Dear Editor,

Recently, President Biden defensively bristled at reporter questions about his handling of Afghanistan, saying that there will be plenty of time later for finger-pointing and blame.
It was a shameful display.
Americans are not interested in finger-pointing and blame, but they have a right to demand straight answers and accountability from government officials at all levels.
There are many questions about the Afghanistan debacle. The country’s government folded in days after Trump’s surrender to the Taliban, and all sorts of U.S. State Department and Pentagon officials and congressmen have since positioned themselves in the media to tell us they’ve known all along that Afghans are corrupt and would not fight for their own country.
America has had soldiers, intelligence officials and congressmen on the scene in Afghanistan for 20 years. More than $2 TRILLION U.S. taxpayer dollars have been squandered there. Thousands of American and other lives have been interrupted, damaged, or lost during the two decades.
Surely, with this huge commitment of resources, and with purported knowledge that Afghan soldiers would cower and fold in the face of their Taliban enemies, American military and political leaders must have made contingency plans over the decades, or at least immediately after Trump’s recent surrender. How about plans for a strategic withdrawal which didn’t allow American weapons to fall into the hands of the Taliban, nor the stranding of thousands of Americans and terrified others struggling to flee via Afghanistan’s only main airport in a humiliating American retreat played out on the global stage?
Now, America is stuck with huge financial costs for an expedient, panicked and incomplete evacuation. Our $800 million embassy and billions of high-tech planes and weapons are lost and in control by terrorists with whom we must now humiliatingly negotiate the most minute details of evacuation.
And the huge, growing costs to American taxpayers will go on well after the Biden administration directs billions of dollars to Afghanistan and its terrorist Taliban leaders, euphemistically labeled and disguised as “humanitarian aid,” but in reality, America’s ransom and goodwill payments to the Taliban for persons still stranded in the Sharia state and seeking passage to America.
Tens of thousands of Afghanistan refugees, and undoubtedly a few terrorists missed in the rushed emergency vetting process, will now land in America, ready for their new lives, with housing, education, transportation, healthcare, and food, etc., all funded by taxpayers.
Virtually any Afghani claiming asylum will be admitted.
Americans are once again paying the price for U.S. politicians and generals apparently more preoccupied with their own promotions and pensions than their duty to America. This time, there must be a thorough and timely inquiry.
Some Pentagon generals, State Department and intelligence service executives must be fired.
Now.

Sincerely,
Mike Fetzer
Clarkston