Why Did We Pull Out of Afghanistan?

There are lots of reasons why I’m going to vote for Joe in November, not the least being the fact that I always vote for the blue team. I even held my nose in 2016 and voted for she-who-still-can’t-keep-her-fucking-mouth-shut-but-I-won’t-mention-her-name, which only proves that I’m the biggest yellow-dog Democrat you’ll ever meet.

But in the current election, my decision to vote for Joe is not just because he’s a bona fide member of the blue team, but because he made the single most important and significant Presidential decision since Jimmy Carter pardoned the guys who resisted the Viet Nam draft, namely, that he pulled our troops out of Afghanistan and ended a twenty-year war.

That’s right. We went into Afghanistan in 2001 as part of our response to 9–11 and in an effort to capture Osama bin Laden, an attempt which failed.

Why did we keep troops in Afghanistan for the next two decades, making it the single, longest commitment of American fighting forces to combat in the entire history of the United States? Because three successive Presidents — Bush, Obama, Trump — all shared the crazy belief that we could somehow build and maintain a Western-style kind of democratic government in a country which had been a graveyard for every political adventure and misadventure over the previous two hundred years.