Editorial
Mr. Joseph Biden, the incumbent president of The United States, entered office in January of this year, with little or no co-operation from the outgoing president and his people during the transition. Despite that, Mr. Biden and his team managed to get off to a very decent start, and his programmes have been very appealing to the majority of Americans. His financial assistance to the middle and lower classes has won him wide support. His proposals to undertake massive programmes to create millions of new and well-paid jobs, new businesses, huge infrastructural developments, and generally make the country once again globally competitive, appeal to Americans across the broad spectrum of classes and political leanings. For the better part, Mr. Biden’s handling of the public health crisis known as COVID-19 has demonstrated what responsible leadership should be.
Suddenly, all of that seems to have faded into the background. Afghanistan, it appears, has pushed everything else aside. Mr. Biden decided that if a certain people are unwilling to fight and make certain sacrifices for their country, he did not see why Americans should be making those sacrifices for them. Hence his withdrawal from Afghanistan, after twenty years of spending three hundred million American dollars (US$300,000,000) each and every day, not to mention the thousands of lives lost.
What has been deeply troubling is to observe the alacrity with which so many have turned on Mr. Biden, while completely ignoring the root causes of the debacle, and the criminal actions of those who caused it in both the short and long terms. A particularly troubling aspect is the public’s blindness to the part which President Trump played. As his term drew to a close, Mr. Trump made a deal with the Taliban — agreeing to a final US withdrawal but only after the 2020 elections. In return, the Taliban would not inflict any casualties on US personnel before the elections. That allowed him to boast of ending the ‘endless war’. But it also left a ticking time-bomb under his successor. It should also be known and remembered that the person who has since assumed headship of Afghanistan was a Guantanamo prisoner released by President Donald Trump. For Mr. Biden it was going to be a lose-lose outcome whichever course of action he decided on. The most scary aspect of all this is the alacrity with which so many have turned against him, and how soon the good that he has been doing has been swept aside. But that aspect of human behaviour is not peculiar to Americans. We have it right here in St. Kitts and Nevis, which is precisely why our country is in the political mess in which we now find ourselves. Oh! The fickleness of people!