Brandon Smith takes nothing the government and its cohorts do at face value, and that’s not an unwise policy. From Smith at alt-market.com:
By Brandon Smith
My first instinct has been to ignore the circus surrounding Biden’s apparent bungle of the troop exit from Afghanistan, primarily because I think it distracts from the much bigger danger of despotic covid mandates and vaccine passports that Biden and his handlers are trying to push forward right now on our home soil. That said, I have received numerous requests from readers to discuss the situation and I’ve found certain aspects of the pull-out rather suspicious. The basic assumption here is that Biden is senile and his handling of the exit is tainted by his stupidity, but maybe there is more to this than meets the eye…
First, I think it’s important to dispel a propaganda narrative being circulated by the media that conservatives are somehow calling for troops to stay in Afghanistan by criticizing Biden’s exit strategy. This is typical leftist gaslighting. One can be in favor of a troop draw-down and still be critical of Biden’s handling of it. Frankly, the US should have been out of Afghanistan several years ago; I don’t think that it’s too much to ask that there be a concrete plan in place to mitigate damage to those people who relied on our presence to protect them from the Taliban.
It was Barack Obama who first promised an exit from Afghanistan by 2014 while claiming that the “combat mission was over.” This of course never happened and the political left ignored Obama’s deception in favor of the progressive savior narrative.
To be fair, the Trump Administration did the same exact thing, platforming the idea of a major draw-down or a full exit and then instituting troop surges instead, but at least conservatives were far more critical of his backpedaling. Trump finally committed to troop reductions in 2020, with most of the assets relocated AFTER the November election, leaving 2500 military personnel in Afghanistan along with 17,000 private contractors.
