What If Afghanistan is More Than Just a Failed War?
What If Afghanistan is More Than Just a Failed War?
The U.S. Empire is in freefall. Good. Afghanistan has reverted to nativist control as expected. The ‘goat-herders’ there remain unconquered. The speed of the Taliban’s takeover doesn’t surprise me because the groundwork for it has been in process for years.
Only the U.S. State Department under both Mike Pompeo and now Antony Blinken opposed this. If you’re angry this morning you can thank Russian diplomats who started this process in December 2016 by opening up the dialogue between the Taliban and the Asian powers with Pakistan leading the talks.
I can’t say I’m shedding any tears here except for all the losses on both sides. War is never righteous.
So, while I’m happy to see this end I am also sad to also see this end for what it is, a planned act of geopolitical vandalism by the Biden Obama Administration to ensure a complete collapse of the U.S. political system.
We are being liquidated by The Davos Crowd at the precise moment when their Great Reset is at its most vulnerable.
20 Years a Slave to War
For 20 years we libertarians warned this day would come and now it’s here. Is it a case of better late than never?
I think that question is irrelevant. The costs are incalculable. They always are.
You’ll hear a lot of utilitarian nonsense about $2.2 trillion etc. but that’s just the price tag you see. What you don’t see, as Harry Hazlitt reminds us, is where the real costs are — the lost opportunities, the Afghan and American lives spent, the bureaucracy empowered, the capital diverted from productive work — that come with prosecuting endless war for impossible democracy.
Before Afghanistan was there a Dept. of Homeland Security? The Patriot Act? The Military Commissions Act? A Global War on Terror?
Are those part of that $2.2 trillion? No. They aren’t. And yet we paid them anyway.
It wasn’t like America wasn’t already fighting a slew of unwinnable wars of ideology (Drugs, Poverty, Democracy, Individualism) in the pursuit of the neocon/neoliberal ideal of ‘exceptionalism’ which was sold to too many of us as a path to a world without sin. Sadly, too many believed this out of loyalty to a government which cannot do anything except lie.
Those sins are reflected in the generation of men and women who fought the wrong war for the right reasons, serving their country and their families. Everyone’s heart should ache at the enormity of everyone’s losses.
We are all poorer today in body, mind and spirit because of this war.
The late Justin Raimondo spent a lifetime warning us about this:
Raimondo taught me to understand that foreign policy is just war by other means, and it was the most important part of our national policy. The foreign policy orthodoxy can never be challenged in the public sphere.
It is verboten.
Because it is that which drives the Empire and all the perks that come with that for those in charge of it.
For a generation we’ve sent young men and women into a meat grinder for no real-world reason other than to protect the CIA’s opium trade and have troops ready to attack Iran if the right circumstances arose.
And those who did so have proven they have no right to speak on this ever again. They are the villains here.
Every time I take my shoes off and get porno-scanned at the airport I’m reminded of this abject failure, not of policy, but of basic governing philosophy. We Americans (yes even libertarians who warned everyone about this) are culpable for the failures not only in Afghanistan but every other place we use to pressure Iran and, by extension, Russia into submission.
For what? An outdated geopolitical theory about the world –Makinder Heartland Theory — which those in power cling to like Linus’ blanket to justify their naked bloodlust and avarice?
It’s time to put away these childish things and return to our own centers, our homes.
I welcome the mimetic collapse for millions in the center of the U.S. political spectrum. They are asking the right question, “What in god’s name was this all for in the end?”
The anti-interventionist crowd I’m proud to be a part of are getting their schadenfreude on right now but this is the exact wrong time for gloating.
This is their moment to prove you empathize with our losses so that no one should have to die again for such an ignoble cause as a pipeline or democracy. That the urge to fight for your family, your country is noble but that nobility ends at the shoreline. The message now is we want what you want, to rebuild the bonds of civil society these villains bombed without remorse and threw your children onto the altar of their evil, gutted and threw away.
You can start by remembering these 2 minutes from Ron Paul in 2009.
The Return of the Tribal King
This is the first lesson from this failure in Afghanistan that has everyone in a state of shock.
Humans are loyal to their tribes.
We spent 20 years building a government and military occupation through destruction, bombing and bribery with the goal of undermining Afghanistan’s tribal structure.
Not one whit of it remains. And yet, after 20 years of propaganda saying it was working, we’re shocked the moment we announce we’re leaving those same people, who never loved us, reverted to their tribal roots?
No amount of violence creates that. In fact, it only hardens that which is there. Vague notions of democracy and women’s rights are not compelling.
If what we offered Afghanistan’s people wanted, it wouldn’t have taken 20 years to build it. As always, the neocons were wrong. The proof is in the 72 hour collapse of the entire edifice.
The morons in power didn’t believe the goat herders wouldn’t read the tea leaves and pledge allegiance to the next most powerful group, the Taliban?
This is why I wasn’t surprised by the speed of the collapse of the Afghan government and its 300,000 strong army.
They took our money and used it to survive the occupation.
History is replete with examples of quickly deposed Viceroys after their rule breaks down.
I hope the Taliban are as good as their word to the Russians per the Moscow talks in July. If so, the chaotic period will be as brief as it possibly could be. The further bloodshed minimized and something close to order can emerge. We should all cheer for that.
When you push a people to the brink of extinction, when you force them back to their basic units of community, in Afghanistan’s example, their tribal identity, you find the limit to which they will retreat.
Having lost everything else they will always, and without fail, fight for their families to the death. Why would you expect anything else? Wouldn’t you? Nothing else matters if not your family.
This is why everyone who has gone into Afghanistan over the past 150 years has failed. Only hubris and the kind of solipsism that comes from unlimited perceived power sings a different tune.
The people who made up Afghanistan’s ‘army’ were faced with a real choice, fight for something they had no loyalty to or submit to the Taliban who now see this as the ultimate victory over the West.
The Road Back from Serfdom
That same choice is rapidly being put in front of us here in America, if not the entire West. We are ruled by stateless and foreign occupiers. There is a viceroy sporifying in the White House. There are looters and vandals running wild on Main Street, K Street and Wall Street.
They have the courts running scared, destroying the rule of law, while Congress has run out of money to bribe us with.
And yet it feels like we have precious few friends or even temporary allies. But we have also seen a massive wave of counter moves by those that still believe in such quaint notions as family, community and, yes, tribe.
In my last article I said it was time to strike at the root of confidence. Not the confidence of the values of our institutions but our confidence in those that operate those institutions.
The collapse of our Afghanistan adventure is supposed to deeply shame us and humiliate us. The vandals in D.C. are chuckling in their version of Collapsitarian.
It has done that.
The media that has been their stenographers and our enemies have been stunned into a rare silence, some even imploring us to self-censor images of their failures.
The anger over this collapse is just settling in for millions of people now.
But, we have to move past that shame quickly. Now we must take that humility, which used to be the ethos of pre-empire America, and realize who the architects of this were and remove them from the public discourse. They no longer get to speak in hallowed halls and drone incantations of death and destruction, dressing it up as a righteous cause.
The no longer get to bamboozle with prepared talking points which are as pathetic as they are deceitful.
Because if we do that then those who enforce the viceroy’s chaos will also face a stark choice. I ask them openly, “Is this order?”
Is this what you are willing to die to protect?
Change is coming. You can be a part of it or run for the airports with your mask on and your vaccine QR code at the ready. Davos has tried to break our spirit by breaking our families and our tribes.
They have us fighting among ourselves while they try to run the table over the flu shot. We think ourselves superior to those Afghan goat-herders. But they still have their identities.
And now they have their country back.
I’ve herded goats, it’s a tough job. Far tougher than the work most Americans do today. So, stow the exceptionalism, back away from the shadows projected on the cave wall and reconnect with the light of reality.
Two weeks ago I implored law enforcement to see things as they were and remind themselves who it is they protect and serve.
Now is your opportunity to prove to us, in our time of need, that you are our friends and not the enemies of civil society. You have the opportunity to help restore real order. Don’t make the mistakes our soldiers and their families made, sacrificing your lives for people who despise you.
Wars of all forms are rackets.
Because the big reveal in Afghanistan is that what happened there can happen here, quickly. Those goat-herders just showed us how to defeat an Empire abroad. Now it’s time to defeat the empire within.
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