"What We Learn From History Is That We Do Not Learn From History:" Kabul, 2021.

 

Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, fell to the Taliban this past weekend and with it the effective government of that nation.

It was not unexpected.

The US and our NATO allies have been leaving for months, although there was still a sizable US presence in Afghanistan, as well as tens of thousands of native Afghanis who were associated with the Western Powers whose lives were therefore at risk after our departure.

What shocked the world is the swiftness with which the Taliban captured Kabul, since the US blithely informed everyone that such an event was months away and the the western withdrawal could continue in a slow, steady pace.

Then, pow!

The Taliban took over, chaos reigned in Kabul as tens of thousands of people tried to get to the airport to escape on US transports out of the country, more Americans were trapped in other parts of Afghanistan...

And President Joe Biden?

He was on vacation.

Yet, there was a sense of deja vu about this.

We HAD been there before, in Saigon, when we retreated from Vietnam for good nearly fifty years before, and our final departure from that sorry land was almost as chaotic as this one.

German philosopher Georg Friedrich Hegel once stated "What we learn from history is that we do NOT learn from history."

We clearly did not learn anything from Vietnam that should have warned us away from Afghanistan.

We were involved in the field for twenty years in both countries before we gave up and left.

We were unsuccessful in nation-building in both cases.

We were unsuccessful in establishing governments there in which the majority of the population had any confidence.

We wasted billions of dollars in weapons, investments in infrastructure (the better to continue the wars), consumer goods to win the populace to our side and way of thinking and to maintain an army of American soldiers (supported in the field by our NATO allies, who really had no business being there in the first place).

And then there were the dead, the American soldiers who were called, did their duty, fought and died for reasons that were unclear, but not to do so would produce shouts of "traitor" or "coward."

Despite all of this, and the supposedly educated people in the various presidential administrations over the forty years' involvement in both wars, we were hopelessly ignorant of the culture, the history, the religious philosophies and the way of life in both Vietnam and Afghanistan.

We really couldn't "understand" the people who we were trying to free, nor could we really convince those same people what they were supposed to be fighting for.

That was the inherent flaw.

Once again, we didn't learn from the history of the French, trying to re-establish colonial rule in a Vietnam crying for freedom from all foreign encroachments.

We began by helping the French try to do so, and ended by replacing them after they failed. And we failed there, too.

The now-defunct USSR involved itself in Afghanistan to reduce it to satellite status forty years ago. In a much shorter time than ours there, they left, defeated. But its defeat provided one of the major reasons for the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

We didn't learn from that, either, any more than the Soviet Union didn't learn from our experience in Vietnam.

Are you beginning to see the picture?

To be sure, the Bush Baby Administration involved America in Afghanistan to whet our appetite for revenge after 9-11. We wanted payback against the Muslim terrorists that made war upon our own land.

Our NATO allies, out of solidarity with us, joined us in this anti-terrorist crusade. Their governments stuck with us long after their various peoples were unsure as to the purpose they were committed to in Afghanistan. In fact, they only started leaving a few months ago, when it was finally clear that the US was leaving, whatever mission they thought they had unaccomplished.

But revenge is a dish best eaten cold and, apart from attacking Americans who practiced Islam, we never decisively defeated the Taliban in the field nor seemed to know what the Hell we were doing there.

But we couldn't leave, since too many American lives had been lost, to no purpose. We had to stay to avenge them, losing more American lives in the process.

As for the native civilians who died, well, they were collateral damage. It was somehow their fault that we were there fighting...who and for what?

And so we were leaving anyway.

But the Taliban decided to stick it to the Western Powers at the last. It was their revenge for the twenty years our armies had messed up their country.

And they promptly invaded Kabul, trapping Americans and other of our associates there, producing a panic far worse than in Saigon nearly fifty years before.

And yet, there are some people who mocked the country's new leaders, referring to them as "goat fucking, beard dyeing, badly dressed bandits." 

Clearly it is these Americans who could not believe that such people beat the most powerful (and expensive) military machine in the world, so they resorted to pathetic insults such as these.

This accomplished little more than to let off steam and to reveal their patent ignorance and arrogance.

When Biden and company finally took to the airwaves, they expressed their shock that the State Department and military intelligence were unaware of what the Taliban was up to.

These are the experts entrusted with our national and international security and were proved to be incompetent.

They also stated that they would probably not be able to get all of our people and their associates out of Kabul, let alone the whole of Afghanistan.

Imagine, an administration openly stating that the were leaving our own people to their fates.

But they DID get the former president of Afghanistan and his people out.

And then the Biden administration blithely moved on to strictures about COVID.

This has been the most shameful example of presidential arrogance, ignorance and stupidity in the history of our republic, to be shared with his cabinet, his departments heads and his military intelligence people.

With such creatures in power, it can only get worse.

And they certainly won't learn anything from history.