President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are due the thanks of a grateful nation.

The obvious reason: Trump negotiated an agreement to end 20 years of war in Afghanistan, and got things rolling on fulfilling that agreement’s terms. Biden finished the job, albeit belatedly.

Slightly less obvious, but at least as important: Trump and Biden finally stood up to the “Deep State” we’ve heard so much about in recent years.

That Deep State consists of a permanent, long-term bureaucracy, both military  (careerist officers who need long wars to put stars on their collars before they retire into other branches of government or cushy positions with “defense” contractors) and civilian (careerist employees in the State Department, CIA, etc., who consider themselves entitled to administer an eternal global empire, actual US interests be damned).

During his single term, Trump sometimes feinted in the right direction before crumbling and doing as his Deep State masters ordered (his supporters always blamed them, not him). But near the end of his time in office, he finally made a stand. And Biden followed through on that stand.

The “Saigon 1975” re-enactment in Kabul is the result of Deep State failure and/or Deep State tantrum, not of presidential dedication to the task of ending the war.

After nearly 60 years of unquestioning obedience from presidents (the last to defy them on this scale died in Dallas in 1963, probably not coincidentally), the ghouls at the Pentagon and Foggy Bottom assumed they’d be able to bully either Trump or Biden into reversing the decision to withdraw. It’s possible that the Kabul fiasco is merely a consequence of foot-dragging — not using the ample time they were given to prepare for the withdrawal because they didn’t expect it to actually happen.

The other possibility amounts to “never let a crisis go to waste.” If we’re not going to get our way, let’s at least make the withdrawal as ugly, tragic, and politically damaging as possible so that future presidents go back to giving us our way rather than risk similar embarrassments.

It’s one, the other, or both. What it’s not is presidential failure.

Eight months to the day after Pearl Harbor, the US Navy landed 16,000 Marines on Guadalcanal, in the middle of a hostile ocean.

In five months in 1990-91, the US armed forces moved half a million troops to the Middle East for Desert Storm.

The claim that 13,000 troops, plus embassy and Afghan support personnel, couldn’t be evacuated from Afghanistan in 18 months without the operation devolving into a deadly circus doesn’t pass the smell test. It didn’t happen because those ordered to make it happen didn’t want it to happen.

For that failure and/or betrayal, Biden should take some Deep State scalps.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As I write this, the Taliban  have assumed full political control — to the extent that such a thing can exist — of Afghanistan. They’ve taken Kabul. They’ve put the US occupation’s puppet president, and many Afghans who served the occupation presence, to flight. They’ve declared the restoration of their “Islamic Emirate.”

Despite the sometimes ugly particulars, that’s good news for America. A war that should never have happened, and that once it happened should have lasted more like 20 weeks than 20 years, is finally ending.

So, let’s get down to serious discussion about the coming “peace dividend.”

As of last month, according to Brown University’s Watson Institute, the US government had spent more than $2.2 trillion — an average of about $110 billion, or more than $300 per American, per year — losing  in Afghanistan.

Some of those costs — for example, more than $500 billion ($25 billion per year) in interest on war borrowing,  and nearly $300 billion ($15 billion per year)  in medical and disability costs for the US armed forces’ wounded — will unfortunately continue to  nickel-and-dime American taxpayers far into the future.

But items like the US Defense Department’s “Overseas Contingency Operations” budget ($933 billion, or $47 billion per year), the State Department’s OCO ($59 billion, or $3 billion per year), and DoD’s “base budget increases” for the war ($443 billion, or $22 billion per year) are fair game for cuts.

At a conservative (VERY conservative) estimate, let’s call it $70 billion a year in savings. I’d be surprised if the real number is less than $100 billion, and un-surprised to learn that there’s more than $500 billion in Afghanistan-related fat in the US government’s annual spending.  But let’s bend over backward to be fair to the big spenders and pretend it’s just $70 billion.

The big problem, of course, is getting politicians to resist the wheedling of “defense” contractors and armed forces bureaucrats.  They want that money rolled over into exciting new (or old), and invariably bad, ideas for US military adventurism (e.g. “confronting China” or “countering Russia”), rather than simply removed from the Bad Idea General Fund.

That’s a difficult problem, but it’s also an incredibly important problem. If the people who keep getting us into expensive fiascoes like Afghanistan are allowed to just roll old money over into new scams when the old ones finally collapse,  those scams will keep coming and keep getting more expensive. The US “defense” budget must be cut by at least $70 billion per year going forward.

As to what should be done with that savings, lots of people have lots of ideas. Mine would be to leave $70 billion per year more in ordinary Americans’ pockets through some kind of bottom-bracket tax cut. But before we can do anything with it, we have to pry it out of the military-industrial complex’s grasp.

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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As I write this column, the Taliban are on a roll. They’ve taken 12 of Afghanistan’s 34 provincial capitals in a single week, including the country’s second and third largest cities (Kandahar and Herat), and Ghazni, which sits astride the main highway connecting Kandahar to the national capital of Kabul.

The US occupation’s puppet president, Ashraf Ghani, blames his government’s debacle in progress on the “abrupt” withdrawal of US forces. Apparently 20 years of the US doing his heavy lifting — contributing not just troops but money, training, and support for his own army — followed by 15 months’ notice of withdrawal, then a three-month extension of the withdrawal deadline, just didn’t give him time to prepare.

American hawks aren’t complaining about the “abruptness” of the withdrawal timeline. They’re  appalled that the US would ever, under any circumstances, consider withdrawing at all. The fiction they’d have us subscribe to is that until and unless Afghanistan becomes a western-style “liberal democracy,” withdrawing means that the 2,500 Americans killed there will have “died for nothing.”

Not true. Those men and women did die for something — something the hawks would rather not talk about. They died to keep the hawks’ campaign coffers (and, via insider stock trading and revolving-door job opportunities, personal bank accounts) full of money from US “defense” contractors.

They did, however, “die for nothing” if the goal was to turn Kandahar into Kokomo. That was never going to happen. And the current situation explains why.

The Taliban’s march down the road toward Kabul didn’t come out of nowhere. The Taliban didn’t wake up one morning, realize US forces were withdrawing, and start planning to take over. They’ve been fighting  to re-establish their rule of Afghanistan for two decades now, and for most of that time they’ve been winning.

Even at the heights of the US occupation and its “surges,” Taliban forces have controlled significant portions of the country and enjoyed the support of significant portions of the population.

The Taliban’s impending victory isn’t a function of “abrupt” US withdrawal. The US was always going to leave sooner or later, and the Taliban were always going to be in good position for a final offensive when it did.

The only question is, and always has been, just how much more blood and treasure the US is willing to waste before acknowledging that fact of reality. And the answer to that question should have always been “no more.”

Thomas L. Knapp (Twitter: @thomaslknapp) is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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