Out of Afghanistan

End Of A Terrible Era 

Everything about the war in Afghanistan sucks. It went on for so long people kind of got inured to this phenomenon out there in the middle of Eurasia whereby USA and its allies stationed their troops, flew combat missions, trained a largely low-motivation Afghan military and for years seemed to feed the Hollywood fodder of a seemingly endless, pointless, witless Forever War. It got so bad it made a defective POTUS like Donald Trump look vaguely statesmanlike when he announced he was completely pulling out the American troops.Yes, the same president who thought sitting down with Kim Jong-Un was a good move. 

The cost of the war is staggering; the human carnage and damage is staggering; the very pointlessness of it is mind warping; and we have to wonder if any of it accomplished anything. We did learn a lot about the nature of war in the contemporary world. We can't go to war without legitimacy and this desire for legitimacy prohibits us from doing drastic terrible things. We can get all the air superiority win the world, but we cannot carpet bomb them all - we're not willing to do that any more. We say we want to win over hearts and minds, but the kinds of troopers we send over like the SAS seem to be high functioning psychopaths, out on a safari to shoot locals. There's no wining of any hearts and minds with all that. 

I've mentioned it elsewhere that the USA is not willing to pay for health and education in rebuilding Afghanistan because they don't even spend that money back home in places like Alabama and Louisiana. Why would they? So that shows to us that America probably shouldn't go marching into places it doesn't want to turning the 51st state of the USA.   

There's a weird irony that then day Kabul fell to the Taliban is also VJ day. Wars rarely end with any dignity or decorum. This one ends with the powers leaving behind a vacuum that will get filled by the flotsam and jetsam of world politics. The fearless prediction we can make is that the Taliban will rise to being a threat again. The Americans will go back again. There will be no plan next time either. 

How Do We Feel About This?

I started this blog way back when around the time they first sent troops to Afghanistan. Blogging was sort of new then, and it seemed like a fun thing to pass commentary upon. I was not a soldier, I was in do danger at all in this 'war on terror', so I had all the luxury in the world to snark away at the conduct of the conservative governments in USA and Australia as well as bitch about Tony Blair and Gordon Brown's ethically challenged Labour Government in the UK. Did the war affect me? It did in strange ways. I won't go into them all but basically I watched liberal democracy dismantle itself in the face of the boogeyman it created for itself. The arts and humanities got defunded over that time, and everybody seemed to lose interest in culture-as-national-project. In turn we've allowed neo-nazis and extremely rightists to gain access to the mainstream, and everybody seems to have forgotten about Marx and Engels. 

I have to admit, the going got so stupid around the early part of the last decade that I gave up commenting on politics. There's a certain kind of idiocy with leaders who choose ideological positioning over proper policy considerations, and such idiocies are too demeaning to analyse. If it can be said that you cannot polish a turd but you can roll fit in glitter; well, there's only so much rolling around the turd can take without losing shape. That's kind of how much our politics and polity devolved in the course of the Afghan War - it turned into a formless bit of turd.

In a way I am glad the USA is out of Afghanistan. It's no place to be, and no place to be dropping money. It is a thankless task to keep the peace in a country surrounded by countries that want to destabilise it or turn it into a puppet or colony. And truth be told it's hard to say for certain the Afghanis really liked having Americans there to keep the peace. The very fact that the Afghan government collapsed like a house of cards as the Allies headed for the door suggests the Afghanis themselves were far less serious about the value of the Peace being kept by the American presence. Now is the awful time of reckoning, The Taliban will come back and run their medieval government. There will be refugees headed for Europe and America and Australia. There will be leaky boats once more. We've lined ourselves up for another bout of history repeating. 

So What Now?

America will probably do a bit of soul searching about the twin follies waged by the George W Bush Administration. They really should. The failure is very real, although somewhat vague. As with Iraq, it was easy enough to dislodge the shitty government. What was hard was to set up a viable government in its wake. Worse still, they left the military there for a long time in a bid to shore up whatever democratic civil government they could. The fact that they did for nearly 2 decades may not actually be a straight up failure.

The Chinese government had talks with the Taliban. Presumably they want to back the Taliban government in the hopes of seeing stability. They might find the Taliban are a lot worse than having the Americans on their backdoor. After all, you're talking about a government founded on the idea that if you're not Islam, you're little people. Godless-Communists-As-Your-Friends might be a bit of a hard sell with these people. Your enemy of your enemy might be your friend, but something tells me the enemies of enemies like these might just be just another enemy. 

If there's one thing I'm willing to prognosticate upon, I think the Taliban will be just as dreadful this time through as they were in 1996-2001. It was a long time ago and people have short memories but, the Taliban were simply terrible. There will be pain.  

Last Thought On This Matter

You know what's amazing? There are still prisoners in Guantanamo Bay that date back to the early days of this war.