thomas leverett weblog

Afghanistan

Everyone is upset because we have turned our back on billions of dollars spent propping up a government that no one wanted and that was unable to sustain itself without us.

I take that back about "no one wanted" because plenty of people would prefer inept greedy incompetents propped up by foreign powers to inept religious fanatics. We have variations of that problem here in the US, and there are obvious down sides to both choices. But my question is: why are we deciding what's best for Afghanis?

I don't think anyone in the US Government has given us a reason for our occupation for at least ten years, as the last one I remember had something to do with bin Laden, and he's been gone for a while. They call it the "endless war" for a reason, and the last two presidents before Biden, Obama and Trump, both promised to get us out and failed to do so. In fact I would also say that they were both elected on that promise, since Americans by and large no longer like wars when we are not given a reason for them, and when our boys are dying for no apparent reason.

Sure, we all want to see them have a more democratic world, where women have rights and everyone has some freedoms. Afghanis though did not support our efforts to prop up a government that might make these things possible. For some reason they couldn't get behind the idea of a US-funded corrupt puppet government that took our money and did nothing to improve the lot of the people themselves. We look at that situation and wonder why they wouldn't obviously support something that made their lives better. Well, I think somehow it wasn't making their lives better. It wasn't doing anything to pull their lives out of misery at all.

So they won't be too happy about the Taliban either, since all it ever did for them was find a market for people's opium, and it has crappy relations with every other country except Pakistan, which has very little itself to offer. But the Taliban has an advantage - it's theirs, and is made up of their own people, and although it represents a backward repressive culture, at least it's their backward repressive culture. A modern democratic puppet government just for some reason wasn't doing it for them.

That's their choice, so what are we even arguing about?

posted by tom @ 8:40 PM