http://www.danielgreenfield.org/2021/08/there-was-never-solution-in-afghanistan.html?m=1Friday, August 13, 2021
A Myth Named AfghanistanDaniel Greenfield
Excerpt:A modern Afghanistan was worse than a client state. It was a Potemkin village of State Department and USAID workers funding female rock bands and American officers trying to get Afghans to act like they're in a modern western army. All that led to was Afghans feeling insulted and trying to kill Americans.
Afghanistan was a strange dream that Americans had. The Afghans never shared that dream. The moment we announced that we were leaving, the soldiers we had dressed up, abandoned ship. Every Afghan we had spent a fortune paying to participate in our production of a modern Afghanistan fled. The show was over, the paying crowd was leaving, and the Taliban smoothly took over everything.
Everyone except us understood that was going to happen.
The old Brits or Frenchmen who had lived through this same phenomenon in the fifties could have told us about it, but we wouldn't have listened.
And we still don't understand.
A tribal opposition to the Taliban will likely emerge. And we will likely fund them. That opposition may succeed in dividing the country. The warlords in the Taliban coalition and the opposition coalition will move back and forth as they did during our part of the Afghanistan war.
It's become fashionable to call Afghanistan an "endless war". But it's not our endless war. It's the endless war of the tribes, clans and families that make up much of the Muslim world. We didn't begin the "endless war" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria or anywhere else.
It was foolish of us to believe that we could end it.
The difficult realities are those no one wants to hear.
There was never a solution to Afghanistan. Nation-building was never going to work And the odds are that after we've withdrawn, Islamic terrorists are going to set up shop and begin the cycle all over again.
Americans think in terms of solutions. Or at least we used to.
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