Boys, I've got another good one for you
This is Professor Charli Carpenter of the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She wrote last week or so:
"The Biden administration needs to simultaneously re-engage air power at the international community’s behest – on Afghan civilians’ behalf rather than Kabul’s – while shifting the narrative about what a US presence in Afghanistan is all about. And crucially, the United Nations should marshal all its political will to assist, including authorizing such action under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter or, if that vote should fail, a ‘Uniting for Peace’ resolution under the UN General Assembly."
So she's saying: Restart the war, only with a humanitarian veneer and
against both sides. Washington was unable to defend the government that it created from the Taliban, no worries. Just announce a new humanitarian mission to
bomb both the Taliban AND the regime Washington had created and supported for two decades if they harm civilians.
Only, if only America had begun to bomb both the Taliban and the Ghani government for the UN rather than the Taliban for the Ghani government, disaster would have been averted. The Afghan people would have been happy, Kabul would have held firm, and the Taliban would have halted their triumphant advance across Afghanistan, agreed to UN peacekeepers around the country, abandoned their 25 year campaign to rule the country, and joined their enemies in holding hands and singing Kumbaya. Peace would reign even as the Biden administration withdrew its forces from Afghanistan. No problem!
Goes on to compare her idea to earlier campaigns in the Balkans and Libya. However, that is bullshit. In both the Balkans and Libya, the US freshly intervened from the start, unlike Afghanistan, in which the US had been attempting to defeat the Taliban for 20 years.
Moreover, neither the Balkans nor Libya involved genuine peacekeeping operations. For instance, after Yugoslavia’s breakup the US went to war against ethnic Serbian forces everywhere but failed to act against other ethnic groups committing atrocities against Serbs. US officials refused to even call the Croatian military’s expulsion of tens of thousands of Serbs from the Krajina region "ethnic cleansing." Some US officials considered the Kosovo Liberation Army to be a terrorist organization.........and of course then Washington DC officially made it a military partner and stood by as it later conducted ethnic cleansing.
In Libya the US and European governments labeled a third-rate regime change operation "humanitarian." The allies cited Gadaffi's threats against armed rebels in Benghazi as if he was threatening civilians, even though his government, oppressive though it was, had massacred no one. Deceitfully packaging regime change as a humanitarian operation in a UN resolution, which won Chinese and Russian support, angered both China and Russia, and consequently are unlikely to back any future requests for similar authority.
So, thank you Professor, but can you please just fuck off? The war is over. Don't start another one.