I want you to watch this.

That’s from a few weeks ago. It is dark, horrible stuff and yes, I agree: shame on the world for what is happening in Afghanistan.

Except, shame doesn’t begin to touch what the whole world should be feeling right now. And everyone is sitting there watching it happen.

It is no simple thing. First of all, President Biden, then a vice president, told someone out loud that there was no reason to stay in Afghanistan. When asked what the consequences of pulling out would be he said, “Fuck that. Look at Vietnam in ’73. Nixon and Kissinger (got away with it)”. In other words he knew we had been there long enough to affect their culture, but in the end, fuck that. Let’s just leave even though we know the Taliban, al-Qaeda and even ISIS would mass forces and move back in, killing anyone known, suspected or just accused of aiding U.S. forces. And kill and enslave women and little girls. Fuck them. Let’s just leave.

Here’s John Oliver’s take on Afghanistan, and I cannot make any better summary than this.

I’ll defend anyone who makes a stand for the greater good, but some ache deep in my gut has me thinking that nobody in Washington had the greater good on their mind. The quote from Vice President Biden haunts me. The greater good. Right.

This has been the track record of American politics ever since Vietnam. We go, we kill, we claim the high ground, we get bogged down, we leave.

But in Afghanistan it was different than in Vietnam. That was a different war, a different time. We should have, if nothing else, learned the harsh lesson it offered.

We aren’t too good at learning lessons, though. I’m sorry for that. But I’m not certain that lessons learned, if there had been any, would have been very helpful. Not in the quagmire which was Afghanistan. Fighting against dedicated communist guerrillas along with the standing NVA after the French already had their asses kicked there was about as stupid as we could get, or so we thought. But the men who came up with the idea of invading Afghanistan utterly lacked brains enough to know what was bound to happen.

Of course, we helped create the Taliban. And John Oliver is correct; the unwritten rule that you don’t go near Afghanistan and certainly don’t invade it was literally a plot point of Rambo 3.

So some screenwriter knew two decades before that invading Afghanistan was stupid no matter what hardware you took along. Some of which we’ve left for the terrorists to use against us in the future. Meanwhile nobody in Washington seems to have had the sense of a B movie screenwriter.

What we have done to the people of Afghanistan is utterly dishonorable and inhumane. And fuck everyone at Fox News.

Fuck every one of your distorted truths and outright lies. And fuck everyone who denies that we are responsible for the lives of civilians we’ve left behind.

Responsible for their deaths as well.

Even our own veterans who just did their duty and came back injured in mind and body get treated like they’re not in any way people of consequence. The suicides are the proof. Before we ever send men and women in harm’s way again, we would do well to have a support system in place for the veterans. War changes people. Always, for the worse.

Twenty years of casualties for what return? Osama bin Laden is dead. Big deal. He wasn’t even a player anymore. He was reduced to watching porn on VHS tapes in a fortified hovel. The Pakistan government were the ones protecting him, proving just what they really think of us. That’s not all Pakistan did, either. But most importantly what we get from twenty years of war is…nothing.

Absolutely fucking nothing. Trump dealt with the terrorist leaders because he was an idiot who thought they would keep their word. But coincidentally we really did have to leave. Biden just finished the job.

Considering the dead, the progress women made which will now get them killed or hand them a living hell, we should never have gone there in the first place.

This is why I have nothing positive to say about George Bush and his satanic version of Jiminy Cricket, Dick Cheney.

Look, America. Look at what we have done.

And this time…try to fucking learn from it.