A Quick Connection Between The Debate And September 11th
Last night's Harris-Trump debate was interesting, but Kamala Harris was one factual jump away from the ultimate moment.
Hello, friends,
I hope you’re all doing well! It’s been a while, huh? Well, first of all, hi! I’m okay, moving life forward as it were. I hope you’re having a thoughtful 9/11, and that if you were directly impacted by it, I hope peace has found, or will find you.
Second, I live-tweeted the debate. It was fun.
Third, I made a TikTok about the debate using the live-tweeting as a notepad. So if you wanna know how I felt about that in general, there ya go!
But, fourth, I wanted to add one thing to what Kamala Harris said about Trump’s negotiations with the Taliban. She was absolutely right, ripping into him about how he invited the Taliban to Camp David to negotiate basically how the United States would surrender Afghanistan to them - the sort of thing that the Biden Administration (for some reason?) felt it needed to uphold.
That’s right. Trump basically set out the rules for the Afghanistan withdrawal. Oh, but that’s not the point I wanted to make!
You see, Trump invited the Taliban to Camp David right around the anniversary of 9/11.
In other words, he invited the dudes who aided and abetted the crime to get back the country we liberated from them as a result.
Like any sane Human, I’m conflicted about how I feel about the withdrawal, itself. It wasn’t America’s responsibility to guarantee Kabul’s eternal security. The Afghanistan army shattered like brittle, poorly-sculpted glass after nearly two decades of training. The war had a certain casus belli that made sense (The Taliban protecting Bin Laden, who had just attacked us), but that rationale had long ago ended and transformed into “Keep Afghanistan free.”
And, like, that’s simply not our job.
But at the same time, seeing what’s happened to the women who we left behind? These fuckers made it illegal for women to speak in public. Maybe it’s chauvinistic, and I know I’ve encountered the occasional internet weirdo who claims this isn’t oppression and that it’s ethically questionable of me to project my values on another culture, but I feel like “Humans have the right to speak” should be pretty fucking universal, and that people who would deny that right to speak are incompatible with a just world, but, hey. I’m just an arrogant American telling another culture they’re wrong, I guess.
I’m not an Afghanistan specialist by any means. I don’t know all the details about how that war went. I don’t know all the details about the negotiations that ended our involvement.
I do think the Trump administration releasing 5,000 Taliban prisoners in his 2020 negotiation probably played a pretty big fucking role in the Kabul government’s fall, though! VerifyThis has this to say:
Now, something *VERY* interesting is hidden at the top of this image: Nancy Pelosi supposedly voiced her agreement with this deal. Of course, going to the included hyperlink produces a dead-end, probably because she’s no longer Speaker and someone (most probably her successor) likely bleached her prior PR statements at some point.
But, yes, the Biden administration inherited a Trump deal that it could very well have disregarded, but that would have re-ignited a war that the U.S. had no real business being in. While I’d like to believe we’d have handled that affair pretty easily, I wasn’t going to be fighting it, just funding it with tax dollars, so what I think doesn’t matter that much.
So…Yeah.
Trump not only set up a terrible situation for our withdrawal from Afghanistan, but he invited the fucking Taliban to Camp David on the anniversary of 9/11.
Fuck him.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.