Sebastian Gorka weighs in
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Gorka took a military-escorted tour of that benighted country in 2006. Here are some excerpts of his thoughts from back then:
… Surrealism was a theme throughout. It was present in the medieval conditions we saw outside of the capital, and it was present in the tragic scene I witnessed on the military side of the Herat airfield.
We were waiting for our flight back to Kabul, just waiting and waiting. A simple chain link fence separated the military zone of the airstrip from those waiting for civilian domestic flights. On the other side of the fence was an utterly adorable little girl dressed head-to-toe in pink, playing with a doll, and just being an innocent child. Then she toddled over to her mother, sitting on the ground against an adobe wall. No pink terry cloth hoodie for her. Her mother was in a head-to-toe black niqab with a grille that hid even her eyes. That girl would live a free and innocent life until one prepubescent day, when she would be put in a black bag and likely married off to a much older lecherous man. This was the country we and our allies were “nation-building” to the tune of more than $60 million per day for 20 years.
…. I convinced my NATO minders I needed to get outside the wire to roam free before flying back home. Things were relatively stable in 2006, but I was still forced to sign a waiver just in case I was blown up or shot, which I did. What did I find out, as I poked around for myself? One metric tells it all. Of all the Afghan officers, enlisted men, and NCOs we trained at the U.S.-funded academy, more than 40 percent of them simply disappeared back to their tribal regions and militias upon graduation. In other words, the U.S. government paid to train our enemies.
That is why anyone who was surprised that Kabul and the “host nation” government fell in just 10 days after America spent more than $2 trillion to build the “New Afghanistan” is an imbecile.
The post-9/11 mission in the hellhole that is Central Asia was supposed to be about just one thing: to destroy al-Qaeda’s ability to use that territory to plan and execute mass casualty attacks on U.S. soil. Nothing else. Not hospitals, not schools. Not “nation-building” or building a “modern” Afghan national Army.
