No one is taking responsibility for the Afghan fiasco

 Andrea Widburg:

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These embarrassments to America's long and honorable military history, as I said, were desperate to place blame anywhere but on themselves.  Milley (as was to be expected) was the worst.  He insisted that Americans abandoned in Afghanistan would have "been at greater risk" if the military had stayed "past the 31st."

But here's the thing about all these guys saying that Biden is to blame (which I'm sure he is): why did they go along with a plan that they now claim they knew in advance would be disastrous?  And having gone along with it, perhaps in the naïve and unfounded belief that they could somehow prevent the worst from happening, why did they try to spin defeat as success?

And when they got called out on it by a single brave Marine lieutenant colonel, why did they go full Soviet, sending him to a psychiatrist and the brig, rather than doing what any decent Japanese politico would have done under these circumstances — resign in disgrace and, perhaps, commit seppuku?

It's clear that these poltroons and their equally craven predecessors in the Pentagon squandered American lives in Afghanistan for two decades.  They never imagined victory.  They imagined career advancement for themselves until their retirement, at which point they'd get economic advancement in the military-industrial sector.  Meanwhile, over 2,400 American troops died, as did over 1,800 civilian contractors.  Another almost 21,000 Americans were sent home with wounds, some (thankfully) light, some so appalling that it's a miracle they survived.  They left America able-bodied; they came home to a life of physical disability.

Meanwhile, these medal-bedecked political hacks sit there and say, "It's his fault; it's not my fault.  It's their fault, not my fault."  These moral weaklings should be shamed out of the military.  (I'm absolutely sure that all three men have physical courage much, much greater than mine, but this was a time for moral courage — and they failed.)

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They did not have the courage to resign.  They also lack the courage to take responsibility for a debacle they had a hand in creating.