It blows my mind as to why we are proceeding to self annihilate as a country. Who in his right mind would fight a war which we were winning for over twenty years, and then decide we’ve had enough? So much so, that we decide to abandon, and donate our entire military weaponry to the enemy. Did we do this because we thought perhaps the Taliban was losing so badly that we would level the playing field? There is no doubt in my mind that we will be back in Afghanistan again, and probably a lot sooner than we think. OpentheBooks.com has stated that the U.S. spent three hundred million dollars a day during the twenty years we spent trading bullets with the Afghanis.
If it were up to me the surface of Afghanistan would look like the surface of the moon with lots of craters. No civilization on Earth is worth spending that kind of money on to try and save them from themselves. Maybe we should have spent the money building a fence around the country to keep the inmates inside. They would be free to subjugate their own people, cutting off their heads to have fun.
Daniel Greenfield is one of my favorite writers. His commentary is almost always spot on with my own philosophy and beliefs. On the occasions where we are not in alignment it is because I don’t understand what he is saying, or don’t understand the background of the politics or country he is commenting on. How any man can be so learned and introspective is a wonder to me. The article below is in total agreement with my own thoughts and has been ever since the Afghanistan debacle began twenty years ago. I won’t even try to embellish his words with mine.
OUR MISTAKEN IDEAS ABOUT HUMAN RIGHTS FAILED US IN AFGHANISTAN
America was founded on that simple premise. The Declaration of Independence’s conviction in the equality of men, individual rights, and governments gaining their authority from the consent of the governed was based on “self-evident” truths.
These truths are “self-evident” to Americans in the way that they’re not self-evident to the average Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi, Russian, South African or Chinese citizen. They have their own truths that are equally “self-evident” to them based on their own worldview and culture.
The Taliban, like the vast majority of Muslims, assert that believers in Allah are superior to infidels, that men must have supreme authority over women, and leaders over people.
This hierarchical model governs a lot more of the world than anything we’ve come up with.
And even in America there are voices that favor tearing up the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and reverting to a hierarchical model. From the Marxists on the Left to the Neo-Reactionaries on the Right, there are those who would turn back the clock to feudalism with enlightened philosopher-kings imposing an “ideal society” on the inferior class of men.
When we say that something is self-evident, it flows naturally from our values and our beliefs.
Consider the two radically different worldviews inherent in Benjamin Franklin writing that, “the rain which descends from heaven upon our vineyards” is “a constant proof that God loves us, and loves to see us happy” and the Ayatollah Khomeini proclaiming “Allah did not create man so that he could have fun” and thus there “is no fun in Islam.”
Both Franklin and Khomeini were expressing a worldview that was self-evident to them.
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” came from people who believed that God loves us and wants us to enjoy life. Beheadings, butchery, and the burka came from Islamists who believe that Allah does not like us very much and that we deserve to be miserable.
The respective governments of America and the Muslim world just play out that theology.
America’s approach to individual freedom and meritocratic government came out of broader English and European intellectual trends. Western nations mostly came around to the approach, at least after two world wars, finding that happy people made for a good economy and stability.
Asian First World nations also came around to their own modified versions of a free society while still emphasizing hierarchy and collective morality. And those were the success stories.
Most of the rest of the world is littered with failures.
The American idea was exported successfully by contact with our culture which contained its individualistic, moral, and aspirational DNA. That’s much less true than it used to be. But what is still true is that our efforts to directly export our ideals have failed miserably. Whether it’s trying to explain the Founding Fathers to the Iraqis or funding Women’s Studies in Afghanistan, few were influenced, and many were confused, irritated, or moderately amused by our efforts.
Constructing “governments-in-a-box” in Iraq and Afghanistan was never going to fit their culture. Exporting human rights by explaining our self-evident belief in individual rights didn’t work in cultures that don’t think that people are primarily individuals with agency, but members of a group whose rights come from their role in a rigid hierarchy of ethnicity, gender or race.
Our own political and cultural elites have adopted that worldview making them particularly unfit to spread human rights or individual freedom abroad even as they eliminate them at home.
How can Biden, who decided to pick a black woman as his vice president, before deciding which individual was going to fill that role, credibly tell the Afghans or Iraqis that they shouldn’t pick their leaders based on their gender, tribe, ethnicity, or Sunni and Shiite status?
Before we explain freedom and rights to the Afghans and Iraqs, we need a refresher course.
Our democracy export business is based on a series of intellectual errors dating back to the two world wars which we had defined as fighting for democracy and against tyranny in Europe.
Ever since then our intellectual and cultural elites have stuck to the conviction that the entire world works much like Europe. Every country, whether it’s in Asia, Africa, or the Middle East, is in the midst of a struggle between liberal democrats and reactionary authoritarians. All we have to do is overthrow their Hitler or Mussolini, and a liberal democracy will emerge from the ashes.
This fallacy may have hit its peak with the insistence that the Arab Spring was Europe in 1848.
The rest of the world isn’t Europe of the past three centuries. Its intellectual trends, worldviews, and culture have little in common. While western lefties managed to export socialism to most of the world, it takes on very different forms in places like North Korea or Iraq. The “self-evident” assumptions of political ideas are lost in the translation and transition to very different cultures.
The problem with exporting our “self-evident” ideas is that they’re based on the belief in a loving and merciful God, on the value of individual life, and the genius of individual innovation. Most of the world’s cultures are not only not individualistic, many, like the People’s Republic of China or the Muslim world, are actively anti-individualistic and believe morality comes from hierarchy.
Is morality individual or is it collective? Is the role of government to free people to make moral choices or to force them to make the right choice? Where you come down on the answer to that issue is going to determine the sort of society and government you want and will fight for.
If you’re a member of the Taliban, of the Chinese Communist Party, a believer in critical race theory or the neo-reactionary ideology, odds are you will come down on the collective side.
And on the side of tyranny.
Is life basically good or bad? Are most people bad or good? Does God love us or hate us?
You can’t just casually export our underlying assumptions behind human rights to cultures that answer these questions in very different ways.
All of us, in a more tribal America, have experienced the frustration of mutually incomprehensible conversations with our fellow Americans that appear to be about issues, mask mandates, Black Lives Matter, or abortion, but that are actually about culture and values.
If it’s all but impossible to establish common ground on what rights and freedoms are with other Americans, what were the odds that we were going to do it with Afghans or Iraqis?
America can and should export human rights. But the best way to do it is by example.
Whether it’s parents influencing children, teachers acting as role models, or any other mentor relationship, the most vital lessons are not didactic, but personal. From our earliest years, we learn by imitation and we become like the people we want to be. Indeed, in both Judaism and Christianity, goodness comes from striving to learn from and imitate the ways of God.
Tellingly, the concept plays out very differently in Islam where Muslims imitiate Mohammed.
When nations and peoples around the world strived to be like America, it’s because they admired what we had, what we achieved, and how we lived. Most people assume that success is the result of values and behaviors. How people see a successful group, whether it’s Americans, Jews, or Asians comes down to the question of whether they achieved their success fairly through discipline and hard work, or unfairly by abuse and thievery. The answer to that question will determine whether someone is anti-American, anti-Semitic, or anti-whatever group.
These days the loudest voices stating that America is evil, and that everything we had was gained through colonialism and slavery, are coming from our own political and cultural elites.
Why would anyone admire or imitate us when we loudly announce that we’re liars and thieves?
Exporting human rights is not a matter of finding dictators to overthrow. The Muslim world isn’t Europe. It’s not in a state of conflict between tyranny and freedom, but between different flavors of tyranny which all share underlying assumptions about hierarchy over individualism.
Regime change won’t fix the culture.
There are times when America may need to intervene in other countries, when it’s to counter a threat or to prevent an extreme wrong such as genocide, but we cannot and will not fix the world. The vast majority of the planet will go on living under authoritarian regimes. Women in Muslim countries will suffer. And so will various ethnic and religious minorities under their rule.
We should condemn evil where we see it without assuming that we can make it go away and that should drive us to build alliances with nations that share our culture, heritage and values. Instead of spending billions reconstructing enemies, we’re better off strengthening our friends.
Above all else, we should show that our values lead to a good life. The example that we set for the rest of the world will do more to spread human rights than any military interventions.
That’s how it always was.
After a century of ideological cold wars, countering Communism and then Islamism, we have a lot of military interventions under our belt, but have gotten no better at making arguments for our way of life to our own people. While we were trying to convince Africans that Marxism wasn’t for them, our Ivy League institutions adopted it. And while we tried to talk the Afghans and Iraqis out of Islamic theocracy, our own cities, institutions, and governments filled up with Islamists.
If we want to defeat Islamism and protect human rights and freedom, we should start at home.
It’s not just Afghanistan where young girls are being enslaved or sexually abused by Islamists.
The massive influx of Afghans into America will make those numbers worse, not better.
The fundamental lesson of our founding is that we can’t defend our rights without also defending our culture. The self-evident truths on which our freedoms were founded are no longer all that self-evident on a college campus, let alone in Islamist enclaves like Dearborn or Little Mogadishu. If we want to save our rights, we’ll have to defeat the Taliban at home.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
If one wants to get sick he can wander outside into crowds and pick up some COVID-19 virus, or he can listen to cable news and hear too much sh_t about Afghanistan. I don’t wander out and I quit watching the news about a country that we should be taking title to. After twenty years one would think that we own the place. Instead we leave it with our heads down, ears back and tail drooping between our legs. Why did we do this without getting any satisfaction? To me the root cause is simple. We believe in diplomacy instead of common sense. If we were really smart we would believe in common sense and diplomacy working together. Liberals tend to prefer diplomacy over military solutions. Our leadership has been mostly shit-headed liberal for more than sixteen of the twenty years we have engaged the Muslims in their world. They are Ivy-League educated Political Scientists who seem to have their heads buried in their rectums. Me, I prefer the George S. Patton method of diplomacy, we win they lose. One of the main problems with the Afghan world is that they are Muslims and they profess the same simple philosophy as Patton. Because of our Constitution giving us all religious freedom we shy away from taking other people’s religious freedom from them. What we forget is that they are not U.S. citizens and the Constitution doesn’t apply to them. When we engage in war against a people other than our own we should not project our rules on them. Hell, that would be hypocritical you say. BS, I say we will use any rules necessary to win.
In the very olden days of Empires, our very own British Empire, to whom we once belonged, had no problem with taking a country over and ruling it by the British system. Just about every known country on the globe fell under the rule of the British Empire. It wasn’t until we the colonist people stood up to them that we separated successfully. Had we not done that we would still be having tea every afternoon at four. Ownership is a benefit of occupation, and the British knew how to do that well. It was simple, the Brits ruled and the population was subjugated to their rule. It is my opinion that we in the United States should also have taken this approach when deciding to occupy Afghanistan, Iraq, Kuwait, etc. We would now be the proud owners of many resources that are found in the mountains and deserts of those countries.
Think about it. Because we would literally own these territories we could then relegate the governance of these places to all the brain dead liberals who are trying to change our Constitution to be something we don’t want it to be. They could spend all their energies talking to and dealing with the Muslims who would be operating under the we win you lose philosophy. Our administration would not have to worry about adhering to the Constitution because it will never work for them. Our guys would have a field day applying the rules of the Koran into a working democracy. The liberal administrative solution would be to rename the Constitution to the Koran. It would be an arm wrestle between the strongest Muslim and our local Ambassador for which would be changed, the Koran renamed to the Constitution, or the Constitution renamed to the Koran? I won’t ask what you think would happen, there is only one option that would be acceptable to the occupied citizenry.
Again, my philosophy on Afghanistan is that we should have beat them militarily into a smoldering pile of ashes about eighteen years ago, and then made them subject to us. If they didn’t like our rules, and since they love cutting peoples heads off I would grant them equal treatment and a direct line to heaven by guillotine.
At the very least, had I been Commander in Chief I would have ordered every U.S. Citizen out of the country by a deadline. If they didn’t make the deadline I would take it to mean that these people had switched their alliances from the U.S. to Afghanistan and have chosen to remain. After all citizens were flown home, I would offer the same deal to all certified friends of the U.S Military. Once I was assured that ll of our people were out I would order a hasty retreat of all military personnel, but not before blowing up the Afghan government complex into a smoldering pile of ashes. That’s diplomacy baby, we win, you lose.
In a world gone awry I have stopped feeding my mind with non-stop cable news and internet news. Too much of what I see in the headlines is geared at trying to convince me that “a” is wrong and “b” is right. None of what they say is fact. Even I could write news blurbs based on my own fanciful ideas. The term coined by President Trump to describe this phenomenon is “fake news.” What really bothers me is when a particular fake news bit is parroted by untold numbers of reporters across the spectrum of broadcasters. They don’t even try to change the words to make their own version a little bit spicier, they just repeat the printed word laid before them. I once read that the lowest paid newscaster earns $140,000.00 a year. That means these yokels are being paid astronomical sums of money for being able to read.
This morning I scanned the headlines of Breitbart as I always do before I begin my day. Scanning headlines is all I need and that is where I stop. Everyone is blaming President Biden for the retreat from Afghanistan fiasco. The poor bastard owns it but he is not the root cause of the problem. It took me a lot of months of training in quality control to finally begin to understand the concept of root cause, and here is my take on it. The root cause of our current Afghanistan retreat is not Biden, it is the American people who voted this sick bastard into place. It goes deeper than just our votes, it goes into all the mentally retarded politicians who campaigned against Trump. Like the Never-Trumpers, and the RINO’s, the news agency’s, and then to all the Democrats who lust for power and who allow their consciences to over rule any immoral corrupt method of voting irregularity to make a win happen.
President Biden should not be blamed for this fiasco but we should empathize with him and his feeble mind. The world knew he was a poor candidate, he has a record of over forty years of no accomplishment in the Senate to back him up, yet we the people decided we hated Trump more than we disliked Joe’s weak record. I think I have to recall my comment about Biden being sick, and to place the sickness on the twisted mentality of the voters who put him in place.
Over sixty million voters voted against Biden, but more than that voted for him. That puts those people into the column in favor of the sick political philosophy pf socialism. That is right, over half of the population is a bunch of lazy-ass, stupid jerks who prefer sitting on their fat-asses drinking beer and feeding themselves non-stop greasy chips while watching mindless entertainment on TV, as opposed to earning an honorable living.
In the past week I’ve had to do a lot of driving. Most time when I stop I find a grubby looking person walking the white line holding a crudely made cardboard sign appealing for help. My mind goes nuts with replay of all the hiring signs I saw along the way. Why isn’t this person spending his energy applying for a job?
Unfortunately, I do not have an answer for this American dilemma, except to brainwash our kids while in school about the virtues of capitalism and the evils of socialism. The problem is that the socialists are winning the war of children’s minds, as they did the minds of their parents a generation earlier. Maybe I am all wrong about what the root cause is, perhaps I should shift the blame to the educational system that feeds socialism into the minds of our kids.
President Obama’s goal to fundamentally change the country is becoming a reality even though he never really defined what that phrase meant.
I wonder if there is any possibility of winning this battle when it is like a cancer that has metastasized to every organ in the body and I am asking a lowly country doctor to cure the patient.
Two weeks ago in a discussion with my Lion friends the subject of Charley Wilson’s War came up. I remembered seeing a movie by that name, but could not remember what it was about. Two days later my friend Rod dropped off a book with the same title. I finished reading the story today, and feel compelled to express myself about it. Before I do I have to say that the reason I couldn’t remember what the story was about from watching the movie is because the story is way too big to cover in a two hour movie. The producers chose to concentrate on Charley’s womanizing and his relationship with a specific CIA agent named Gust Avrakotos. Both Wilson’s womanizing and Gust’s CIA association are major parts of the story, but their involvement in driving the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan and the eventual downfall of the USSR was complicated and confusing in the film.
Here is my opinion. All presidents from George Bush the second and every president after him should read this piece of history. Had Bush absorbed the message of Jihad played out in the story he would have thought three times before declaring war on Afghanistan. In Obama’s case it is worse. He is a muslim sympathizer yet he fails to recognize the drive and fervor of jihad. His foreign policy regarding muslim nations would have to be different if he understood the message of this book.
The Russians spent billions under the guise of liberating Afghanistan, but they really wanted to own Afghanistan and to open a path to the Indian Ocean. They lost 28,000 young men, and their engagement is compared to our Viet Nam. They killed over a million muslim jihadists, and they might have won had the CIA not gotten involved.
What was the message I got? That muslims on a jihad are crazy zealots for revenge and for driving infidels from their countries. Almost as soon as the door hit the last Russian in the ass as he left Afghanistan, the mujahideen shifted to the USA as their new enemy. It hasn’t stopped since then, and we all know that things are not getting better.
This book is an interesting and enjoyable read. The history covered is relatively obscure because the USA, namely the CIA kept it so covert that neither the Afghans or the Russians knew we were involved.
The second thing I got from the book is that a single Congressman with abilities similar to those of Charles Wilson who wanted revenge for the Russian involvement in Viet Nam against us could appropriate so much money for a program that was never approved by Congress, or the President. In my opinion Charley Wilson was a hero for bringing down the Russians, but he should be in jail for how he went about doing it. The reason he never went to jail is that he had too many other Congressmen in his pocket.
In retrospect, what Charley Wilson did amounts to peanuts compared to what Obama does daily in the name of redistributing wealth.
