It doesn’t matter if you think the Global War on Terror was foolish. It doesn’t matter if you think nation-building is none of our business. It makes no difference if you think that American military adventurism is just neo-colonialism. It doesn’t matter if you think that trying to turn Afghani Muslims into Western Secularists who support democracy is stillborn at conception. It doesn’t matter if you think that America needed to get out of Afghanistan sooner or later. It doesn’t matter if you thought that the Afghanis are cowards who didn’t make any effort to save their country from the Taliban. None of that matters.
Because even if you believe any or all of those things, that wouldn’t change the fact that from the point of view of anyone with a modicum of integrity, compassion, or commitment, the way this country withdrew from Afghanistan was shameful. It was shameful to abandon a country we conquered to terrorist despotism. It was shameful for President Trump to negotiate with those terrorists. It was shameful for President Biden to just up-stakes and leave our allies and friends to the tender mercies of Al Qaida, ISIL, and any other Islamic terror-groups who want to set up bases of operation in the fortress mountains of the Northern Tier.
What is immediately apparent to anyone who has paid any attention to American Foreign policy since Korea is that America is a very, very…very bad friend. America is a lot like the handsome rich kid in who starts going out with the so-and-so, what’s-her-face, unpopular girl. The girl feels like a fairy-tale princess until she gets preggers and he gets bored. He takes no responsibility for the conditions he’s created. He fulfills no commitment to people who, because of his actions, now depend on him. He’s bored. Commitment is hard, and expensive, and tedious. Commitment is for poor people…commitment if for ugly people.
And it’s shameful and depressing to think that this is our country – but ask the Vietnamese who fought the Communists, ask the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs, ask the Kurds, ask any of our erstwhile super-best-friends and they’ll tell you that America is worse than the 80s teen-movie-villain described above. Whether we SHOULD have been in Afghanistan is irrelevant. Some choices, good or bad, limit your future choices. When you conquer a country and ask people to defy powerful violent people and then you abandon your friends to those violent powerful people you asked your friends to defy, you’ve failed in your commitment.
And it shouldn’t surprise us. We’re a nation that loves to let people to whom we owe obligations and have commitments die – or we just kill ‘em. Is it any wonder that a nation that’s murdered dozens of millions of babies because they were inconvenient and a burdensome commitment would abandon people who aren’t our own flesh and blood children? If you think that our withdrawal from Afghanistan was shameful: you’re right – but it’s no different from our culture and society’s sinful and evil habit of killing people when they become tedious, burdensome, or boring.