The right-wing media doesn't share the Beltway press' faith that Afghanistan will hurt Biden with voters
www.salon.com
Overall in the USA we do seem to have the attention span of a fruit fly, and there's always an apple or a banana somewhere else nearby. The Rs are moving back to their talking points in the culture wars because talking about Afghanistan much longer will not keep eyeballs on ads on Fox News.
The Dems will carry on bashing everyone in reach a little longer because that's the party in power and the Dem Congressional candidates for 2022 races are eager to disperse blame elsewhere --anywhere else-- before the main ads for those midterms are crafted.
Bottom line the average American of any political persuasion still couldn't label Afghanistan on a blank outline map of Asia, much less give a damn that Pakistan and China now jointly and separately have a lot to gain or lose in whatever tack the Taliban takes in trying to establish actual governance going forward. So on TV news, well... it's back to whose fault it is this afternoon that masks aren't being mandated (or are being mandated) or consumer sentiment is jittery and the housing market remains in disarray and some idiot stole some CDC vaccination certifications and peddled them on eBay for 10 bucks a pop.
Sure it has been selling papers to trash Biden about the human suffering as we depart a military effort in Afghanistan, but the right as well as the left out there in America wanted us to get the hell out and both are relieved it's happening (as well as disgusted by how it's being pulled off).
So Trump AND Biden made it happen, and both the Rs and the Ds do know that, and also know the voters will end up more satisfied by our leaving than devastated over how the departure is being executed. The country's not going to make either Trump's or Biden's legacy about exiting the battlefields of Afghanistan or the halls of its hapless, corrupt and propped-up central governments.
To me it's still mind-boggling to realize that for all the somber claims of "lessons learned" after the USA's war in Southeast Asia, we took twice as long to slog back out of Afghanistan's civil war as we did leaving the one in Vietnam.
I'm never going to forget my great great aunt (once a missionary in China, going there as a Methodist and coming back as an undeclared Buddhist!), remarking way back in 1963 that the USA had no business expecting to win a war that we were stepping into for ideological purposes but that the Vietnamese had long since undertaken 1) to declare independence from foreign occupiers for once and for all and 2) to fight to raise a flag for the side they believed would uphold their own families' values. She wrote a letter about that to a local newspaper back then. Guess the Pentagon of those times didn't read it. Of course neither did the Pentagon charged with trying to formulate "victory" from an even more complicated set of scenarios in Afghanistan.
Let's see how they react when the question of settling them in the U.S. comes up.
