A fat lip GOOD MORNING!!! to you all! Yup. Got a fat lip yesterday in jitsu. That damn mistress of mine (Juji Tsu) bringing the hurt to me!
Think About it Thursday Ed-vise today. Cause it’s Thursday and we got some shit to think about!
Bit of history to start.
When 9/11 happened, the US and the world were 99.99% certain Osama Bin Laden adn Al Qaeda did it. The world was also certain that OBL and AQ were in Afghanistan. Under the protection of the existing government, the Taliban.
GW Bush said “turn him over.” Taliban said “show us the evidence and we will turn him over to a third country.” GW said “nope” and away we went for 20 years. Thing is the US NEVER GOT RID OF THE TALIBAN! And now, we are all kinds of freaked out about the Taliban coming back.
See, it did not take long for the Taliban to take off running once US troops hit the ground. Soon as that happened, they jumped in their trucks and motorcycles and split out for their neighbor…Pakistan. Sat up in the Northwestern part of that country for all this time. And waited. We went in once and took out OBL in a night raid (left the informant that helped us to get killed later on). But, we never went in to take out the Taliban. Never shut down their social media stuff or countered it; never stopped them from communicating and learning from their mistakes; and did a PISS POOR JOB OF STOPPING THEIR FUNDING. Pakistan gave them a place to live and grow and train and whatever else they needed.
Meanwhile, in Afghanistan, the corruption went unchecked. The problems went unchecked. And we KNEW there were problems. I mean Think About It. A commission was set up called the Special Inspector General for the Rebuilding of Afghanistan (SIGAR). This was a person who was tasked with tracking waste, fraud and abuse of ‘Merican tax payer money that was going to rebuild the country…to put in some good ol’ ‘Merican Democracy! SIGAR was put in place in 2008 and continued up until the Taliban came back. Their last quarterly report made a great statement The Risk of Doing the Wrong Thing Perfectly. That report which was published 30 July 2021 pointed out that reports of optimistic outcomes were being used as a smokescreen to obfuscate the reality of the dismal situation on the ground!
SIGAR, for YEARS was pointing out the problems with Afghanistan reconstruction. Troops on the ground were also pointing it out. And so many want to act surprised that the Taliban just waltzed on in and took it over. Smoother than the US election of 2020.
I’m just saying
That’s it for today. Take care of yourselves. Check in on each other and remember if you try to make a tree pun…you will be stumped! HAHAHAHAHAHA. Get it?
Peace
Ed-vise 