As I type Taliban militants are flooding the streets of Kabul, and the president of Afghanistan has fled the country.
Will we learn this time? Is this the one that takes?
Is this the obscenely expensive (blood and treasure) attempt to externally impose modern Western values on people who have not only never held them, but who are thoroughly acclimated to substantially opposing values, that keeps us from trying it again?
Those who will soon rule Afghanistan are subhuman monsters who inflict unimaginable suffering on the populations they control. But guess what? That’s also true in China, in North Korea, and in several other countries.
So why’d we go into Afghanistan? Oh yes–because the Taliban was harboring Osama bin Laden, who planned and executed the September 11 attacks. When they wouldn’t hand him over, we invaded.
Twenty years ago.
Guess what? We didn’t get the bastard for a good while longer. But we destroyed numerous known terrorist training facilities and related infrastructure. And we should have been done then.
“We’re pussies about enemy nations, embarking on decades-long, trillion-dollar campaigns to make them love us, instead of quick ten-million-dollar lessons in why they should fear us.” – John Derbyshire
I’ve seen that put as “withdraw and strike” as well. You get the point.
My heart aches when I consider the billions of people in the world who’ve never done anything else in their entire lives but suffer at gunpoint. I want us to help them. But we need to forever purge the notion that the best way to help them is comprehensive nation-building.
What have we accomplished this time? Well, a lot of people are dead. Want to talk roads? Buildings? Bridges? We’ve built a lot of neat, expensive things with which the restored military dictatorship can more efficiently exploit the populace.
Would you call these desirable outcomes?
We’re killing bad guys a lot more efficiently than was even possible in 2001, and we’re doing it primarily with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Despite the potential for abuse and questions of civil rights, I don’t do a lot of hand-wringing about this. I figure enough people have to sign off on such things that if these folks didn’t need killin’, someone would have blabbed by now.
Is that naïve? Maybe a little. But there are realities about modern warfare that must be acknowledged and accommodated. Our adversaries may not be nations. Their weapons may not be guns and bombs.
Maybe that, and a long memory on the ultimate outcome of our occupation of Afghanistan, will prevent us from again being tempted to try such nonsense.
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