How Did We Ever Wind Up In Afghanistan?

Anyone who believes that the United States will have no further involvement in Afghanistan after tomorrow, is someone who is also willing to believe that the Earth is flat, or maybe the Sun rises in the West, or that immunizations against Covid-19 are the devil’s own work.

Before I explain how this view, government narratives to the contrary, is such a complete and total load of crap, I just want to run through a brief history lesson, okay?

See the little square in the middle of the map? In the years just before World War I, this little chunk of real estate controlled the politics and economics of every other chunk of real estate in the entire globe, with the exception of the United States. The process of reducing 9/10ths of the world to economic and political vassalage of 1/20th of the land mass of the globe began in the 16th Century with the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch. Then in the eighteenth century, the Dutch and the Belgians added more to their share, and in the nineteenth century, things really took off in Asia and Africa for the Germans, the British and the French.

Note that my map does not have any marking around Turkey, which was known as the Ottoman Empire and developed a presence in the Near East, primarily in territories now known as Israel, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. But the Ottoman rulers had very little real, day-to-day impact over their foreign holdings, as long as some kind of taxes got paid.

Not so in the territories controlled by countries in Western Europe, who not only assiduously worked to reduce most of their overseas territories to compliant, subservient states, but fought three wars between themselves over carving up the world map.

The de jure and de facto ownership of the world by a small group of European countries which all happen to be both Christian in terms of religion and White in terms of race, came to a crashing end with the Great Depression that started in 1929. The economies of even the most advanced countries were so badly disrupted by the economic collapse, that no country had the will or the strength to maintain its grip over colonial zones. The loosening of economic and political connections between colonial powers and colonial zones became even more evident with the wholesale destruction of the Western European physical, economic, and social infrastructure during World War II.

Enter the United States, which decided to become the world’s leading power by playing the surrogate’s role for the European colonizers in the various colonial zones. This is why we replaced the French in Indo China and ended up losing more than 60,000 Americans in Viet Nam. This is why we went into Afghanistan and gave weapons to Bin Laden and the mujahideen to help them resist the Soviet invasion, then stayed around after the Soviets pulled out in 1989.

Think that August 31st represents a ‘drop-dead date’ for an American presence in Afghanistan? Yea, right. Yesterday’s drone attack on an unmarked vehicle carrying a bomb towards the airport indicates that we have already begun to develop an intelligence network within the country which we will no doubt continue to control and expand.

Meanwhile, the usual suspects are beginning to appear who can always be counted on to promote the importance and value of America’s continued presence in just about every country on the globe. I’m referring here to Niall Ferguson, for example, who is a right-wing spieler at the Hoover Institute, claims that America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan will embolden China to become more of a threat to our interests as their economy continues to grow.

I don’t know where Ferguson gets his numbers from, but the last time I looked at per-capita GDP, we were somewhere around $62,000 and China was somewhere between $12,000 and $17,000, depending on which Chinese source you want to believe. Ferguson also claims that China’s per-capita GDP will almost match our GDP by 2024.

To bolster the idea that American ‘power’ needs to be defined in a different way so that countries like Afghanistan might eventually become modern, national states, The Economist has also rolled out Henry Kissinger, who presided over the collapse of another experiment in Western-style government building, this one in South Viet Nam.

Why was the withdrawal from Afghanistan such a big mistake? Because according to Kissinger, “America cannot escape being a key component of international order because of its capacities and historic values.”

So here we have it again. The United States is the model government which represents freedom, democracy and all those other good ideals mentioned in the Bill of Rights. All we need to do is be patient, because turning Afghanistan into a place whose government resembles what it took the United States seventy years to achieve won’t happen overnight. In order to grant Constitutional protections to all Americans, or at least all male Americans, we had to fight a four-year civil war which only cost 1.5 million military casualties on both sides.

Let’s go back to our world map again:

Notice on this map the black, oblong space which covers parts of 12 different countries. This territory stretches from the Eastern coast of the Mediterranean to somewhere in the middle of China. Marco Polo travelled through this region in the thirteenth century, and he encountered seemingly endless numbers of people who were wandering from one watering hole and oasis to the next.

From God knows when until today, this region holds millions of people who have no awareness of national borders, or national governments or national political authority at all. For those of us who live a relatively settled and permanent life (read: just about everyone in the United States), it is difficult to imagine that our world contains millions of people who lead a transient and impermanent existence for the entire course of their lives.

What do you think the phrase ‘tribal territories’ really means? It’s a phrase used again and again to describe parts of virtually every country in this unsettled, nomadic zone. And statesmen like Henry Kissinger and academics turned pundits like Niall Ferguson really believe that America’s authority and power will be sorely tested because we picked up and ran away from this God-forsaken part of the globe?

I didn’t feel very happy watching some of our fighting men and women being rolled down a ramp in metal caskets draped with American flags. I don’t want to see any American trooper, or for that matter any man or woman of any nationality, religion or race lose their life because some of us feel obligated to go around the world and tell everyone else how to behave.

What did Grandpa say was the best foreign policy for the United States?

“Shait en haim,” (read: stay at home.)