Closing Time

I’m just a plainspoken Colorado criminal defense lawyer, but the way I see it…

U.S. presidents tend to disappoint you, even the ones who don’t dye their hair the color of a creamsicle.

President Obama said he’d close Guantamo on Day One, and that torture garden is still in business.

One president’s failure is another’s aspiration. The next guy ordered it remain open indefinitely. Probably meant to put his first presidential opponent there, and his second after the reinstatement that was supposed to happen a couple weeks ago (hand it to those QAnon kids: as Frank used to say, they’ve got high hopes).

Now, President Biden declared, come hell or high water — mostly hell — we had to get out of Afghanistan by end of business tomorrow.

[Perversely, he beat that already rushed and plan-free deadline as I was writing this: the last Globemaster military transport sneaked out at midnight Kabul time, leaving one hundred thousand and more people we promised to protect to the protection instead of people who despise and hate them.]

Never mind two decades of U.S. assurances to Afghans that if they worked with us, “we will have your backs” (they see only our backs now). Never mind the tens of thousands who’ve died apparently for nothing doing that work, the tens of thousands more of the abandoned who will die. Never mind the burgeoning human rights disaster that faces those who will live under Taliban rule.

There are fourteen million women and girls in Afghanistan. Approximately fourteen million of them will see their lives abruptly degraded again.

The Afghan writer Khaled Hosseini (“The Kite Runner”) had said we could not allow the people we have been calling “our partners” for twenty years to be murdered, to “be imprisoned, to be beaten and tortured and persecuted now that we have left. We have a moral obligation to follow through.”

But the last time someone suggested we had a moral obligation to the Afghans, Joe Biden said “Fuck that. We don’t have to worry about that. We did it in Vietnam. Nixon and Kissinger got away with it.”

And now this president hopes to get away with it, with his own bungled exit, counting on a changed Taliban. He says he doesn’t trust the Taliban, yet to the Taliban he has entrusted Afghan rule and lives (even offering up a list of Afghans to evacuate — in Taliban hands now likely a death list).

We are the new Taliban, the old Taliban assured him, and things will be different — better — now.

Earlier this month, militants of the different and better Taliban 2.0 murdered an Afghan woman, murdered her for cause: her clothes were deemed tight-fitting and she brazenly wandered the town unescorted by a male relative.