skynews America has fallen. The world’s mightiest power has failed to stop a stone age, parochial, quasi-terrorist organisation from retaking a country it last ruled 20 years ago, writes Joe Hildebrand.
This is a monumental military and moral failure that has kicked the stilts from under the United States’ once unrivalled authority as the flawed but forceful source of security and surety in the world.
I say this with both great certainty and great sorrow. I love America, I am half-American and whatever its myriad faults I have always believed it to be the keystone to world peace and order.
But the hamfisted and haphazard abandonment of the people of Afghanistan — especially women and children — is a scar on the nation that will never heal.
There can now be no doubt that Afghanistan is America’s second Vietnam. A prolonged and ultimately pointless war the US entered with both noble rhetoric of democratic freedoms and strategic goals of regional security only to withdraw in humiliation having achieved neither.
American and Australian troops who sacrificed their lives and souls on the ground have every right to ask what it was all for. Today no political leader can answer that question.
I wrote many times during the US primaries and presidential election that Joe Biden was the best of a bad lot. He was a moderate centrist who fended off the lunatic green-left elements of the Democratic Party and had the language, carriage and familiarity to appeal to middle America.
That clearly proved to be so but it is now equally clear that he is incapable of being commander-in-chief of a global superpower.
Obviously the Afghanistan government and military sit is a basketcase but this cannot excuse the fact that American intelligence failed, American military training failed and American air support failed.
It could also be argued that Taliban rule is perhaps not much worse than various tinpot dictatorships around the globe, but Western powers did not dethrone those evil governments with the promise of freedom only to cut and run when it all got too hard, leaving their citizens to slaughter.
And it is undeniably true that Donald Trump was the first to sign a deal with the Devil when he committed to withdrawing from Afghanistan, just as he abandoned the Kurdish people to Islamic State terrorists — all in the name of doona-covered American isolationism.
Passing strange, however, that a supposedly progressive US President would overturn almost all of Trump’s policies but decide that his handshake with a terrorist organisation that stones women to death for adultery was the one promise that had to be kept.
This is an American disgrace writ large on a global scale and Biden has rivers of blood on his hands. Troublingly, there is little public evidence he is even fully aware of the problem.
The truth is the South Park boys were right: America only really works if it is the World Police. Otherwise what is the point of it? Just another fat overpopulated country?
Now it has gone from four years being run by a madman to one year being run by a man who wouldn’t know whether he was mad or not unless someone passed him a note.
Unless America gets itself together China will roll in with effortless abandon and take its place as the number one global superpower. And there are plenty of other countries that will watch and fall in from the sidelines.
If the US can’t even liberate women and children from a ragtag bunch of terrorists like the Taliban then what is the meaning of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness?
What is the purpose of it at all?
