Posted on 08/31/2021 3:30:15 PM PDT by Ennis85
As the Taliban reconquers Afghanistan, producing bloody scenes of reprisals and desperate attempts to get on some of the last planes out of the country, the blame game is operating at full tilt. Who’s responsible for all this? It can’t be America’s fault writ large—a colossal tale of imperial hubris and corruption that left an already war-wracked Afghanistan in shambles while our homeland slipped further into disrepair and authoritarianism. No, that would imply that America is not exceptional; that all of us have some penance to perform for what’s been wrought in our name. Another enemy is needed.
For the far right, many of whom supported the U.S. withdrawal when it began under President Donald Trump and have spoken out against fruitless nation-building abroad, the emerging disaster in Afghanistan—with its echoes of American flights out of Saigon in 1975—can be blamed on President Joe Biden and the Democrats. But the fault goes deeper than that, as religious conservatives, MAGA heads, paleocons, and right-wing extremists seem to have found some bizarre and creative ways to shoehorn their culture-war grievances into the Afghanistan debate. The problem, you see, is not the inherent injustice of occupying a foreign country for 20 years, the ineffectiveness of nation-building and counterinsurgency, the destabilizing effects of the global war on terrorism, CIA-trained death squads, or any matter of geopolitical strategy. The problem is, obviously, wokeness and the gays and gender-neutral pronouns and U.S. cultural decadence, all of which have conspired to make our military soft and incapable of ruling Afghanistan with the iron fist it required.
Take it from Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, one of our country’s leading exponents of U.S. military might—even if it’s deployed against the American people. “It’s clear President Biden and his Department of Defense have been more concerned with critical race theory and other woke policies than planning an orderly withdrawal from Afghanistan,” tweeted Cotton.
If this all sounds ridiculous, that’s because it is. But it’s also an emerging part of right-wing Afghanistan discourse, finding expression throughout the Twittersphere and in conservative publications like Breitbart, where General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was derided as too “woke” to have seen this collapse coming. “The US government is so busy centering wokeness that it is ignoring the real world,” said Rod Dreher, the religious traditionalist and Viktor Orbán fetishist. “Our military is telling itself woke lies,” he wrote in another tweet. Right-wing news personality Greg Kelly, whose tweets have the overweening self-parodic quality of the popular @dril Twitter account, expressed the same sentiment, writing that for Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, “TRAGICALLY, Planning and preparing for AFGHANISTAN wasn’t a priority. Instead, he made the Military WOKE.”
Cast a net and you can reel in a huge catch of these confused geopolitical complaints, filtered through tired culture-war talking points. Bella Wallersteiner, a British commentator, blamed “G7 nations spending too much time focusing on their woke rebrand and pleading with the world to bow to their green agenda.” One of her followers asked, in an attempt at humor, what pronouns Afghan women should now use. “Afghanistan Falls as Biden and Woke Generals Nap,” went the headline from right-wing influencer Mike Cernovich. On Gab, a social network with a large far-right user base, one popular post waxed nostalgic that when the Afghan war started, the U.S. was “a Christian nation” that banned gays in the military, considered trans people “mentally ill,” and outlawed gay marriage. “We definitely lost the Afghanistan war,” wrote one person in the replies. A user with the Ayn Rand–inspired (and oddly misspelled) Twitter handle @WhoIsJohnGault offered a response that spoke to what they saw as the larger stakes: “We lost the culture war first.”
In some of these expressions, especially from religious traditionalists, you can detect dueling strains of contempt and respect for the Taliban. I don’t mean to say that these right-wingers are Taliban sympathizers, but they see Taliban foot soldiers who were nurtured by America’s foreign policy complex in military misadventures that predated the war on terrorism as relatively admirable precisely because their austere religious fundamentalism—and their opposition to the cultural decadence ostensibly corrupting American life—offers a familiar image of theocracy that they wish to emulate at home. Riffing on an Army document that casts “cultural and ethnic differences” as a strategic asset, Dreher wrote, “There’s nothing diverse about these hillbilly adversaries, but they drove us out of Afghanistan. There’s a lesson here.”
After 20 years of warfare, the lessons of Afghanistan should be numerous and obvious, but they have nothing to do with what Rod Dreher thinks. We never belonged there in the first place; President George W. Bush should have accepted the December 2001 offer from the Taliban to turn over Osama bin Laden; nation-building at gunpoint is a moral and administrative disaster; and practically everything we did made the country worse and the Taliban, who now sport an impressive array of U.S. armaments, more powerful. As an infamous headline once declared, the biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan may have been the United States, whose bags of CIA cash bought the putative loyalties of politicians and warlords while further immiserating an already impoverished country. In the meantime, the flourishing of the opium trade, under the watchful eyes of U.S. forces, gave the Taliban all the money it needed.
There will be other lessons to extract, testimonies to collect, maybe even a blue-ribbon oversight commission or two. In a better world, the U.S. would offer Afghanistan reparations and take in a million refugees. In a similar spirit of wish fulfillment, we could hope for some accountability for U.S. officials who spent years lying about the progress of the war—which conservatives should view as a far greater outrage than liberal gender politics. (Based on the fact that the Republican National Committee deleted a section of its website celebrating Trump’s signing of a peace agreement with the Taliban, it would seem that the GOP is not quite ready to undertake the necessary reflection.)
These and other basic insights surrounding the war’s failure should be self-evident by now, unless you happen to believe a long-term neocolonial occupation is in America’s interests. As the far right ignores the more obvious lessons of Afghanistan and retreats ever deeper into culture-war absurdities, one can see where Trumpism and right-wing traditionalism comfortably intersect. The result is that any U.S. failure can be blamed not on politics, leadership, or policy, but on decadent elites and culture-war grievances that run bone deep.
Media entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart somewhat famously pronounced that politics was downstream of culture. For today’s far right, that is an indelible truth. Wokeness, LGBTQ rights, and other forms of progressive belief are, in the eyes of Dreher and his fellow travelers, the real cause of American decline. Above all, this is what has contributed to our impossible-to-ignore national drift. This particular culture war, especially over LGBTQ rights, may be another conflict that the far right is fated to lose. But as in Afghanistan, they are willing to battle as long as others bear the costs, and they can do a lot of damage before they’re done.
Laughable, To quote a blogger anonymousmugwump:
"This position is open to two sets of criticisms, both of which undermine the "offers" given by the Taliban. Firstly, the credibility of such offers is minimal for several reasons. The Taliban claimed that Bin Laden went "missing" before they then went on to offer him when faced with air strikes. The Taliban continued to speak with two voices, the highest echelons (Mullah Omar) rebuffing any indication saying in October "there was no move to hand anyone over" while the less senior officials like Muttawakil and Kabir needed "evidence" and would pass him over to a "third country" which would never "come under pressure from the United States." Even this offer is unreasonable given the British government published a dossier on Bin Laden's involvement in 9/11.
And even this is being far too generous to the Taliban: they have a history of making "offers" which amount to nothing. The National Security Archives obtained a file which was written pre-9/11 which documents talks with the Taliban on Bin Laden: In our talks we have stressed that UBL has murders Americans and continues to plan attack against Americans and others and that we cannot ignore this threat... These talks have been fruitless. The Taliban said that they want a solution but that cannot comply with UNSCRs [United Nations Security Council Resolutions that demand his expulsion from Afghanistan]. In October 1999 the Taliban suggested several “solutions” including a UBL trial by a panel of Islamic scholars... Taliban consistently maintained that UBL’s activities are restricted despite all evidence to the contrary. Often our discussions have been followed by Taliban declaration that no evidence exists against UBL This all sounds very familiar but these talks did not concern 9/11 but the other attacks Bin Laden carried out against Americans pre-9/11. At this stage it should be sufficient to say that the Taliban have a track record of dilly-dallying but there's more. Evidence was consistently rejected by the Taliban: On May 27, in Islamabad, Undersecretary Pickering gave Taliban Deputy Foreign Minister Jalil a point-by-point outline of the information tying UBL to the 1998 embassy bombings... The Taliban subsequently rejected this evidence. This is also the conclusion of the British government: [In June 2001] Despite the evidence provided by the US of the responsibility of Usama Bin Laden and Al Qaida for the 1998 East Africa bombings, despite the accurately perceived threats of further atrocities, and despite the demands of the United Nations, the Taleban's regime responded by saying no evidence existed against Usama Bin Laden, and that neither he nor his network would be expelled. Sometimes they just refused to respond to the USG (e.g. Sept. 29, 2000, October, 2000). The result is that the U.S approached the Taliban to expel Bin Laden 30 times before 9/11 to no avail. This in spite of repeated "negotiations," and demands not just from the USG but from the United Nations Security Council. Even the Bush administration tried three times in 2000 to no avail. In sum, we had multiple voices speaking out on something that the Taliban regime was clearly not serious about and had avoided. It is no surprise that the USG did not take seriously calls for evidence or negotiations: they completely lacked credibility. "
And no Wokeness didn't allow the Taliban to take over but it sure as s**t didn't help.
” On Gab, a social network with a large far-right user base, one popular post waxed nostalgic that when the Afghan war started, the U.S. was “a Christian nation” that banned gays in the military, considered trans people “mentally ill,” and outlawed gay marriage.”
Anyone got a link to this?
The vile POSes are coming out in force.
What a bunch of drek.
Wokeness didn’t make us “lose” Afghanistan.
Wokeness is why 13 soldiers are DEAD.
Woekeness is why Afghanistan is collapsing to the “right-wing” Taliban and destroying the lives of millions WE PROMISED to protect and spent billions setting up.
Wokeness is why the Atlantic here is LYING and defending this failure of an administration.
Speaking of Wokeness... where’s FEMA in New Orleans? Why are there no outcries about the devasation there and demanding Biden save Louisiana like the mob did with W?
Articles like this are not what they purport to be about. This is not an article about Afghanistan.
700 mil spent on feminism in Afghanistan down the drain.
Wokeness or treachery at the highest levels. Take your pick.
The mass media seems to have found the one-winged bird.
The bird has a far right wing, but no far left wing!
Strawman
I think the author of the article is projecting: it is probably the LEFT that secretly admires Islamic extremism. After all, they worship power, and Islamic terrorists have no qualms about exercising raw power. A favorite slogan on the left during my college years was, “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.”
Thank goodness I have these folks around to tell me what I am thinking.
A small base supporting the national army is not an occupation.
Just as we have come to regret being there, we may also come to regret pulling out, certainly as precipitously as we did. Was keeping the Talibs out at the cost of a small base worth the price? I don’t know the answer but… We are all going to get a front row seat as we see what happens over the next couple of years.
Not wokeness. It’s the lack of determination to win. That’s all.
Wake up, Silverman.
You can’t pinch us under the table and get away with it this time— everybody is looking.
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