I don’t know if that phrase is from an older work, or if it originated in the script of Blade Runner.
Nonetheless, it’s a great visualization.
Afghanistan has fallen. Apparently President Biden was shocked, according to some reports. This, less than a month after he told America and the world that the Afghanistan Military could handle the country’s defense.
Uh huh.
There are tons of articles all over the net with various takes on this situation.
The most poignant was one I read on Apple News. It’s actually an article that appears in The Guardian here .
We’ve spent 20 years in Afghanistan. In that time we’ve lost troops, had others maimed, still others remain profoundly affected by what they saw and endured in that country. Those men and women did an outstanding job and their duty, of that there is no question.
I’m less certain that we should have remained in Afghanistan after we’d broken the Taliban. But that wasn’t really an option now was it?
The beliefs that allow the Taliban can’t be changed overnight, and apparently they can’t be changed in 20 years. I suspect that even 100 years wouldn’t change the underlying belief structure that creates monstrous ruling bodies like the Taliban.
You’d have to systematically destroy every mosque, kill every Imam, burn every copy of the Quran, wipe all memory of Islam from the internet, and destroy all of that religion’s adherents everywhere.
First of all we don’t have the stomach for that kind of bloodshed. Second of all, it would be wrong for us to try. Third of all, it would be doomed to fail right from the start.
We have historical examples of failure to eliminate beliefs. Rome tried it with the Christians. Hitler wasn’t successful with Jews. Even the Ottoman Empire couldn’t eradicate the Jews in Spain, nor could the Inquisition. The kind of oppression required to attempt something like eliminating a religion would simply drive it underground.
You have to kill not only the practitioners of a religion, you have to kill all memory of it entirely. Which is something that the Taliban understands all too clearly. That is why no world heritage site, or non-islamic archeological dig is safe in Taliban territory. They understand how to destroy “false beliefs”. Their brutality in this is unmatched.
Which brings me to the point I want to make.
We as a nation must enact a non-interference policy. It is not our job to free anyone from their dogma, or give them a democracy by force. Our military is ours. It exists to defend us and our interests from invaders, or conquerors. That’s it. Our allies are by definition in our best interests and they too deserve our protections just as they offer their armies under treaty to our protection.
That being said, when we’ve done the job, we should leave. To do anything else leads to decades of misery and unintended consequences.
Think of the misery the young woman in The Guardian article has to endure now. Had the Taliban remained in force for the past 20 years, she’d still have lived the misery to be sure. But now she knows there’s another way, she knows what she’s lost, she’ll feast on that bitterness for the rest of her life.
Were I in her position…
I’d develop a pretty healthy hatred of the US and all Americans for abandoning her to her fate after showing her how things could be different. I’d be teaching all my children to hate Americans, America is a lie, America cannot be trusted, America deserves to be destroyed.
That’s how the cycle of violence continues.
We MAKE our enemies, and frankly, we do it very well. How many more generations will spring from this one woman and all the others like her, enlightened and abandoned by our actions?
We shouldn’t have long term student visas for any country outside our allies. Short term upper division students perhaps, but not long term college educations.
Long term students simply become contaminated, then return to their countries with knowledge of a very different life. How can one of those folks ever be content returning to cooking over a fire pit or defecating in a hole in the ground, when they’ve lived the convenience and ease that Western civilization enjoys?
I know what I’m saying sounds cruel. But I think it far more cruel to “give” someone 21st century knowledge and then send them back to the 6th century.
President Biden’s legacy will be his Baghdad Bob moment a month ago. But the legacy of hatred and terrorist activities to come, belongs to our government from Bush through Biden, perhaps even further back than that.
I think it is time for us to exit the role of “good guys”, it’s time for us to stop trying to remake the world in our image. It’s time for Americans to be mythical beings in undeveloped parts of the world. Something whispered of, but never seen.
It is well past time for us to stop feeding our enemies, or pumping trillions of dollars, material, and American lives, into a hole that will never never be filled.
People make war on each other, and people die every day, disease and natural disasters happen all the time, these are facts of life. We need to get past our messiah complex and focus on our own problems.
There is no shame or guilt in recognizing that we can’t help everyone. The shame is in telling those people we will help, then breaking that promise.
Close our borders, allow visitors from allied countries only. That way we don’t contaminate and destroy primitive cultures.
We have historical examples of cultural contamination starting with the European conquest of North and South America. (Damage done. There’s no going back) We have examples of other indigenous people having their lives turned upside down in the South Pacific during World War II. (See Cargo Cults.) We even have contemporary examples of possible cultural contamination with all the hubbub surrounding UFOs and Alien contact.
Just the rumors of Aliens causes shockwaves and distractions in our “enlightened” culture. If they actually exist, it would make sense for them to be circumspect. Especially if they’re doing some kind of anthropology study.
We’re advanced compared to some of the folks on our planet, but we’re not superior.
We certainly don’t have enough positive outcomes to be dictating how any one else should be living.
It’s time for us to come to grips with our limitations and recognize that;
“Sometime you have to be cruel to be kind.”