A Tale of Two Talibans: Afghanistan's and ours

Images of the Afghan Taliban inside the presidential palace in Kabul are distant shadows of what took place inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 of this year.

The American Taliban stormed the Capitol to reinstall their cult leader to office after he lost the election and launched the stop the steal movement. In the Afghan presidential palace, we saw the victorious Afghan Taliban forces surrounding their confident leader sitting on the same place where ex-President Ashraf Ghani used to sit.

Ghani, a Western-trained economist who had to give up his American citizenship to become president of Afghanistan, has now fled the country with stolen millions, looking for a place to hide. He may end up in America as an illegal immigrant.

Ghani posted on Facebook that he fled to prevent further bloodshed. "The Taliban have won with the judgment of their swords and guns and are now responsible for the honor, property, and self-preservation of their countrymen," he said.

This is 20 years too late, Mr. President!

The Taliban are back after the American invasion kicked them out 20 years ago, having swept the country before President Joe Biden could finish his noon nap. This surprised everyone except those who understand the lesson of Vietnam. You can't indefinitely defeat a national movement no matter what your pretext or claimed good intentions are.

Americans were up in arms after the hillbilly coup Jan. 6. Good Americans cried: "This is un-American!" But the same good people voted for and supported presidents from Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Biden when they stormed other countries' capitals and installed puppet regimes.

Everyone now is talking about the danger of Taliban rule, how the Taliban will treat women, whether they will bring back the hijab and Burka. Twenty years of destruction, hundreds of thousands killed, millions of refugees, trillions of dollars wasted — and all the talk in the West is about whether Afghan women will be able to take their hijabs off.

Western reporters are talking to young women who fear the change in their lifestyles. None is talking about the lies and deceptions the Bush administration spewed to get us into this mess in the first place.

Over the years, we have supported regimes that treated women worse — in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf oil countries. Now we cozy up to Mohammed bin Salman in Saudi Arabia because he lets women drive, and to dictator General Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi in Egypt because he got rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and let women take their hijabs off.

But both put a burqa on freedom and democracy for everyone.

Afghan Taliban entered the presidential palace with their arms. Still, they showed more reverence to the place than the American Taliban who stormed our Capitol on Jan. 6, destroying, looting and chanting racist slurs and outrageous demands.

Here in America, the American Taliban storms school board meetings to stop the teaching of "critical race theory" and "communism," preventing the schools from teaching history that may make white kids uncomfortable. How about Black kids enduring 300 years of teaching racism and white history?

So if it's any consolation for all of this, as you sit in your living room watching the Taliban conquer Afghanistan, remember that Obama assassinated Osama bin Laden sitting comfortably in his situation room.