulf War -- a war of maneuver, not a war of occupation. Bush I was heavily criticized for not pushing on to Baghdad, recall. Had Schwartzkopf (PBUH) been in charge this time around, things probably would have gone better, but not much better. We expected to win and win easily, and we did. When it did turn into a war of occupation, it went differently. No MacArthur in Tokyo equivalent was installed. We didn't catch Saddam right off the bat, we didn't catch Zarqawi out of the gate. How many of the "52 cards" did we actually nab? (Actually, most of them.) Izzat Ibrahim, who was probably the most important of them, died last October, probably of old age.
 - What do we have to show for the expenditure of men and money over two hard decades? The al-Qaeda hydra had its head lopped off and grew another, and then another, but with the Saudi money drying up they're still becoming anemic. ISIS is now the bigger problem. The treasury, despite the opinions of the Dems, is looking pretty depleted. Wars cost a lot of money. Troops need paid and supplied, munitions aren't free, and the Air Force sez each new Reaper drone, costs somewhere between $14 million (2008) and $32 million (2021). It costs $4,762 per hour to operate it -- a bargain, compared to a B2 bomber ($169,313). Bin Laden's objective was to break our economy, and to that extent he succeeded. The dollar's in far worse shape than it was in 2001
- On the other hand, bin Laden is dead. If you're reading this, you probably aren't. The Saudis seem to have quietly given up driving Islamism and are now pretending they were on our side all along. The Paks have given up trying to pretend they're on our side. Saddam's gone. Zarqawi's gone. A succession of Chechen supremos is gone, most of them forgotten. Arafat's gone, Saleh's gone. Qadaffy's gone. Mubarak's gone, followed by Morsi. Even ben Ali's gone, and he was relatively harmless. Gone also are most of the Saudi Abu Whatsisnames and emirs and holy men who were driving Islamism. Qazi's dead, Sami's dead. Nizamuddin Shamzai is long dead. Qatar and Yusuf Qaradawi are about it. Even Morocco's Islamist government is out. We haven't spread democracy throughout the world, but we've given Islamism a pretty thorough beating.
 - Afghanistan is the exception. We win wars of maneuver. We know how to do that. Infantry fights battles, logistics wins them. That's why there's enough equipment remaining to equip an army. That was what it was there for. The other rule we passed on was not allowing a safe haven. The Vietnamese commies had Laos and Cambodia to withdraw to. The Taliban had Pakistain.
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