Doug's Darkworld

And in the news. Now that the US is pulling out, the Taliban are rapidly regaining control of their country. In the west, the only approved narrative is that Taliban barbarians are overrunning a bastion of civilization. Or as the BBC puts it: Afghanistan: Panic and disbelief as thousands flee Taliban onslaught. Sigh. Yes, it is a terrible thing, people are dying, refugees are fleeing, a land that hasn’t known peace in decades is experiencing a paroxysm of violence and retribution. My heart goes out to the people suffering and dying.

However, the situation is a little more nuanced than “good vs evil and evil is winning.” OK, a lot more nuanced. Afghanistan is a land where there have been no good actors for decades, and blame for this horror show stretches all the way to Moscow, London, and Washington. A number of points and observations I would like to make. The first being that leaving was the only good option the US had, staying in Afghanistan wasn’t going to change anything, it was just postponing the inevitable. Staying there was just putting good money after bad as poker players say. And the idea that leaving would somehow make all the blood and money we wasted in Afghanistan meaningless is classic “sunk cost fallacy” thinking.

It should also be pointed out that the people running Afghanistan under our protection were just as violent, fundementalist, and misogynistic as the Taliban. And vastly more corrupt. That’s how the Taliban came to power in the first place, they were an improvement over the warlords whose greed and internecine warfare tore Afghanistan apart after the Soviet Union withdrew. The very same warlords the US put back in power. It should have surprised no one that they couldn’t form an effective and popular government to fight the Taliban. What a nightmare. Basically Afghanistan is a microcosm of just what a counterproductive disaster the whole “war on terror” has been. Conquest is easy, just and effective rule doesn’t magically follow.

And then there’s the usual painful hypocrisy from the west, as if western governments actually give a crap about the plight of the people of Afghanistan. We are allied with plenty of governments that are just as fundamentalist, undemocratic, violent, and misogynistic as the Taliban; but since they are happy to let the west exploit their resources, no problem. Frankly I’m so cynical these days about the world’s leaders it’s getting harder all the time to write about the state of the globe. The vast majority of them don’t give a crap about their own people and are solely concerned with protecting the wealth and power of themselves and their cronies. Even worse, huge numbers of people continue to slavishly support these “leaders.”

Anyhow, here’s a similar take on the topic: Stop Listening to the Pro-War Idiots Who Got Afghanistan Wrong. This: Deceptions and lies: What really happened in Afghanistan. Or this: Who Lost America’s Longest War? – Antiwar.com Original. Sigh. Have a good weekend everyone, stay safe and cool.

Copyright © 2021 Doug Stych. All rights reserved.

(Image: Russian troops pulling out of Afghanistan. Image reproduced in accordance with US copyright law. Attribution: RIA Novosti archive, image #58833 / A. Solomonov / CC-BY-SA 3.0 This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)