New Year's predictions 2018

January:  Doug Jones will be sworn in as the new Senator from Alabama.  He will have to dodge Roy Moore, who will run in and try to snatch the Bible off the table and administer the oath of office to himself.

February: Justin Timberlake will perform at Super Bowl halftime, fourteen years after the infamous 'wardrobe malfunction' in which he ripped Janet Jackson's outfit and exposed her breast.  This time he will surprise people and invite Jackson back on stage, but this time,  in this year of #TakeaKnee and #MeToo  , when Timberlake tries the same thing again he will  'take a knee' from Janet to the nether regions.

March:  The start of baseball season will include a pitch clock. A major scandal will erupt when the Red Sox get caught speeding up the clock when the Yankees are pitching. Donald Trump will send a tweet blaming Hillary Clinton and reminding people Massachusetts is a blue state, even if they do call their team the Red Sox.

April:  The Trump administration announces that entry fees to National Parks will rise again, to well over a hundred dollars for top National Parks.  When it is pointed out  that this might make it too expensive for a family to visit Yosemite,  White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders Huckabee says,  "Well, then, they can go to Six Flags and see Yosemite Sam instead !"

May:  A few months after passing a tax bill that raises the deficit, Paul Ryan and Marco Rubio will cite the skyrocketing deficit as a reason to cut entitlements (as they already have said they will.)  Social Security payments will be cut only slightly for present retirees.  Future retirees will be promised a t-shirt saying, "I paid thousands into Social Security but all I got was this lousy t-shirt."  When somebody points out that immigrants are overwhelmingly young people who could help stabilize Social Security and Medicare, conservatives will drown it out with chants of "build the wall, build the wall."

June:  Six months after moving the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, citing reasons of 'convenience,'   the Trump administration will announce they are moving our consulate with the Palestinian Authority to an abandoned oil platform off the coast of Louisiana,  also citing 'convenience.'

July:  The GOP effort to privatize Social Security by ramming it all through  in a matter of days that began in May will fail in the Senate.  Donald Trump will respond with a series of angry tweets attacking Hillary Clinton.

August:  The record breaking drought continues around the southwest.  In southern California and Arizona, mold is added to the 'endangered species' list.

September:  The Trump administration will announce a solution to the Confederate Monument controversy. They will all be relocated to Puerto Rico to serve as windbreaks for families who are still living out in the open with no heat or shelter a year after Hurricane Maria.  He will praise himself for helping bring 'a great success' to Puerto Rico.

October:  The Mueller investigation issues a final report several weeks before the election, concluding that there is evidence that Russia was in close collusion with members of the Trump campaign to ensure Trump's election.  Rather than indicating any concern about a foreign power being involved in our election, Republicans derisively criticize former FBI director Mueller and start wearing  Putin masks at Halloween parties.

November:  Democrats decisively win control of the House, many Governorships and despite the terrible Senate map, are able to pick up a 50-50 tie for control of the Senate.  Trump sends out a tweet calling the election results 'fake news.'

December:  On Christmas morning, the nation wakes up to find that the White House is buried under hundreds of tons of coal, with a reindeer poop on top of it.  Donald Trump will blame Hillary Clinton.

Afghanistan-- what the heck are we still doing there?

If current reports are accurate, the Trump administration (remember Trump ran on a neo-isolationist policy in which while he promised to get rid of ISIS, otherwise pledged to reduce our involvement in foreign wars) is about to get us in deeper in Afghanistan.  The Afghan war, which began in October 2001, a month after September 11 and less than a year into the Bush administration, lasted through the rest of that administration, then through the entire Obama administration and now is into its third administration  (arguably its fourth;  recall that on August 18, 1998, eleven days after the African embassy bombings the Clinton administration launched cruise missiles in an attempt to get bin Laden in a meeting he was known to be attending that day;  unfortunately the meeting ended early, before the missiles arrived and we now know that among the topics discussed during the meeting was the plot that eventually became 9/11. )

Given that the 9/11 terror attacks were hatched in Afghanistan (not to mention the African embassy bombings and the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen) and the Taliban government was at the time giving refuge to bin Laden, it made sense to go in originally because if we hadn't then bin Laden and al-Qaeda would have continued unimpeded in their quest to kill Americans.  However, after an offensive in January and February of 2002 drove bin Laden from his hideout in Tora Bora and drove the Taliban into a small sliver of Afghanistan, George Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld made a fateful decision.  The Taliban was almost gone, but instead of finishing the job and taking the final sliver of the country they held onto, the Bush administration put Afghanistan on the back burner and then used 9/11 as a rallying cry to invade Iraq, a country a thousand miles away that had nothing to do with the September 11 attacks.  An invasion of Iraq had been on Bush's agenda since taking office after his father had made the decision not to finish off Saddam Hussein in the 1990-1991 Gulf War,  and since then Saddam had continued to cause problems for the U.S. and other countries in the region. 

By putting the situation in Afghanistan on the back burner, the Taliban were allowed to regroup and grow back, and by then were learning how to fight more effectively against the few Americans remaining;  roadside bombs, suicide bombings and ambushes, especially in populated areas (the same tactics used later on by Iraqi insurgents after Bush claimed 'mission accomplished' a few weeks into the Iraq war.)  By this time bin Laden had fled to Pakistan,  so we were in effect fighting on one side of a civil war (and propping up a corrupt government then led by Hamid Karzai, which was known to be dealing, just as the Taliban were, in opium poppies that were smuggled out and into the world drug market.)

President Obama, like President Trump, ran on a platform that included getting American troops out of harms way.  Only it didn't happen, and in fact eight months into the Obama administration (and on the eighth anniversary of September 11) I wrote a blog post critical of the Obama administration's Afghan policy.  It seemed then that the Obama Afghan policy was really little different than the Bush policy.  Obama's "Afghan surge" only got us in deeper and didn't ever seem to resolve anything.  Yes, Americans and our allies might win battles and take territory, but just like any guerrilla war, once they left the territory it reverted back to the control of whoever had the support of the local populace (think about it-- HOW MANY times since the Afghan war began in 2001 have you heard about Americans backing allied Afghan government forces driving the Taliban out of strongholds in Helmand province?  As soon as we leave, the place reverts back to Taliban control and we don't have the manpower to physically occupy all of it.)  With bin Laden dead and al-Qaeda fragmented, clearly there is no threat from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan anymore.  Of course now you keep hearing about 'ISIS in Afghanistan.'  It's not like a bunch of ISIS fighters somehow traveled from Syria to Afghanistan. It's the same locals we have been fighting who are now calling themselves an affiliate of ISIS. And at some point we have to ask ourselves why we are still there.  Does anybody even know what exactly a 'victory' in Afghanistan would be?  No administration-- not the Bush administration, not the Obama administration and apparently not the Trump administration, has said what exactly the objective is in Afghanistan.  If we are going to stay there then don't we owe it to our troops to state exactly what our purpose is and what we are trying to achieve?  Vacuous statements like 'a stable Afghanistan' are useless as an objective.  How do you measure 'stable'  in a country that has been at war now for over forty years?  And how do we plan to create it?  If we can't answer these questions then we should GET OUT.