As August 31Yingshi Towards the end, the Afghan government’s provincial capital cities are collapsing faster and faster, which reflects another painful and collapsing final battle in the United States.
We are about to lose another war. According to my estimation, it will be greatly lost. I am fully looking forward to seeing the requisitioned American armor overthrow the gate of power in Kabul, and reproduce the PTSD flashback images of the tank breaking through the gate of the US Embassy in Saigon on April 30, 1975 and the crash of the US Embassy in Tehran on November 4 , 1979.
The impact of this loss on foreign policy will be profound for the United States. The last time we lost a war in which we have a military advantage but culturally flawed, this has plunged our country into self-doubt for fifteen years. It is about to do so again, especially for us veterans of the Middle East conflict, who will see all the dominoes they erected as adults fall back to Earth. They will ask, like all veterans, why do we have to die in vain?
Considering that we went to Afghanistan, then Iraq, and finally Syria, this is a difficult question to answer. These goals are always unrealistic. We drank Kool-Aid and believed in the advice of the fortune-tellers of nation-building to save the helpless people from tyranny.
A national debate will follow. Who would want to do this again? For whom? The EU vs. Ukraine? Are you crazy? Get ready to go by. There is nothing to stop the train from crashing now. You can see that every competitor in the United States is eagerly looking forward to where opportunities will appear.
Strategic realists, including myself, never believed that our Middle East “Alliance of Will” would work. Imperial Management students who study history understand that plans and commitments to change the region need to be part of the solution for at least three generations. This is an in-depth commitment of 100 to 150 years-not only military control, but also shaping social engineering in a way that will completely change the entire value system. Historically, this is the work of the empire, and its life span is measured in hundreds of millions of years; and whose leaders are willing to use the tools of statecraft, we will regard this as a crime and humanity.
The fact is that a country with only 245 years of history, has not even figured out who we are inside, is totally unsuitable for interfering with a culture ten to twenty times our age. This is pure arrogance. Arrogance, the constant cost of calculating 400,000 people for every mistake made every ten years is a tragic fate for the “docile” referred to in the biblical literature. Engineers and economists call it shock response inhibition. This is a clinical term that refers to the burning of Orchard Valley into opium fields; the brutal killing and enslavement of one faction after another, resounding like a snare drum.
When we first went to Afghanistan in the 1980s, it was part of the cold war excuse. We participate in the Mujahideen organization fighting to expel the Russians from their land. Our people at the CIA captured this strong independence, just as they did elsewhere, and most of it didn’t work, annoying the Soviet Union in another proxy way. This is not the best basis for starting nation-building activities.
I remember writing such a reservation when we decided to enter Afghanistan after 9/11. This time, we are Russians, and the jihadists have become the so-called Taliban. I am sure that as time goes by, the deeper religious and cultural connection between them and Al Quaeda sheltered in the Tora Bora Mountains will not go well for us. This is the bad hand of the asymmetric war to be overcome. All other competent military planners I knew at the time were equally worried.
Most importantly, I worry that we don’t have enough perseverance to stick to the requested centennial commitment. I remember two people, both of whom will become the future president of the United States, expressed the same concerns. One of them is a state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. The other is Donald Trump, a businessman from Queens, New York. Both will inherit the consequences of their predecessor’s strategic decisions. Both will try to withdraw the United States from the region on conditions acceptable to the United States. Both have succeeded in some respects, but neither did it cleanly.
Now it’s the Biden administration’s turn to replay the role of President Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford is another amiable former congressman who inherited an unplayable hand of playing cards. History often repeats itself, and this situation has all the characteristics of repeated chorus symbols in hymns.
At this time, we have withdrawn the US troops except the US embassy task force. We have seen this pose before. We also disbanded our contractor support task force to enable the Afghan army to perform its air and armored infrastructure missions. The morale collapse of the abandoned Afghan armed forces is completely understandable. Just like the Iraqis in the early stages of the Islamic State war, they are calculating the exact same rational economic wealth, maximizing behavioral calculus and giving up. The Taliban will enter a vacuum without opposition. That’s it.
For ordinary Afghans, this is more like a routine changing of the guard ceremony. They have seen it many times since the beginning. For the intruder who was about to leave, a prophecy about bandage cuts and bruises began. The kettle of the next outsider who yearns for Afghanistan will continue to burn.
By September 11, the Afghan people will start a new life under the new socio-political situation. Objectively speaking, they will be the country most free from foreign interference since the British invasion of Afghanistan in November 1878 forced Emir Sher Ali Khan to step down.
Hey, look at that! That was 143 years.They Macedonians and Romans know their stuff
