War and Famine - TomDispatch.com - Andrea Mazzarino, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse?

War and Famine - TomDispatch.com Andrea Mazzarino, The Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse? July 7, 2024 Consider it strangely (in)appropriate that, among the things Donald Trump and Joe Biden hardly discussed (including climate change) at their debate, they did face off over... yes, Afghanistan! You remember Afghanistan, right? Biden said that Trump "didn’t do anything about that,” and Trump, in his usual incoherently hyperbolic fashion, responded, "He was so bad with Afghanistan. It was such a horrible embarrassment. Most embarrassing moment in the history of our country that when Putin watched that and he saw the incompetence... No general got fired for the most embarrassing moment in the history of our country, Afghanistan, where we left billions of dollars of equipment behind. We lost 13 beautiful soldiers and 38 soldiers were obliterated." To which Biden replied, "You ever heard so much malarkey in my whole life?" Uh... Do you even remember Afghanistan? You know, the land George W. Bush and crew invaded soon after the 9/11 attacks; the place this country's military then fought in until, just short of 20 -- yes, 20! -- years later, when, as the Taliban won ever more victories and the Afghan military that the U.S. had trained began to collapse, the Trump administration launched a chaotic process of not-quite-withdrawal, all too fitting for that disaster of a war that Joe Biden ended with the deaths of those 13 U.S. troops and (as ever) untold numbers of Afghans. It was, in truth, a horrifically appropriate conclusion to the first of America's terrifyingly and terrorizingly disastrous wars on terror. And now, in some eerie sense, you might consider the Afghan war -- in fact, all of America's wars on terror -- to be coming home to roost in a genuinely disturbing fashion, thanks in significant part to the man whom TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino labels the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse -- and yes, there is something potentially apocalyptic about this bump stock of a moment in America. Tom