SLR: Thanks Biden, now Afghanistan can bask in the glory of western democracy

Two decades after they were removed by the US, the Taliban retook Kabul, Afghanistan in a matter of days. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Afghanistan’s national army and police forces – numbering roughly 350,000 men – were trained and equipped by the US and Western allies, making them a “powerful deterrent to the Taliban”. “That is one reason why President Biden, when he announced in April his decision to withdraw all American forces from Afghanistan, expressed confidence in the Afghan military’s ability to hold ground,” it reads. Since then, security forces have undergone a humiliating collapse, losing most of the country, with Taliban fighters entering Kabul on Sunday and freeing inmates at the city’s main prison. BizNews founder Alec Hogg says that “US president Joe Biden is being universally blamed for his country’s astonishing humiliation which American commentators say only ranks behind Vietnam. He is accused of having blundered with an ill-conceived, overly hasty, and consequently calamitous withdrawal that’s turned into a rout of the US and its Western-aligned allies.” Never one to miss a beat, popular columnist at BizNews Simon Lincoln Reader provides his unique perspective on the situation. – Claire Badenhorst

Afghanistan – one of the original ‘build back betters’

By Simon Lincoln Reader*

Fiery White House spokesperson, Jen Psaki, has managed to stop the Taliban in its tracks as it descends upon Kabul, Afghanistan, the final city there it needs to capture in the wake of the US military’s incredibly brave decision to flee the country in the dark of night without telling anyone. “The Taliban,” Psaki mused philosophically during the latest crisis press briefing, “needs to ask itself: what kind of organisation do we want to be?”

Word about Psaki got out and a meeting between religious elders was immediately convened – with McKinsey even despatching a delegation of ‘fact finders’. The meeting revealed that the leadership group is split: there’s the traditionalists, many of whom have been specially trained to deal with women found behind the wheel of a car, and then there’s the progressives, who reluctantly admit that although Psaki frequently embarrasses herself, she might be onto something here. So the progressives have recommended all Taliban leaders begin unconscious bias training in Q1 3089, and that gender identity and critical race theory are included in every single school’s curriculum for the academic year 3090. But McKinsey’s own suggestion of creating a special flag for the month of June each year was dismissed out of hand and the functionary who made it has gone missing. One of the progressives remarked: “McKinsey themselves only did that to divert attention away from its predatory activities in South Africa.”

The Taliban remains extremely cross with America for not providing as much protection to its opium farmers as it promised it would. But some amongst the progressives are mildly optimistic: “We think we may have identified common ground,” they claimed. “We note that the Biden administration, in the favourite word of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s beautiful daughter Chelsea, is ‘inspired’ by the far-left radicals who jump-started its chances of electoral success, particularly on the night of November 3rd 2020, and we believe we can appeal to these forces in one area of mutual interest: lowering the age of consent. The people we wish to broker talks are old Labour Party members from the UK, or ‘nonces’ as infidels so rudely describe them, and we wish for them to be released from their current prison sentences to head negotiations.”

In terms of wider foreign policy, the people who absolutely under no circumstances definitely did not have anything to do with the suppression of a laboratory leak in Wuhan, the Chinese Communist Party, have announced they are ready to recognise the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan. Thanks for that, the Taliban responded, but we’d like to address the issue of your treatment of Uyghur Muslims, which every single other country in the entire world, particularly that soon-to-be-obscure island in the southwest Pacific, New Xiland, has been too shit scared to confront you on. By the way, nice economic-zone-passage-thing you’ve created with Pakistan. Would be a shame were something to happen to it.

Ladies and gentlemen, here we are on a Sunday morning, inches away from stupidity’s crescendo. Invade the very country whose militias you once funded, open up a few Starbucks, explain to the locals that men can now get pregnant too – then sit back and bask in the glory of ‘western democracy’. Don’t expect any contrition: the neocons who started this mess are extremely angry with Donald Trump’s tweets, and the neoliberals who supported it are now executives in American prestige media. Joe Biden’s already limited capacity short-circuited a few hours ago and his deputy, incompetent though she may be, is not incompetent enough to open her mouth now. So the next time Anthony Fauci or Bill Gates or Greta Thunberg or some creepy Open Society identity scolds you for asking questions about the current state of the world, don’t forget to remind them that Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan were the original ‘build back betters’.

• Simon Lincoln Reader works and lives in London. You can follow him on Substack.

Related articles: 

• SLR: Fall from grace of Andrew Cuomo epitomises everything corrupt about a way of thinking
• SLR: A missed opportunity as more question marks arise post-Ramaphosa’s ‘cabinet shuffle’
• SLR: ‘Just because Rian Malan makes people angry, does not make him wrong.’
• SLR: Responsibility of SA media highlighted by chilling misrepresentation of riots