Afghanistan: The Graveyard of Narratives
"In Afghanistan as elsewhere, the U.S. government has hired a lot of people and spread around a lot of money to service the even more expensive services of well-connected Americans. But that money has not bought allegiance to any ethically or politically binding enterprise because it has not offered any—any more than it did in Vietnam, in the Middle East, or in Africa. Or in America itself for that matter.
Perhaps the only useful result of the Afghan enterprise’s clamorous collapse, at a time when so much else that our ruling class is doing also collapses of its own weight, is the widespread recognition that we are not seeing the results of discrete choices about foreign policy. We are experiencing the inexorable working out of the logic by which a whole class lives, moves, and has its being."
GRTWT.
1 comment:
I don't hear this argument very often but...what if we had chosen to stay? The "longest war" narrative is bullshit: we are still in Korea. Perhaps we should have maintained an indefinite presence. Maintain air superiority, keep the tribes apart.
Use our own personnel, minimize use of natives, provide no training and equipment. Build infrastructure, mine the rare earths, pay royalties to the warlords and shot-callers. Let them take care of asshole extremists. Let them govern themselves as they see fit.
This is likely what China will do. Why couldn't we do it?
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