Why West Lost Afghan War

[bwv]

Two dueling illusions, both of mind bending arrogance.

War isn't a one off aberration that you can make not exist by getting it over with. Yes that is what Grant and Sherman and a whole American tradition want them to be, but wishes are not horses. Out in the corporeal world, war is a normal part of the human condition in all times and places and it isn't going away, ever, full stop.

Next the idea that wars are all of choice and if you just decide they aren't worth it you won't have any. The other side gets a vote in such matters. Visit lower Manhattan if you are unclear on the point. End all the wars you like and run away home to your heart's content, and the enemy will just come looking for you.

America has enemies because America has power and other men want it; we get in their way. You can't get them to not fight you by not fighting them; they aren't fighting you in the first place because you are fighting them but because they want your power. If you renounce power instead, you will get to see why they wanted it, and you won't enjoy that very much.

Americans simply need to grow up to the fact that world leading power means the obligations of empire as they have always been (and for which the illusions of our idyllic past - which wasn't of our making but sheltered behind Britain acting then as we are acting now - are irrelevant) and with it a continual stream of new enemies, and war as a normal perennial.

And if soldiers aren't up for that, don't sign up, it is a volunteer military.

Compared to the realism of the above, we instead get "I want to win, therefore I have merely to wish it and I've won" or "I don't want to fight in the first place, therefore I don't fight and there is no fight". For all the world as though the enemy did not exist. Hey guys, if they enemy already didn't exist there wouldn't be a war. Your wishes in the matter have precisely nothing to do with it.

(yawn)

Nice little junior imperialist monologue there, but given that Afghanistan currently poses no conceivable threat to the national security of the US and we accomplished the original mission, which was eliminating the Al Queda camps, we are free to stop whenever we choose. And in reality no one really cares about our military power. Our supposed allies are more than happy for US taxpayers to pay for their national defense and our enemies are happy to see us spend our way into bankruptcy playing the role of world policeman. Indeed there is considerable evidence that the whole rationale for the 911 attacks was to provoke us into a prolonged war in Afghanistan