Somehow, these three articles are related

happy days are here again

Many Afghans welcome the return of the Taliban. The author of this article strikes me as a glib Pollyanna, and It will be interesting to revisit this article six months and a year from now, by which time I expect the poor, benighted country will be an absolute hell hole, but a government must be pretty damn awful if citizens welcome its replacement by horrible people — and it was. Passing over his “oh, it won’t really be so bad, except maybe for women and opponents of the Taliban”, there’s this: the utter corruption of our “allies” – the crooks we installed ad kept in power for twenty years.

Keep in mind that Kabul has 4 million citizens, the vast majority of which just want to get on with their lives. Will Taliban rule be much more restrictive? Of course, but this is Afghanistan, there is no centuries-long culture of enlightenment, no tradition of Jeffersonian Democracy, it is a culture and a people who will largely be able to live with the Taliban, have families, and enjoy Friday nights watching a spirited game of buzkashi.

We stayed to install and then maintain a government no one really wanted or for which anyone had any respect while heavily arming a largely indifferent military with billions in sophisticated weapons and equipment.

Why?

We all know why we went there in the first place, but why on earth did we stay? In whose interest was that?

It wasn't mine. It probably wasn't yours.

Getting out (as a general concept) made sense (I won't quibble over when, but many years before now, certainly). In fact, it was an inevitability. Afghanistan was never going to be Japan, Germany, or South Korea. We knew that a long time ago.

The powers that be (take your pick, military leadership, defense industry, shadowy billionaires) want you to believe that life in Afghanistan will be utter hell under the Taliban. I will readily concede that it won't be South Dakota, but it never was going to be, and I would argue most parts of the world could, by that standard, be described in similar terms.

It most certainly will be bad, if not tragic, for many, and the United States bears an awful lot of responsibility for that, but you can't force a country or a culture to be something it's not prepared to be. Germans and Italians were certainly ready after World War II as was Japan. It can be done, but it can't be forced. Capitulation can be forced, defeat can be forced, but you can not force a people to embrace something the vast majority of which find to be alien.

The New York Times did some good reporting last week, noting that there have been disruptions, particularly a shortage of cash with banks closed (more to come, I'm sure, despite my friend's optimistic outlook), but they also found this:

Others had positive things to say about the arrival of the Taliban, in contrast to their U.S.-backed Afghan predecessors, widely despised for their corruption.

The Afghan government has been widely despised for its corruption from the beginning. The people hated their government. Why would they risk their lives for it?

In the Company neighborhood on the western edge of Kabul, even though gas has been getting harder to find, road traffic and business was nearly back to normal.

Truck and bus drivers said that Afghanistan's highways had become more secure now that the Taliban had consolidated control over the country. Drivers praised the removal of dozens of checkpoints where security forces and militias had previously extorted bribes — replaced with a single toll payment to the Taliban.

And the real kicker:

"We're happy with the Islamic Emirate," said Ruhullah, 34, a resident of Wardak Province who drives a passenger bus along the main highway from Herat to Kabul. "With the Taliban's arrival, our problems have been solved. There's no more police harassment and bribery."

….

“To that end, life under the Taliban will not be anything like we'd want to experience, and surely not anything like many Afghans would have preferred, particularly women.

“But if that many Afghans truly cared — if the culture, the majority of people, had largely embraced the ideas of self-determination, secularism, liberty, and democracy as we understand those terms — the well-equipped, 300,000-man Afghan army, even absent air support (the Taliban had none), would have held easily.

It didn't.

And this: Afghanistan: A Possibly Unimaginable Country

Most of the discussion on nation building focuses on assistance programs, which makes sense as they’re tangible, measurable, and channel untold billions to international organizations, development agencies, and the like. These programs fall into two broad buckets — concrete infrastructure and procurement (roads, military equipment, sanitation, schools) and capacity building (cultural exchanges, legislative assistance, training for security forces and government officials, etc.)

Ideally, a second kind of nation building is happening behind the scenes, a coalescence of diverse groups into a single national identity outweighing local or tribal loyalties. In other words, people see themselves (and others) as primarily members of the nation, and only secondarily as members of ethnic or religious subgroups.

The process becomes even more daunting when you consider that 74% of the population is rural, and deeply traditional. That’s a huge obstacle. Urbanization brings plenty of social pathologies, but you need a lot of cosmopolitan, atomized city-dwellers if you want to hyper-speed a country from premodern to postmodern in two decades.

Next, most of Afghanistan’s people groups have co-ethnics across the various borders: Pashtuns and Balochs in Pakistan; Turkmen, Tajiks, and Uzbeks in the various Central Asian “Stans”; and so on. Porous borders and transnational loyalties are powerful centrifugal forces.

Now add in chronic warfare, with its inevitable ethnic and religious enmities, and constant disruption of movement and communications.

Lastly, have Pakistan use its intelligence service and military to destabilize the fledgling nation and provide limitless support to the Taliban.

We could list a dozen more factors, but the upshot is that Afghanistan never cohered into a unified, durable nation-state, as evidenced by its Jenga-like collapse. And part of the reason was that too few people imagined themselves first as Afghans and secondarily by tribal or local affiliations.

Was nation building doomed from the start? I can’t say. But it was always going to be an uncertain and maddeningly difficult endeavor.

When we debate future commitments, our experience in Afghanistan could serve as a cautionary example.

Tucker Carlson: Our Military Has Been Lying To Us For Twenty Years
No, there was never any “progress”; our generals knew it, and they falsely told their commander in chief and the American public otherwise.

Thousands of young soldiers were killed and horribly injured, thousands of more were burned out and used up by repeated, years-long deployments back to the country, trillions of dollars spent, but perhaps the greatest harm our general officers did was to destroy Americans’ faith in the institution itself. With promotions at stake, and billions to be made by their future defense industry employers, these people deliberately kept the truth hidden and the charade continuing.

And now they’ve set about indoctrinating their troops to hate their country and each other by introducing “critical race theory” into the ranks. If one didn’t know better, he’d think that we have traitors in the top levels of our government.