Rod Dreher nails it:
Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan. (See above.)
The losing of this war began in 2002 when the Bush administration decided to convert a highly successful raid on Afghanistan, which toppled the Taliban in a matter of weeks in 2001, into a long range project to transform Afghanistan into an Islamic version of a twenty-first century democracy. Why was this a mistake? Let us count the ways:
- Afghanistan is a land of tribes which have been feuding with each other since before Alexander the Great was weaned. To think we could change this was simple hubris.
- The only thing that the Afghanis have in common is Islam, and we never had a hope of support for this project from that quarter.
- What little Potemkin success the project had was entirely in the cities, and 73% of Afghanis live in rural areas, often hard to access under peaceful conditions.
- The attempt to impose Western notions like feminism and the homosexual agenda on the Afghanis convinced most of them that we were mad and/or evil.
- Corruption has ever been the form of government in Afghanistan, and most of the generosity of the American people vanished down a few powerful Afghanis pockets, with our own government officials and contractors often taking a substantial slice themselves.
- The Afghan National Army was a sad joke, utterly dependent upon American air power. Defenders of this exercise in delusion have pointed to its battle deaths over the past few years, failing to comprehend that this was due to the Taliban being on the offensive, and often massacring the disorganized rabble, which, outside of some elite units, was all too often what the Afghan National Army was in combat zones. Due to endemic corruption the men were often short on food, wearing boots with holes in them and sometimes short on ammo. Their leadership ranged from indifferent to absent.
- Our brilliant American leadership never succeeded in cutting off supplies from Pakistan for the Taliban, and Pakistan was ever an untouchable refuge for the Taliban against American offensives.
- Our military often reported satisfactory progress when it was obvious to almost all independent observers that this was mendacious fiction, higher officers not wishing to risk their careers by telling truth out of season.
- While all this was going on in Afghanistan, at home Western elites were, increasingly with each passing year, buying ever more into nihilism and far Left hatred of the traditions of the West. The Taliban at least believe in Islam; too often our elites making the decisions in Afghanistan believed in very little, at least during the last decade, other than staying on the good side of online mobs dwelling in their maternal basements. I recall General Milley, after his stroll with Trump during the riots in DC last year, staying up into the night reading online accounts blasting him, and, as a consequence, Milley making a fatuous apology the next day:http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oHKSZ4FKXc
Such hollow chested men are good only for ensuring defeat.
- This was not only a no win war, it was a could not hope to win war from its inception. I would hope we would learn from this, but learning and our elites seem not to be on speaking terms this century.
To our elites Afghanistan was a great strategic victory by undermining our confidence, creating more divisiveness, and adding to our overall impoverishment both financially and morally.
Bingo, Michael Dowd!
And, the 99% lies media and high tech overlords swore to all the lies. And, they’re lying about it as I click-clack.
WE ARE ILLEGITIMATELY RULED BY IDIOTS, INCOMPETENTS, AND THIEVES WHO ARE WORKING FOR CHINA.
“The American political/academic/managerial class is made up largely of buffoons. It’s hilarious, except for it being so toxic and deadly.” Glenn Reynolds
A legendary [KIA at Delhi in the Sepoy Mutiny} Brit officer, John Nicholson, said, “The Afghans are the most vicious and bloodthirsty race in existence.”
However, Biden; China, Inc.; the commies in the CIA/NSA/Pentagon; Pelosi, Schumer, et al could not have caused more tragedy if they had intended.
It was personal for me. I remember the how they similarly sold-down-the-river the South Vietnamese in 1975.
It might have been successful if we’d concentrated on training the military and the civil service in the use of appropriate technology – that is methods and machines they could readily learn to use and which they could learn to repair on their own. In re the general public, the aim would be instruction in literacy and numeracy along with agricultural extension (again, making use of appropriate technology). For a government, we might have just restored the old king and let him work with various warlords and grandees.
One of Fr. Paul Mankowski’s contentions in re problems in the Church is that diplomatic corps are collecting pools of homosexuals. That aside, the Foreign Service in the United States recruits people who have a liberal education, not people with specific skills or knowledge. The language deficiencies of Foreign Service officers have been a subject of public complaint for 60-odd years. See Lewis Amselem (Diplomad 2.0) on the Foreign Service, where he was employed for 30-odd years. Many FSOs are frankly hostile to the country on whose behalf they should be working (Amselem had face-to-face dealings with Hillary Clinton; he said Mrs. Clinton’s attitude was actually better than a large block of the career staff). You got this cr!p in Kabul because they recruit haut bourgeois who have little critical distance from the attitudes in their social matrix, and, one might surmise, because there are a lot of queers who are like parasitoid wasps when they reach a critical mass in a given human organization.
My goodness telling muslims in Afghanistan to be sympathetic to Homosexuals and their cause is living waving a red cape in the face of a raging bull.
When I saw the flag I initially the thought the war would be the war for our own country. We do fly the flags of an occupying force everywhere.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/395460.php
The case for putting Milley and Austin on trial.
When I was in school, I often wondered about the saying that some people are “lost.” Now I know what it means. The lost fraudulently control hte US govt. and those people are “leading” us. Certainly we will all fall into the ditch.