By Nicky Reid aka Comrade Hermit

Exile in Happy Valley

This is the part of the horror movie where the plot collapses beneath the weight of one too many clichés. Having already gruesomely dispatched all the more promiscuous teens, the knife wielding masked psychopath has cornered the chaste final girl in an old dilapidated farmhouse. The backdoor is seemingly wide open, but instead of making an easy and sensible, if anticlimactic, escape, the bookish antagonist takes the fucking stairs to the attic, leaving her no place left to hide from the monster stalking her. You, the audience, is left beside yourself. Your mind boggles at the hackneyed rational of a supposedly sensible heroine. You’re left with no other plausible response than to yell out at the silver screen, “Get the fuck out of the house!” In 2020, this is the analogy where we as Americans find ourselves. Only we are all the final girls, the masked psychopath is a seemingly unkillable war of our own creation, and the farmhouse that we refuse to escape from is the imperial crypt called Afghanistan. If you are one of the few remaining committed anti-imperialists in this country, you find yourself on the outside of this colossal mess looking in, practically begging, “Get the fuck out of Afghanistan!”

Apparently Donald Trump, one of the dumber sluts to face off with this psycho killer of an endless war, has heard our call. Though the motherfucker has been playing footsy with the idea of withdrawing troops from Afghanistan and pretty much everywhere else since before he was elected, he appears to be desperate enough for a foreign policy win in the increasingly uphill 2020 election to actually, just maybe, get out of that fucking house. After a peace deal brokered with the Taliban early this year, Trump has rapidly widdled down America’s military footprint in Afghanistan from 13,000 to 8,500 troops, shutting down 5 bases and moving way ahead of his own schedule.

I’m not an imbecile. I’ve seen far too many American intervention slasher flicks to be gullible enough to mistake the Donald for anything but a desperate and craven opportunist. His plan is to hold off a complete withdrawal until after the election while ratcheting up the Cambodian style air war on Afghan civilians and keeping 4,000 final girls in country until May, just long enough to plausibly win the election as a pseudo-peace candidate and come up with some bullshit excuse to back out of the peace deal at the last minute. But even a jaded anarchist like me can see that it can’t be underestimated how truly desperate and impulsive our feckless leader has become. He’s already shit the bed on COVID, and law and order just ain’t selling like it did back in ’68. Trump has even hinted at the possibility of pulling all the remaining troops from the Afghan death trap before the election, and a growing number of more legit isolationists in the GOP along with a few brave Democrats are making attempts to push the motherfucker to do just that. But the pathological opportunists in the Democratic leadership are going out of their way to sabotage this effort.

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