Disagreeing With President Joe Biden – With Respect & Compassionate Counter Points…

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

Dear President Biden,

I disagree with you.

It may be no big thing after all I understand you do not crave the need for comforting nodding from those around you and welcome people having robust views. We are, after all in a mature democracy. It has emerged from a time of chaos into the wider world, but we are, I am afraid at the wrong end of a debate.

I also know that this shall end up being on your shoulders, but the seeds of this debacle are actually part of your predecessor’s mess. Having entered a discussion with the Taliban whilst ignoring the Afghani Government, the Trump Administration sidelined democracy and then gave a pledge – withdrawal by the 1st of May. It may as well have been the 1st of April.

To date you have done so much to reverse damage done by that man and his previous attempts at governing I wonder why you took the decision not to alter this.

And hey, we can hardly talk. The United Kingdom has had at least three goes at governing Afghanistan, with invasions in 1838, 1878 and 1919. We did little better though there is a pretty decent Afghani cricket team, so our influence was not all lost.

It is unfortunate that the images we saw, of people handing over children to escape, of people at Kabul airport clinging onto planes and the continued news reporting we hear of death squads roaming the streets and going house to house in search of critics is terrifying for democrats. We have seen and heard from people within the country terrified that they shall not last longer than a weekend. Their fear is real.

I know that the USA had trained a force to defend the country before you left – 300,000 – but that included the police. And what did they do? Gave up. Now when one of my students goes into an exam and fails, one of the, quite right, foci is on my teaching. So, I have to ask – what did you teach these fellas? A conservative estimate of the Taliban forces was around 80,000 fighters; the number in the Afghan army could be as low at 50,000, once you remove the police and others used to inflate their force.

In principle they might simply not have stood a chance.

I suppose given the damage inflicted on the USA you may have thought you also had little chance.

And I know that looking in the eyes of those who have lost loved ones is tough, telling them that they may have to continue to sacrifice for the common good. That is terrible and there have been too many already dead and injured. The toll on your communities is nearly 2,000 US military personnel dead and a further 400 plus from non-hostile causes. There are over 20,000 who were injured and returned to safety but with scars that have more than an external battle with which to fight – theirs is an internal one.

But to be a global superpower requires you to make sacrifices and look at what the cost will be to your own country and to the values and ideals you hold dear if you do not face those sacrifices.

Those already given have not been in vain.

In 20 years, the share of girls at Afghani schools went from 6% to 39% in 2017. About 20% of civil servants were women. There were 100,000 female students in universities.

And perhaps most startling of all – the life expectancy of women from 2001 to 2017 went up a decade from 56 to 66.

Let me leave you thinking about that for a moment.

It means that what happened was that the way that women were treated allowed them to live longer under this foreign occupation. We are now returning to the time when the darkness fell. I saw were and use the past tense because we are about to go backwards. We are returning to a time when women are second class citizens. The Taliban have said they shall forgive those who trespassed against them but have also sent out death squads.

And finally, I know that the mission in Afghanistan, conceived under the shadow of the appalling tragedy of the Twin Towers was never designed to build a new nation. It was about preventing a terrorist attack on your homeland. You seem to have achieved that but leaving a country behind which is now as resentful for having lost 20 years as it has a populace talking of when the Americans bombed weddings and then scarpered from the Taliban is no secure victory for safety. In short, you have left a new scar that may never now heal.
You never always thought this.

I would take you back to 2001 when you said, “Our hope is that we will see a relatively stable government in Afghanistan, one that… provides the foundation for future reconstruction of that country.” Or in 2003 when you commented, that the “alternative to nation building is chaos, a chaos that churns out bloodthirsty warlords, drug traffickers and terrorists”.

I am not one for throwing quotes from the past to win debates, but this is clearly a shift; in politics we all know that shift happens.

American military intervention can be a positive – South Korea, post war Germany – or a debilitating loss – Vietnam, Iraq – but it must always come with an exit strategy. Once in the White House you could have redefined it and become more like a JFK, than a Carter.

This could have been more like Bay of Pigs than Iran hostage crisis.

Then again, I never voted for you, so what should it matter? I cannot vote for you. I am not an American. If I were, I would have voted for you, and not because the alternative was so awful. I would have voted Biden/Harris because I believed that you, as a consummate politician could restore order and the safety and security of firm leadership to the US and all around it.

I still do.

I still have faith. That is because I truly believe you can see the errors and switch course. What happens next shall not define your effectiveness, but it may, internationally, define your presidency.

I trust you have already worked that out.

A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(kailyard n. a genre of sentimental Scottish literature turned into effective invective comment from one Donald worth reading…)

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