At the moment I write this, the United States is experiencing the worst military humiliation in its history. You might be tempted to think that is hyperbole. That would be a mistake. The Fall of Saigon, which may have been the previous record-holder, is nothing like what is happening now, but not for the reasons President Biden claimed a month ago.
The South Vietnamese government held out for at least a few years after American withdrawal, and then only collapsed after Congress ended foreign aid.1 The Afghan government, after twenty years of training, infrastructure development, American combat missions to pacify resistance, and tens of billions of dollars of military aid held out for about three weeks. Biden was (unwittingly) absolutely right, there is no comparison whatsoever between this and the Fall of Saigon. The Fall of Kabul is exponentially worse.
Besides the obvious waste of nearly 2.5 trillion dollars, 2500 American lives, and 20,000 wounded, what makes this so bad for the American regime is that somehow they believed they could totally abandon Bagram Airbase in the dead of night and the government they installed and military they bought wouldn’t instantaneously fold. No amount of money could make this work. If it were not such a monumental tragedy, it would be comical. Biden’s press conference on July 8, 2021 is being used to show how absurdly out of touch he is, or mentally unfit he is, but that badly misses the point. The entire military, intelligence, and diplomatic apparatus that informs him was either unbelievably naive or willfully deceptive—most likely a combination of both. Our entire globalist liberal system got so high on its own supply that people at the highest levels actually believed they could go to what is little more than a Stone Age Muslim country in the Himalayas, where the median occupation is goatherd, and install a puppet government that was cool with Rainbow Flags and women getting Master’s Degrees in Gender Studies.
Both the nation-building experiment and the instantaneous collapse of the Afghan government are examples of how absurdly inept the people that rule the Globalist American Empire are. It is impossible to overstate how clueless these people are. At the same time the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, sat before Congress declaring that the greatest threat to America was “white male rage” and how Critical Race Theory helps the military keep our country safe, he was at the very same time presiding over the most disastrous and ignominious moment the nation has ever seen.
Why did this happen? Twenty years ago all of America was furious that our country had been attacked. We wanted the most powerful military that human beings have ever assembled to avenge us. Soon a campaign to strike Al Qaeda and the Taliban became an invasion and occupation with no clear objective. It quickly went from “avenge 9/11” to “make sure a 9/11 never happens again.” Such a statement makes a nice soundbite for politicians, generals, and bureaucrats, but it was as open-ended as it was pithy. Exactly how are you going to make sure it never happens again? Kill every Pashtun man, woman, and child? Eternally maintain an occupation force of tens of thousands of troops in a landlocked country with supply lines literally over the Himalayas? Magically transform a nation of mostly illiterate Muslim shepherds into a First World economy and nation-state through the power of the printing presses at the Federal Reserve?
Afghanistan became a notorious waste and means to essentially launder money, both to American defense contractors, on the front end, and Afghan warlords, on the back end. There are stories of tribesmen setting up fake Taliban camps to inform the Americans on, letting them drop hundreds of thousands of dollars of ordnance, and then selling the scrap from those bombs for a few hundred dollars. A friend once told me about his son’s experience leading an infantry platoon as a fresh young officer, and they were to negotiate with the village elders a few dozen barrels of drinking water and other supplies. They delivered the supplies, left the village believing they had “won hearts and minds” when they later discovered those supplies were immediately stolen. By the village elders selling them on Afghan craigslist or by the Taliban, really makes no difference. They would repeat this charade several times. Now imagine this playing out across countless villages throughout Afghanistan for 20 years. No amount of free stuff, education, road building, etc. was going to transform those people into something like rural Midwesterners.
But the modal American lib (both the progressive and his half-brother, the neoconservative) believe somehow America absolutely could do that. I will never forget, around 2012, after President Obama had apparently accomplished this single-greatest goal for the Afghan War (in the minds of most Americans, at least) in the killing of Osama bin Laden, having a conversation with someone about why it was now time to leave Afghanistan. “We’ve been there 10 years. That’s as long as the Soviets. Bin Laden is dead. What are we trying to accomplish?” “But what about all those little girls who won’t get to go to school!? All the roads and bridges we built! We are turning that country into a democracy like us.” Many people actually believed this. They believed it was worth spending 2.5 trillion dollars and inflicting incalculable suffering because schools would transform Afghans into a people just like us. It makes sense, these are the same people who believe we just spent a little more on education here, the average 18-year-old in Baltimore might finally attain the education level of a 5th grader. “Success is right around the corner, if we just do a little bit more.” There is no limit to the credulity of the American liberal when it is a question of spending other people’s money.
What the Fall of Kabul Means
The American failure in Afghanistan is indicative of a much deeper problem, that should be readily apparent to everyone. Our system rewards compliance, not competence. This is not just true of our military and intelligence establishment. We see this in every area of government, society, even to a large degree in business. Our system filters the most compliant to the top. That is the factor that matters the most. Yes, talent and competency are not seen as totally worthless, but they are secondary. The midwit who never questions what he is told will be rewarded. True genius is despised and relegated to obscurity. Anyone who questions them is told to shut up. But all the experts in the credentialled class have to show for it is failure upon failure upon failure. It would be bad enough if these were merely personal failures, but the ineptitude of the credentialed, occupational class plunges all of us down with them.
As obvious as this is right now in Afghanistan, it is also quite obvious in the arena of public health. The people at the highest levels managing the Coronavirus Pandemic are simply not very bright. Anthony Fauci botched the response to AIDS, and whipped the entire country into hysteria 30 years ago over a disease that is ultimately not a threat to the non-intravenous drug-and-sodomy-enjoying general population. How is his utter failure rewarded? His career only advances to where he could run the same playbook yet again. What Afghanistan and the Pandemic should conclusively show you is the experts are clueless and probably lying, and if you trust them you might find yourself clinging for your life on a ventilator or the landing gear of a C-17.
What This Means For The Future
The Fall of Kabul is a disaster, there is no way around it. But the regime that rules us needs to be humiliated. No, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris and Jen Psaki and Ben Sasse and Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and the rest of DC are not going to wake up in a cold sweat because of this. These people don’t care. They don’t take it as a personal embarrassment. They will forget about it after a few news cycles. But the prestige of the Globalist American Empire has been permanently damaged. It was humiliated when, despite the full force of its propaganda machine, Donald Trump emerged victorious in 2016, and it did not forget that humiliation. It struck back in 2020, with destructive lockdowns, aiding and abetting massive rioting, and an extremely dubious election, to put it mildly. After 2020, it appeared the regime was invincible. It had binded its wounds from 2016 and struck back with a vengeance. But their inability to mitigate the pandemic and now their total humiliation in Afghanistan, they don’t look so invincible anymore. They are still incredibly powerful, to be sure, but they are not the omnipotent force the blackpilled, rightwing doomer assumes.
The Fall of Kabul is a humiliation for the Globalist American Empire, but for actual Americans, it is a good thing. No, this doesn’t mean that actual Americans are rooting for the Taliban or should think of them positively in any sense. What it does mean is that a regime that is making the world safe for OnlyFans should be humiliated everywhere it raises its rainbow flag. We should come to recognize that there are indeed two Americas. One whose standard is the Stars and Stripes and another whose dual standards are the BLM and LGBT flags. If your flag is the former, you should want those who fly the latter to lose wherever they set foot and against whoever opposes them, even a group as evil as the Taliban. This is no different than rooting for purple-haired kneeling women’s soccer players to lose in the Olympics. It does not mean you are pro-Russia or pro-Taliban. It means you want the woke regime that hates you to be humiliated.2
This is an extremely hard pill to swallow for many Americans, especially those who fought in Afghanistan and who lost friends and body parts over there. No one wants to think of a sacrifice like that as a waste. This should make American anger burn against the Globalist American Empire occupational class that sends their sons to kill and die to project the power of a regime that hates us. The news cycle will go on. The regime will forget this quickly. But the actual American people never will. And do not be surprised when a charismatic leader emerges years from now who will summon the anger and shame that the Fall of Kabul has unleashed.
I am as surprised as you are, but after consulting with several Constitutional scholars, this is actually a thing Congress is allowed to do.
You have to admit, the mental image of a Taliban women’s soccer team clad in burkhas defeating Meghan Rapinoe’s mighty kneelers is hilarious.
Excellent essay. For this you have earned a new subscriber.
Ben Sasse is part of the problem? Is Donald Trump the solution then?