America leaves Afghanistan: It’s not cutting and running if you don’t care
Why is America fighting anyone it isn’t willing to flatten?
Will the last American to leave Afghanistan turn out the lights?
Actually, you can probably leave them on. All that infrastructure Uncle Sam built fighting the Global War on Terror will soon be in Taliban hands.
America got ran off its corners in Afghanistan, after 20 years, to its great shame — so the media will say.
But you and I need to think more clearly than that.
What’s worse? Admitting a failure of nation-building, in a place with a centuries-long — and ongoing — tradition of warlords? Or propping up the 20-year lie that this could end any other way?
America was unprepared to leave Afghanistan because it was never supposed to leave. The case for war in Afghanistan only works if pitched as the case for perpetual war, a blur of sunk costs and future fears. If this still works on you, shame on you.
In both Vietnam and Afghanistan, American managed to be on the wrong side of the only people in the country with a fighting spirit. America has lost its gift for picking friends and enemies.
This was a Loser Leaves Town match, and the Taliban and the Viet-Cong weren’t leaving. Where would they even go? People fighting for their homelands tend to do better than people fighting for chess pieces a world away.
Yes, America could have flattened the country. But why would we? Better question: why are we fighting anyone we’re not willing to flatten?
Such people can wait out Uncle Sam forever, knowing that Americans will not stomach losing their boys in countries they’d never visit.
If not for Donald Trump’s decision and Joe Biden sticking to it, a forever stalemate was indeed the plan.
But it’s not cutting and running if you don’t give a shit. It’s the preservation of blood and wealth and energy.
America should have left Afghanistan in 2002, having broken it and not bought it.
The fight had value, at one point, for about a month. The nation-building was always a mistake.
It’s never the wrong time to do the right thing. Leaving Afghanistan is the right thing.