By Dan Murphy
Watching American troops depart Afghanistan in today’s internet, social media age, allows most of the media to abide by that old journalistic proverb: If It Bleeds it Leads. We are shown the sad images of the Afghanistan people hanging onto airplanes and desperately trying to enter the airport and get a ticket into the United States. And we are also shown the images of destruction in Kabul after ISIS set off a bomb, killing 13 US Servicemen and more than 100 Aghanistan civilians.
But the L.A. Times reminded us in a recent editorial that “the U.S. Military had U.S. military had evacuated 100,000 people from Kabul — 7,000 in the previous 12 hours alone. These airlifts have been one of the most complex logistical undertakings in military history, reminiscent of the British evacuation at Dunkirk in 1940.. We support Biden’s deicison to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan by Aug. 31, and his insistence on sticking to that deadline.”
One of the positive takeaways that I found in that editorial was, if we are going to watch a major, United States withdrawl, on our phones and laptops, and see the same images of terror and desperation, again and again, our exit may seem worse than it actually is.
That is unless you are former General Mike Flynn. Instead of using the Dunkirk example, where more than 330,000 British and French troops were rescued by boat from Nazi forces, Flynn used the Alamo as an example of how America was leaving Afghanistan.
On the War Room with Steve Bannon Podcast, Flynn said “our nation is in an extreme crisis of leadership…this is our nation’s Alamo, we have been enricled by the enemy that we have been fighting and killing for 20 years. They have us encircled and our political leadership directing that we work with these thugs.”
The opposing views of our exit from Afghanistan also points to how divided our country has become. Yes President Biden has made mistakes in our withdrawl, but more than 65% of Americans no longer wanted us fighting in Afghanistan.
