An ignominious defeat  awaits America in Afghanistan,  with harrowing echoes to the calamitous last days of the United States’ previous 20 year effort to militarily sustain an unsustainable government –  in South Vietnam.  President Biden, true to his democrat roots of never letting a crisis go to waste, has leveled his careful and experienced gaze on the self induced disaster befalling his erstwhile allies in Afghanistan, and has determined this is the perfect time as leader of the free world …to go on a two week summer vacation in Delaware.  Well, given Biden’s leadership  track record, defined by former Obama Administration Secretary of Defense William Gates as Biden having been wrong on essentially every major foreign policy question in the Delaware politician’s professional life, maybe both America and the Afghans are somehow better off.

At the speed by which the Taliban is summarily sweeping away the five times larger 300,000 man American and NATO  trained and equipped Afghan National Army, the likelihood of a final redoubt surrounding the capital of Kabul, and its inevitable collapse, is only days away.  The Biden Administration announced in April, 2021, that a final withdrawal of all US troops would take place by September, 2021, completing the twenty year commitment to a liberalized, and unified Afghanistan, eerily aligned to the anniversary of 9/11, and that the withdrawal would take place “in a safe, deliberate and responsible manner and with full coordination with its partners and allies in Afghanistan.”  To say the withdrawal process has fallen somewhat short of that mark would be the understatement of the century.

The Taliban, a local tribe of radical Sunni Islamic faith based on strict Sharia philosophy,  emerged as winners of the ragtag mujahideen warlord forces that had ejected the Russians and their proxy government from Kabul in 1994. They then ruled Afghanistan in ruthless tenth century fashion prior to 9/11, allowing nests of Al Qaeda to train in country and eventually base the 2001 terrorist  operation from there that ended with a catastrophic terrorist attack in America sacrificing over three thousand American lives.

A sophisticated and vengeful American military campaign in response to 9/11 then succeeded at driving the Taliban out in just four months, sending them back to the mountain caves and Pakistani redoubts from which they came.  Twenty years of American support of a “liberal” central government in Kabul followed, underwritten with  a trillion dollars of investment in Afghan infrastructure and and military buildup at one point over a 100,000 troops to pacify the country, and the cost of several thousand more American lives. President Bush lost his initial focus on Afghanistan, converted to “nation building” and became mired in Iraq.  President Obama declared the Iraq incursion a mistake and militarily refocused on Afghanistan, leaving a gaping hole that birthed ISIS.  President Trump stomped on the burgeoning ISIS caliphate in Syria and Iraq then ordered the planned ordered withdrawal of the mass of  American military consistent with his philosophy of ending “endless nation building”. President Biden looked at the whole situation – and bugged out.  Four Presidents and lack of continuity in any rational plan for determining what success would look like has led to the calamity now facing the Afghani people, and once again, the unmitigated humiliation of the United States  by a vastly inferior local force shoring more tenacity and staying power then the blundering giant out of its element.

Why does the United States post World War II continue to blunder from one military debacle to another projecting massively superior power only to become mired down, drained, and eventually defeated by local forces not remotely capable of directly taking on the U.S.?  As Shakespeare said, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in the stars, but in ourselves.”  The United States once fashioned its military as a reluctant weapon unleashed to defend the freedoms of its citizens, a means of protecting the hard won rights of citizens to determine their own fate, evolve to their own destinies free of foreign malign threat.  Somewhere along the way, the country’s enormous success and hubris transformed the mission in injecting the American ideal of a “successful life” forcibly into other cultures with considerably different histories and principles of life.  Afghanistan as an example has been self governing since 1709, though the world has continued to insist it has no core reason to exist as a self governing country.  First the British Empire, then the Russians, and lastly the Americans have come up against the stubborn Afghani insistence that they don’t need anybody’s help in determining how to live.  The British, used to recognizing local culture as long as the Empire’s base strategic needs were achieved, came closest to achieving an eventual detente.  The Russians brutally injected godless Marxism on one of the most intensely religious cultures in the world, only to be followed by the Americans, insisted that global concepts of “democracy”, “rights” and “free markets” would be absorbed and appreciated by a culture of over a thousand years of fierce reactionary submission to a faith and way of life.  The Taliban, and the Afghan army they are so easily collapsing,  looked into America and saw nothing they wanted.  They see a corrupted country led by a enfeebled leader, that can’t tell the difference between men and women, can’t defend their own borders, don’t respect their own laws, and most egregiously, think they have the right to project forcibly their fallen virtues upon others.  They see us as an empty vessel of long neglected insights about life, easily outlasted, out maneuvered, and as fragile as a paper mâché demon.  They believe in God, a fealty to that God through a law of rigorous subservience, and laugh at the Americans love affair with materialism and feelings.   Certainly whatever brief spell the Americans may have put over on the urban Afghanis who wanted to reject their inheritance, they plan to expel with ruthless, righteous and bloody efficiency in short order.

We believers in Western ideals, the rights of man and woman, the defenders of individualism and personal destiny, need to get our own house in order or we will ultimately succumb to any malign inferior force capable of sustained resistance and push back, just as the Taliban and other groups ultimately expect. History and culture are not dusty relics of the past with no modern value, but need to be understood and built upon, not casually ignored and brushed to the side.  Rights are hard won and must be defended continuously generation to generation. The founding principles are our permanent roadmap to the exalted journey we have achieved, and must be defended against assault. Foreign lands see no reason to fight and die to achieve such hard won rights foreign to their own evolution, when the leading proponent of that victory cares so little for those rights and the sacrifices required to win and hold them, amongst their own.

It will be a bleak future for Afghanistan – but it will be their future.  It will be the tragedy of our time if we can not finally recognize this simple fact.  We now need to tend to the resistance to our own decay, and restore the reason why other people may once again look upon us as something worth striving for and some day emulating, in their own culture’s journey through life.