Biden Gets It Right. Time To Get Out Of Afghanistan And Elsewhere.

The ongoing debacle in Afghanistan is a bi-partisan issue, with plenty of blame to be distributed on both sides of the political isle.

Simply put, Democrats and Republicans are equally responsible for the wasted lives, wasted dollars, wasted time, spent, as Joe Biden succinctly put it today, to fight another country’s civil war.

Four U.S. presidents have spent 20 years presiding over the Afghanistan experience.

The lesson learned, one we should have learned long ago, is you don’t fight a war unless you are willing to do whatever it takes to win it unconditionally.

The concept of “limited war” began in Korea. All these years later, that country still is divided into North and South.

Vietnam was another limited war with pathetic outcomes considering the costs in lives and national treasure.

We started out OK in Iraq, but quickly lost our way there. Afghanistan has been Korea and Vietnam rolled up into one seemingly never-ending example of how not to accomplish a goal.

I’m often critical of Joe Biden, but he was clear and concise in this livestream today on the internet that the United States no longer should fight in wars the country’s residents aren’t willing to fight for themselves.

Let us return to a combination of isolationism and Monroe Doctrine. Unless the threats are in this hemisphere, we ignore them.

The situation in Afghanistan is the equivalent of the police officers’ no-win domestic disturbance call. You show up to protect one side and, before you know it, both sides are fighting you.

Afghans are giving the French a run for their “Retreat. We Give Up” crown, earned through military misadventures from Napoleon onward.

Our intelligence services come away looking ridiculous, too, with their time estimates of how long it would take Afghanistan to collapse once Americans no longer were doing the fighting. The promised months disintegrated to hours.

“We could not provide them with the will to fight,” a wistful Biden noted after recounting a list of training, support and payroll the U.S. had invested in a 300,000 man army that collapsed like a tent in a windstorm.

Biden said he won’t be adventurous militarily going forward. Hopefully he can recall saying that in the future, when the cries will go out – as they always do – to intervene in some God-forsaken patch of real estate elsewhere.

It’s time American leadership learns from the lessons of Korea, Vietnam and now Afghanistan. Go big, or stay home.