Afghanistan is not Germany nor Japan. Afghanistan cannot be rebuilt like these nations were rebuilt after world war II, with the Marshall plan. To posit insurmountable cultural, religious ethnic differences is taboo to the point that Trillions (one million million dollars) are spent for impossible fantasies of nation building, to turn Afghans into Americans, Germans, or Japanese democratic citizens. Social, political, human rights norms invented by white Christian Europeans might not be right for the entire world1. Political correctness (PC) does NOT desire diversity of countries.
Afghanistan: Doomed from the Start
Twenty years of ruling class failure
The mission that the United States—or, to be more precise, the George W. Bush Administration—set for itself in Afghanistan was doomed from the beginning. It declared unrealizable goals, which experience quickly showed were unrealizable, and then instead of learning from that experience, doubled and tripled down over and over. And not just the Bush Administration but the entire bipartisan foreign policy establishment […]
Even Richard M Nixon wanted to cover up race differences he was aware of.
Universalism or Egalitarianism Universalism or Egalitarianism “insists on the universal nature of mankind. This leads to the belief that all racial-ethnic groups and cultures are equal,
What happened next was that the Bush Administration talked itself into believing that the democratization of Afghanistan was both necessary—practically and morally—and possible. Let’s take these in turn.
The Unsayable Truth
The alleged practical necessity was said to arise from the alleged fact that what Donald Trump would later call, controversially, “radical Islamic terrorism” would never go away until and unless the countries from which it came were radically changed—I.e., secularized, Westernized and democratized.[…]
[…] sincere Christians who believed that a place had to be found for Muslim religious belief in a new democratic order. In this view, Islam was not the problem. The Americans who wrote the Afghan and Iraqi constitutions […] even wrote Sharia into those documents! In this view, a closed political system that stunted discourse in the Muslim world was terrorism’s “root cause.”
One problem with this argument is the way Muslims heard it. To a faithful Muslim, there is no separating religious belief from secular authority, the laws of God from the laws of man. Properly understood, the latter are but a dim reflection of the former, if they may be said to exist at all. It’s all well and good, therefore, for well-meaning people in Washington to insist that a Muslim nation can have Islam with democracy yet without Westernization or secularization, but a substantial proportion—dare I say, majority?—of the Muslim world didn’t believe them.
In any event, the Bush Administration insisted that this must be the agenda. The great scholar of Islam, Bernard Lewis, of whom one expects more, put it this way: “Bring Them Freedom, or They Destroy Us.” Mike Gerson himself couldn’t have put it more succinctly.
The alleged moral necessity was thought to arise from two sources. First is the alleged always-and-everywhere superiority of democracy to all other forms of government—the conception of democracy as really the only just regime, a necessary but not sufficient foundation of a good society.
Anti-Racists are Ethnocentric White Supremacists:
Anti-Racists believe that the political and legal system created by white Europeans and US Americans is the salvation for all humanity of all races.They violently tried to enforce them upon Africa, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, with disastrous results.
Second was an alleged obligation arising from the use of force in self-defense or as just retaliation. One of the things the Bush Administration got right was its steadfast refusal to allow the multitude of international Lilliputians to tie down the American Gulliver in its moment of crisis. Sympathetic headlines such as Le Monde’s “Nous Sommes Tous Américains” aside, it quickly became clear that most of the rest of the world wanted some say, in many cases a veto, over any American response. The Bush Administration would have none of that.
But it didn’t dismiss such sentiment entirely. In part to soothe its own conscience, in part to mollify international opinion, the administration came to accept the notion that, for a military action in Afghanistan to be just, it must be followed by an intensive reconstruction effort. This was also thought, not incorrectly, to be necessary to satisfy certain elements of American public opinion. For every Jacksonian who thinks a few well-aimed strikes followed by a hasty bugout is the height of strategic prudence, there is a Wilsonian who thinks it’s America’s duty to “make the world safe for democracy.” In this light, bombing followed by reconstruction seems designed to appeal to both sides. […]
The fundamental error: Inequality Taboo, the lie that destroys the world.;
[…]they concluded that the rebuilding of Germany and Japan retroactively justified the prior destruction; that the only way to prevent future war was similarly to remake in our own image any country with which we came into conflict; and that such remaking would be possible anywhere, with anyone. In other words, they talked themselves into believing that the one-off events of 1945-1950 could and must be infinitely repeatable, everywhere.
So many unspoken taboo facts
- Germany are white Europeans, with an average IQ of 100, Japanese have an IQ of 105, Afghanistan’s IQ is 80[IQ].
- Islam and Jihad and Sharia
- Cultural and educational differences are the only issue that can reasonably be mentioned
- Enforcing women’s rights is misplaced in Afghanistan. Maybe women’s rights are destroying Western civilization by low birth rates and left leaning female vote.
Modern Americans are endlessly told to “celebrate diversity” but are also hectored to treat other peoples as if they are interchangeable, all behave in the same ways and want the same things. This bedrock assumption of Wokemerica is the ultimate shoal on which the Afghan war foundered
Political correctness is illogical and inconsistent. Especially PC is immune to counter-evidence.
Postmodernism: Denial of Objective Reality and of Facts
[continue reading Afghanistan: Doomed from the Start]
_________FOOTNOTES________
-
Anti-Racists are Ethnocentric White Supremacists:
Anti-Racists believe that the political and legal system created by white Europeans and US Americans is the salvation for all humanity of all races.They violently tried to enforce them upon Africa, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, with disastrous results.
Nothing is more expensive than political correctness.