The war in Afghanistan began with the oppressive, theocratic Taliban in power, and ended with the oppressive, theocratic Taliban in power. Sisyphus rolled his Katamari Damacy boulder up the mountain, and it rolled right back down again. The absurdity of the war is obvious on its face, but there is a desperation to find meaning within it that would make Camus blush. Though it’s somewhat old news by now, during the American withdrawal, there was all sorts of noise about how Western forces were abandoning their Afghan comrades to the brutality of the Taliban.
I am not trying to diminish the severity of what the Taliban has done and will continue to do with those dissenting under its rule. My glibness comes as a result of the crocodile tears shed over the bodies of those slain during the withdrawal from the war that ignore the over a hundred thousand bodies that accumulated preceding it. Losing a war is bloody; that’s the reality of war. If you don’t like it, maybe question the war itself rather than the means of its end.
The tears come from the bipartisan desire to create meaning in a pointless war: if there are good Afghans to save, it means that the war produced good Afghans worth saving. Nobody would have given a shit about them otherwise; the West would be much more inclined toward taking refugees if there was a heartfelt belief that we need to create a safe haven for those fleeing violence and persecution. The sad irony is that those whose freedom from the Taliban was being demanded were those who had aligned themselves with the invaders, cementing the linking of a “good” Afghan with their complicity in the war.
Another central tenet that the war in Afghanistan was meaningful is the women’s liberation that the war provided. Some women were able to go to school, and therefore 20 years of death, torture, and war crimes are vindicated. Those women are worse off now than they were before; again, no argument, but finding miniscule acts of success to justify what is otherwise 20 years of pointless war is incredibly ignorant. In actuality, using war to generate feminism is more likely to produce a nation of incels who see feminism as cancer than an Islamic Feminine Mystique.
Using feminism as justification for the war in Afghanistan, and gesturing loosely toward the mostly urban women who benefited, pointedly ignores the majority of women who live in rural settings where most of the war took place. Afghan women were certainly not benefitting from the war when they and their families were dying from it. The quick rise of the Taliban points to a nation hungry for incel-logic; Afghanistan may actually be worse off than it was 20 years ago from the perspective of democratic and liberal reformation due to the brutality used allegedly in its name. Sisyphus’s boulder fell back down the mountain and into a ravine. The West tried to viciously impose liberal secularism in Iran with the Shah, and he too was violently overthrown by a virulently religious fundamentalist group. Any positive regard held for Western ideals is just as dead as all the rest of them.
The war made Afghanistan worse, and for what? The bipartisan narrative adopted in much of the media paints the picture of a blundering but ultimately benevolent force trying so hard to do good but occasionally failing in simple but horrific ways. Like if Rocky Balboa knocked out Apollo Creed in the first round, but because his eyes were all bruised up and he couldn’t see, he wandered into the crowd and begun striking civilians at random. At home we’re watching and thinking, no! Rocky! If only Mickey had cut you so you could see! We are helpless as Rocky bludgeons old women and children in his missteps. Then, after the crowd boos too loudly for too long, we lament Rocky leaving, shaking our heads at the blows he receives on his way out the door. Meanwhile, Apollo Creed has gotten up and dusted himself off, and being the only one left standing in the ring, claims victory.
We could still love Rocky after such a blunder. It’s forgivable. But that’s not how war works. The better analogy would be if Rocky was at a bus stop where Apollo Creed was reading a newspaper, and Rocky was like, “I heard you hate women!” and then pulled out a gun and shot him. Then he wandered away from the bus stop to a nearby wedding reception and shot up the guests. And he did so with eyes wide open.
The West knew what was going on in Afghanistan. They’re actively preventing themselves from being held accountable to international law. We’ve had whistleblowers point out the war’s criminality to us repeatedly and they’re all being punished for it by both American political parties. And for what? For what? For literally no reason. Terrorism didn’t go away; Al-Qaeda evolved into ISIS-K. Afghanistan is fully red pilled. America wanted war instead of justice, the rest of the West went along with it, and this is what we’re left with.
I’ve purposefully avoided talking about the military-industrial complex and how the reason for the war is obviously all the money that was made by the defense contractors and weapons manufacturers. It’s not that I disagree, it’s that we don’t have a smoking gun pointing to that level of Machiavellianism, and I want to be as convincing as possible. The war is provably pointless in a way that ought to make us reflect on why it ever happened in the first place. When there is no justification for a war, it’s a lot easier to compare it to straight-up murder. The war in Afghanistan was criminal. Those who participated in it are criminals. Anyone saying otherwise is covering up a crime.
Blog for Chumps 
It might be a belated post of yours and my reply to it might be a little belated, but you eloquently said what I tried to say earlier. Brilliant.
Thank you! I basically took Chomsky’s view on America’s approach to Vietnam (both in the media and politics) and applied it here. He would probably cite Mark Twain and say that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
And given how infrequently I post, time has lost all meaning anyway, so it’s all good.
I used to think… just leave people alone if you want them to leave you alone. But that didn’t always work. Then I was like… try to enlighten the people who I want to leave me alone. That didn’t really work, either. Then I thought: show solidarity with the good guys and beat the bad guys for them.
But sometimes there aren’t any good guys. Like in Afghanistan.
What I think now would make my younger selves avert their gazes. I don’t think you’d like it much either. So I won’t tell you. You’re angry enough as it is. The years have instilled in me a dark and bitter wisdom. It’s the price I pay for having paid too much attention.
I disagree that interpersonal experiences are a sufficient foundation for a theory of the world. It sounds like my interpersonal experiences have been vastly different from yours, and if that’s how we’re gauging how to rate the world, then we’ve already slipped into irrevocable relativism. If you’re dismissing my experiences, then that’s, at best, solipsism. I feel sad that you’ve had such a hard time connecting to other people; it sounds very isolating. Bitterness is not something I would wish on anyone. It’s literally my job to connect to others (I’m a social worker in a hospital for the downtown eastside of Vancouver), so I connect to a lot of people who are stigmatized as “bad”, and I’ve found that making generalizations about groups of people, as you’ve done with the people in Afghanistan in your comment, doesn’t allow me much success. My experience has shown me that approaching others with humility and curiosity gives the best results.
And anger is the natural response to injustice, so while I think that anger is a very legitimate response to what has happened in Afghanistan, I was actually going for a more sardonic tone. I put Rocky Balboa in rather absurd situations to make a point! Oh well… I suppose I can’t help how people read my words.
On the topic of curiosity, it sounds like being alone is something that you strive for. I read the evolution of your life goals to have been varying shades of how to get people to leave you alone. What does being alone mean to you? What benefits do you gain from that?
Greta Garbo was misquoted, and I am being misconstrued. The point is to have some editorial control over who gets to be part of your life. I know more than I ever wanted to know about people who have mental or character disorders. Now I’m learning all I can about how to keep them at arm’s length. I’m not cut out for social work. Whatever it takes, I haven’t got it. I’ve got no problem with other kind souls being social workers so long as they don’t try to involve me. If you can actually help these people, that’s fine.
I have a lot less anger now that I don’t try so hard to tolerate everybody. Also, I find that I can tolerate anyone at all from a sufficient distance. People who don’t care about what’s not their business are people who don’t muck things up.
It’s my vast indifference that helps me be truly tolerant. If I were POTUS I’d be non-interventionist, bordering on isolationist. I have no illusions that the world would be fine if only the US did nothing, but I would do very little all the same.
Caring beyond your headlights leads to frustration. Frustration leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Specifically, lovehate. An oxytocin bender. Good guys and bad guys, damsels in distress and white knights and dragons to be slain – all on the other side of the planet where you haven’t the foggiest notion what’s really going on until too late. Do you know what goes on inside a Pashtun’s skull? I don’t.
Remember: it’s the other side of the planet. It’s as alien as alien gets until the day the flying saucers arrive. Just leave it alone. Pointless caring leads to pointless wars. Care only about what you have in front of you, what you can see clearly, what you know how to fix. Leave the rest alone.