Taliban and Camp David; Guess Who's (Not) Coming to Dinner

From September 9, 2019

So, if we can believe the President’s twitter storms, we were almost treated to the specialist of the Taliban representatives being entertained at Camp David. During this sad show, Trump would sign away the lives of our Afghan allies, the efforts of every veteran who served there, and shut the door on 18 years of efforts to finally bring some sort of civil society to the country. All this during the week that marks the anniversary of the September 11 attacks which were masterminded and planned (wait for it) in Taliban controlled Afghanistan. And then he tweets that this summit we didn’t know about was cancelled.

Cancelled because the Taliban took credit for bombing. And the fact that Taliban wold do something like that surprised him. As I said last week regarding another of the President’s seemingly idiotic ideas: C’mon, man!

I went on about why talking to the Taliban and trying to reach an agreement was bad enough last week. I won’t rehash it here. But I’ve thought of another bad result that I’ll add to the list. Why would any future pro-American faction want to step-up if they suspect that we’ll simply leave them in the lurch? The Afghans, the Iraqis… Sorry guys, the strongest nation in history is unwilling to shoulder the burden of honoring our commitments because our population is too ignorant to understand the true scope of the federal budget and the minuscule amount in question, let alone something like a cost benefit analysis and our politicians are too craven to try to explain it and we’ve become so adverse to casualties that something like the debacle in Mogadishu in 1993 might bring down a government these days,

But all that last week was before the whole Camp David thing came to light.

I really think that Trump, being essentially a non-political animal immersed in New York culture and not too interested in the world as he grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, sort of has a “We Didn’t Start the Fire” understanding of history, so there are certain buzzwords that he is vaguely aware of and holds some degree of significance. With that mindset, he seems to remember something about “Camp David” and “middle east” and thinks it would only be appropriate for him to do that as well. Maybe? It’s such a bad idea that I can’t think of another reason why he’s want to do it.

I’ll just say this about Afghanistan and be done. If you want to leave. If you hear the words “18 years” and think that that means it is time to leave. Whether you’re coming at it from the pacifist left or the isolationist right, it makes no difference. If that is your policy than just pack up and leave in the middle of the night like some sort of heavily armed Baltimore Colts. The same bad stuff will happen. And we’ll still (probably) have to go back in some manner soon enough. But at least we won’t have to subject ourselves to the indignity of reaching a deal with the Taliban.

You may be a fool, Mr. President, but don’t make the whole nation look like one.