Thanks, no thanks
Better sit down for this one, folks, it really is just that shocking.
How We Lost Afghanistan
Cockburn thinks he has found the key explanation: Western elites let Afghans see what Western elite culture is like. Naturally, and inevitably, they took down their AK-47s from the wall and fought tooth and nail to prevent being assimilated into that!
I personally know quite a few folks who are fully primed and nearly ready to do the same thing right here. NYM’s brief post is by way of pointing us to this more in-depth but still concise one:
Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did. Scholars and partisans still argue over the reasons America lost in Vietnam, so why should Afghanistan be any different?
On the plus side, the debate promises to be far more interesting. When it comes to Vietnam, partisans debate rules of engagement, bombing strategies, funding levels and the Tet Offensive. With Afghanistan, the question could be: did gender studies cause America to suffer its most humiliating defeat ever? Cockburn wishes he was joking.
Traditionally, nations have waged war by mustering armies, defeating their enemies in battle, and despoiling their lands and cities. Only after total victory is the process of remaking a society feasible.
But America in Afghanistan sought a shortcut, and by ‘shortcut’ Cockburn means ‘something that takes 10 times as long but doesn’t look as nasty for TV cameras’. America hoped that with enough half-baked social engineering in the half of Afghanistan it controlled, it would eventually be rewarded with victory, and Afghanistan would become the Holland of the Hindu Kush. On Ivy League campuses, students are taught to decry ‘colonialism’, but the Ivy League diplomats who sought to remake Afghanistan in Harvard’s image were among the most ambitious practitioners of it in world history.
So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.
A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.
The more layers stripped off the Afghanistan onion the worse it stinks, and the more ridiculous the whole clusterfuck looks to anyone with even half a lick of sense. I mean, seriously now—can there actually be a living soul on this planet who:
- Is capable of feeding himself without assistance
- Can successfully dress himself
- Understands what a flush toilet is, how to use it, and why that might be a good idea
- Who is nonetheless dim or naive enough to think that riding the “gender” hobbyhorse so beloved of overly effete Westerners across the Khyber Pass (in a manner of speaking), down the mountains, and directly into a clutch of some of the most vicious, benighted, and ardent Muzzrat primordials currently extant was ever going to accomplish a damned thing, apart from getting their blood-simple asses shot out of the saddle
Of course, as damned-nigh impossible as it is to believe, the answer is Yes. Yes, they really ARE that stupid. Our self-declared Elite masters seem to be quite proud of being abject morons; they must be, strutting around like peacocks as they do after each new failure or fiasco; quacking on and on as if they hadn’t just stepped in yet another steaming pile of their own dung, or as if no one saw them do it.
The rogue facade they built over the face of a once-legitimate US government displaced by their machinations is shot through with utter, blank stupidity, on exhibit in its every department, office, and bureau. The evidence of this stupidity is voluminous, ubiquitous, and continually mounting. It proclaims its presence with every blustering politician’s gaseous windbaggery; every unlawful, unworkable, and redundant edict; every heedlessly squandered taxpayer dollar; every empty, disingenuous claim to cherish “principles” or “values” they routinely disgrace, and are in reality contemptuous of.
So why do I say all the above is stupid? Because these mountebanks, these grifters, these preening fucking muttonheads are unswervingly convinced that their subjects all adore, respect, and trust them. Their faith in their ability to pull the wool over our eyes again and again, and to keep it there indefinitely, is absolute. If they only knew the truth: we aren’t even listening to them anymore.
Maybe we ought to set ’em straight about that, eh? And soon, too. They’d certainly profit from a good, stiff dose of enlightening, before they’ve screwed things up beyond repair.
(Via KT)
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