“You can always count on Amer­i­cans to do the right thing, after they’ve tried every­thing else.”
Had Sir Win­ston Churchill coined his famous phrase with the Afghan deba­cle as a bench­mark, he could have added that the learn­ing process invari­ably includes tuition fees paid by those with no say in the curriculum.

“The right thing” can only be done when the pro­tag­o­nists learn that sys­tems of gov­er­nance, reli­gious tol­er­ance, women’s rights and any­thing else that dif­fers from the way things are in the West aren’t prob­lems to be solved. They are cul­tur­al issues that need to be acknowl­edged and worked with and around…a bit like the rest of the world com­ing to terms with the Amer­i­can cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­non of hubris.

                     PIPE DREAMS AND EXPECTATIONS

 Afghanistan has shown that the Amer­i­can dream of being the “indis­pens­able nation” is just that: a dream.
Expect­ing ‘demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tions’ to trans­form a coun­try that has nev­er had an offi­cial cen­sus and where cor­rup­tion and nepo­tism are endem­ic, was wish­ful think­ing with­out the “think”.
Back­ing it with mil­i­tary might was equal­ly fanciful.
It didn’t trans­form Viet­nam, Laos, Iraq, Syr­ia or Libya into an Amer­i­can ide­al. Why would it be dif­fer­ent in Afghanistan? Dogged — and mon­u­men­tal­ly expen­sive — efforts to remake the Afghan army into a mod­ern mil­i­tary force proved unsus­tain­able with­out Amer­i­can and NATO sup­port for the logis­ti­cal and sup­ply com­plex­i­ties required.
Every pho­to of the ‘new’ Afghan army showed troops equipped and tooled up like Amer­i­cans. But Tal­iban fight­ers, who go to war jammed onto bat­tered pick­ups and two-up on cheap motor­bikes, wear­ing tra­di­tion­al garb and san­dals or sneak­ers for com­bat boots, now con­trol all but one small area of the country.
And it’s worth not­ing that apart from some­times tot­ing Amer­i­can M16 assault rifles instead of AK47s, the Tal­iban aren’t parad­ing about in uni­forms or gear cap­tured from or hand­ed over by Afghan troops.
But the real sur­prise is that even swift vic­to­ry came as a surprise.
“A his­tor­i­cal analy­sis pro­vid­ed to Con­gress con­clud­ed that the Tal­iban had learned lessons from their takeover of the coun­try in the 1990s. This time, the report said, the mil­i­tant group would first secure bor­der cross­ings, com­man­deer provin­cial cap­i­tals and seize swaths of the country’s north before mov­ing in on Kab­ul, a pre­dic­tion that proved accurate.”

                                   LIES AND FANTASIES

Mean­while, the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Afghan Papers Pro­ject shows that U.S. offi­cials con­sis­tent­ly pre­sent­ed mis­lead­ing­ly opti­mistic ver­sions of events on the ground.
Again, a les­son still wait­ing for the learning.
In his first pubic remarks after the Tal­iban take-over, Gen­er­al Mark Mil­ley, chair­man of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said: “There was noth­ing that I or any­one else saw that indi­cat­ed a col­lapse of this army and this gov­ern­ment in 11 days.”
The echo cham­bers and dream fac­to­ries aren’t just in the halls of suc­ces­sive U.S. admin­is­tra­tions and the Pentagon.
Gen­er­al Sir Nick Carter, head of the British mil­i­tary, said the Afghan army dis­in­te­grat­ed because the troops did not want to fight for their gov­ern­ment. “Morale just col­lapsed,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today pro­gramme. “We have often seen that in his­to­ry before. Armies can col­lapse very, very quick­ly if the momen­tum is seen to be going so rad­i­cal­ly against them.”
Only a few days pre­vi­ous­ly, the gen­er­al penned an arti­cle laud­ing the Afghan mil­i­tary as a “for­mi­da­ble fight­ing force”, and claim­ing it was “too soon” to write off Afghanistan, and the pop­u­la­tion was ral­ly­ing in sup­port of its army.
Civil­ians on both sides of the Atlantic may be for­giv­en if they’re a tad con­cerned about the atten­tion span of those in charge of nation­al security.
Britain and America’s Euro­pean allies will pay the price of hav­ing to cope with what will inevitably be a new wave of refugees, with all the domes­tic polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic uphea­val that entails.

The U.S. and the UN are now con­sid­er­ing how to pres­sure the Tal­iban by with­hold­ing hun­dreds of mil­lions of dol­lars in aid. But the only ones like­ly to suf­fer from that are the peo­ple the whole deba­cle was sup­posed to ‘uplift’.
In 2018 it was esti­mat­ed that con­trol of opi­um pro­duc­tion earned the Tal­iban $400-mil­lion dol­lars a year. That is now believed to be as high as $1.5‑billion, tre­ble the amount the U.S. pro­vid­ed Afghanistan in human­i­tar­i­an aid.
Con­trol of cross-bor­der trade pro­vid­ed sev­er­al hun­dred more mil­lion even before Tal­iban fight­ers took over the pres­i­den­tial palace.

The nar­ra­tor of Gra­ham Greene’s nov­el “The Qui­et Amer­i­can.” sums up Alden Pyle, the earnest diplo­mat to whom the title refers this way: “I nev­er knew a man who had bet­ter motives for all the trou­ble he caused.”
The book was pub­lished in 1955. Get­ting to “…after they’ve tried every­thing else” is tak­ing a long time.

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