I’m not a foreign policy expert. But this much I do know.
The greatest threat to life on Earth is the War of All Against All.
If the world doesn’t unite against the common enemy of climate change, human life will be impossible on this planet within the lifetime of your grandchildren.
It’s already becoming intolerable. The east sides of our continents are flooding. The west sides are burning. COVID-19 is accelerating the change, pushing people away from mass transit, pushing them into further-off suburbs. We wait hours in our cars for take-out.
Afghanistan wasn’t even a war for resources. Afghanistan was purely a war for power over people. For 20 years America was told to believe we could make Afghanistan “free” through military force.
We couldn’t. We can’t. No one can. That’s a job for the Afghans. Liberation is an internal process. You liberate yourself, and only then can you liberate your neighbors.
The Soviet Union tried to occupy Afghanistan for a decade and disappeared. We have now done it for 20 years. Our democracy is more threatened today than it has been since World War II. We could lose it. I would argue we are in the process of losing it.
What disgusts me, more than anything, is how the Washington “press corps” is pretending that we “abandoned” Afghanistan, and Joe Biden has diminished our power in leaving. Abandoned to who? Diminished for what?
When I was starting my reporting career, the very word “Afghanistanism” meant events happening so far away as to be irrelevant. If terrorists based there try to come after us again, we still have the option of killing them. But occupying territory won’t kill them. It only kills us.
Afghanistan provided a handy excuse for the people of Central Asia to hate our guts. Hate is the enemy here. It goes both ways. Read the garbage the so-called “Very Serious People” are throwing out at us. We’re told they hate us, so we must hate them. Bullshit.
If any nation should feel threatened by what’s happening in Afghanistan it’s China. China is committing genocide against Afghanistan’s co-religionists. They have a border with it.
We need to focus on what’s important. American democracy. The planet. We need to do that now. We need turnover among our Beltway columnists, and our Very Serious People.
