[h3][/h3]
Daniel Greenfield August 18, 2021
"Afghanistan's collapse: Did US intelligence get it wrong?" ABC News asks. "Afghanistan Is Your Fault," barks Tom Nichols at The Atlantic. "Why Afghan Forces So Quickly Laid Down Their Arms," Politico ponders.
The one thing that the Taliban's conquest of Afghanistan is good for is more media hot takes.
https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLXbsfkI...0ACNcBGAsYHQ/s792/image_2021-08-18_001622.png
Afghanistan didn't fall because it never existed. The Afghan army laid down its arms because it also never existed. And not just because many of the 300,000 soldiers were imaginary. Its Pashtun members surrendered to their fellow Taliban Pashtuns, or fled to Iran or Uzbekistan, depending on their tribal or religious affiliations which, unlike Afghanistan, are very real.
The Afghan army was there because we spent $90 billion on it. Much like Afghanistan with its president, its constitution, and its elections existed because we spent a fortune on it. When we left, the president fled, the army collapsed, and Afghanistan: The Musical closed in Kabul.
Afghanistan isn't a country. It's a stone age Brigadoon of quarreling tribes, ethnic groups, Islamic denominations, and warlords manned by young men with old Russian and American rifles. Unlike the fiction of a democratic Afghanistan, that is something they will die for.
And in the coming years you will see some of those same soldiers who laid down their guns fighting and dying for tribes and warlords, even fighting the Taliban, in the real endless war.
The forever war isn't something we invented after 9/11: Afghanistan has always been at war.
Americans are impressed that the Taliban held out for 20 years. They shouldn't be.
There's no time in Afghanistan. Two decades of war are horrifyingly incomprehensible to Americans. To Afghans, it's the way things have always been. We stepped into a place that has been a war zone for centuries, took sides, supplied weapons, and then left as everyone knew we would. The British and the Russians came and went. After us, the Chinese will come and go.
And the forever war will go on endlessly.
Before us, the Russians wanted the Afghans to pretend to be Communists. We wanted them to pretend that they were Democrats. But the Afghans aren't 'Afghans', they're Pashtuns, Uzbeks, Balochs, Hazaras, Sunni and Shiite Muslims, everything else is just a temporary costume.
The Taliban, another Pashtun bid to seize power, will be met with resistance, not by the proponents of a free and democratic Afghanistan, but by rival tribes and warlords.
We'll probably end up funding some of them. And maybe this time we won't be stupid enough to ask them to hold elections or any of the other nation-building nonsense from Foggy Bottom.
Our Afghanistan campaign after September 11 was fast, clever, and ruthless. The men who conducted it understood the society. They worked together with warlords to crush the Taliban. Their goal was a quick and dirty victory that would make an example out of the Taliban.
Our allies were anyone whose current factional interests in the endless power struggle aligned with ours. As the years went on, some of our allies became enemies, and some enemies became allies. The Taliban were the bad guys, but just like in Syria, so was everyone else. There were plenty of innocents caught in the crossfire, but innocents have no power.
The average Afghan rural villager doesn't think of being a citizen of some country called Afghanistan. He cares little for elections and his elders confuse Americans with the Russians and sometimes even the British. The elites in Kabul are happy to dress up their power grabs in presidential titles and constitutions that no one else in the country cares about. USAID pays girls in Kabul to play at feminism and college graduates to talk about international relations.
None of it mattered a damn in the vast majority of the country as we are now finding out.
But, Afghanistan didn't become a complete disaster for us. Until Obama.