Roanoke Times Op-Ed Death, taxes and whatever the US does in Afghanistan will fail

By John Freivalds

Roanoke Times, Roanoke Virginia

Published 9/22/2021

It was Founding Father Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) who first said” in this world nothing can be said to be certain except death and taxes.” If he were alive today, he certainly would have added the abject failure of everything the US tried in twenty years of war in Afghanistan would fail. Hey, that’s not just my opinion but the conclusion of Craig Whitlock in his new book The Afghanistan Papers. Whitlock, an investigative reporter for the Washington Post interviewed 1,000 people in a “lesson learned “project who were involved with the Afghan war. What an exhausting tale of woe and very expensive cultural blindness! Whitlock examined the military efforts, the geopolitical strategies, the nation building, the economic efforts to try to find something, anything, that the US could be proud of. Results: Nope. Nada. No way José. And now Congress will try to figure out what went wrong-and who to blame.

Getting us out of Voidstan (oops Afghanistan)

By John Freivalds

Minneapolis Star Tribune

In 1801 Founding Father Thomas Jefferson and our third President said this in his inaugural address: :” the US should consider its military alliances to be temporary arrangements of convenience and should freely abandon or revers them as indicated by the national interest.” Neither President Bush, Obama or Trump paid any attention to him and continued the US support of Afghanistan. Forget all that stuff about ‘staying the course”, “strategic posture” et.al. None of them wanted to look bad and weak in our supercharged political environment. President Biden didn’t buy into those fears and is taking Jefferson’s sage advice.

Are the Taliban Really That Much Different From Us? The Rise (and Respectability) of Fragile Masculinity in the US

Trump supporters gestured to U.S. Capitol Police in the hallway outside of the Senate chamber at the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. Doug Jensen, an Iowa man at center, was jailed early Saturday, Jan. 9, 2021 on federal charges, including trespassing and disorderly conduct counts, for his alleged role in the Capitol riot.

Published July 12^th, 2021

By John Freivalds

Minneapolis Star Tribune

Recent news reports have been full of stories about the vicious, male-oriented Taliban on the verge of taking power in Afghanistan. The Taliban exert their masculinity-on-steroids by having full beards, carrying heavy weapons and relegating women to a subservient role. Historical facts, science, democracy, shaving and public education are a no-go. We bask in the thought that we Americans are nothing like that.