There is an old joke about a golfer who didn’t shower after his round of golf, I’ll call him Budd.
Every Saturday, Budd played golf with a group of friends and after their round of golf, he would go directly to the bar while his buddies went to the locker room, showered, and changed, before joining him for a round of drinks. Because they were often alone, Budd and the bartender become quite friendly. One day the bartender asked him,
“Budd, you seem like a meticulous guy, why don’t you shower after your Saturday round? It seems out of character.”
“ Well, Biff, I’ve got a small penis and I’m a little embarrassed to be seen naked in the shower.”
“Oh. does it work?”
“Do you mean, ‘Can I have sex?’ Yeah, sure”
“Uh…How would you like to trade for a dick that looks good in the shower?”

When the Americans invaded in 2001, the Taliban did not control the entirety of the country. Twenty years later, as the US departs, the Taliban control all of Afghanistan A Tweet by Yalda Hakim @BBCYaldaHakim Anchor and Correspondent. Host of BBC World News’ Impact with Yalda Hakim.https://yaldahakimfoundation.org

Fuck right off with your pat answers blaming one party for Afghanistan and exonerating your favorite politician. This is a generational failure, and they’re all to blame — Biden, Bush, Trump, Obama, all of their generals, all of them. A Tweet by Noah Shachtman @NoahShachtman Soon: @RollingStone. Back in the day: @thedailybeast, @Wired, @ForeignPolicy, @BrookingsFP. noah.shachtman@protonmail.ch Wherever

What’s happening in Afghanistan currently is a humanitarian crisis. Let’s be clear: there has never been, and will never be, a U.S. military solution in Afghanistan. Our top priority must be providing humanitarian aid & resettlement to Afghan refugees, women, and children. A Tweet by Rep. Barbara Lee @RepBarbaraLee Progressive Democrat representing the #EastBay. Promoting justice for all, peace, & human rights. @ProChoiceCaucus Co-Chair. Washington, DC and Oakland

I’m genuinely shocked that the Taliban took over Afghanistan so quickly. It took the North Vietnamese two years to take South Vietnam after we left, the Taliban have done it as fast as they can drive from provincial capital to the next provincial capital to, now, Kubal. After about 2011, it seemed obvious to me that we were not going to be able to win this war but, judging from my reaction today, I must have still believed the propaganda. I had no idea that, after twenty years, we were leaving with the so-called official Afghan Army comparatively that much worse off than when we got there.

We are constantly told that we have the best military in the world, but, it turns out that we have a military that only looks good in the shower. We may have the most high-tech, best-equipped military in history but we still can’t win a war. We outspend everybody, we even spend more than the next nine nations put together and we haven’t won a war since 1945 (unless you count Korea and Iraq in which, I guess, we weren’t actually trying to win, just to push the enemy back to where they started which we did, and Grenada.) For twenty years – and still counting – we were told we were winning this war and we weren’t. Don’t get me wrong, we can still win battles, we can still kill more of them than they can of us, we just can’t actually win the war.

If that sounds too harsh, if you think it’s a political problem, if you think the military’s hands were tied, whatever, then why didn’t the generals say, “We can’t do what you want without more men, more school teachers, more tanks, more whatever…” But, for twenty years, no general did that, they took the job, all of them. Either they knew they couldn’t win under those conditions and said “Fuck it, it’s a promotion and I’m going to go to work as a lobbyist for Lockheed/Martin anyway.” or they were too stupid to understand the problem. I’m going to go with the second option. I think that our military leadership is a perfect example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Our military leadership, probably from about Colonel up, had no idea that the Taliban were winning the war, our military leadership thought they were doing great.

The Taliban got stronger while we were fighting them and nobody seemed to notice. The grunts must have noticed but the brass were so confident that they didn’t listen to them. Nobody even made plans for getting out of Dodge on the outside chance that the Taliban might win. The other analogy that comes to me is that of a narcissist. The military, and probably State Department, leaders were so sure that they were – and still are – right and doing well that they only listened to the Afghan toadies that told them how great they were. Surprisingly, shockingly, actually, we didn’t learn anything from the Vietnam disaster.

Now we are being told that the problem is the Afghan senior leadership which is corrupt. Sure, that’s a factor, but the big problem is that it is our leadership that is corrupt. Our entire military system is corrupt, including Congress, who thinks the answer is to increase the budget by twenty-five million over the existing 778 billion budget. It’s sickening, infuriating, sad, and sort of terrifying. Happy Monday.