I want to write extensively about Afghanistan, but oh my god it's so exhausting to think about.
All I'll say for now is that foreign affairs really, really, REALLY matter and people don't think about them. Rock ribbed liberals on American politics turn into libertarians abroad, and behold, the results. If only Republicans have actionable ideas about how to solve problems abroad, you don't get to complain when their solutions become predictable disasters. If you don't want foreign affairs to become domestic affairs, you get involved abroad before millions of refugees show up on your doorstep, and if you let them die before they get here, why would anybody else help us when it's our turn on the chopping block? And clearly, it may be our turn sooner than we know.
We are put on earth to help each other. Multilateral coalitions work, they're the ONLY thing that works. Nation-building is not imperialism, it's the only option and the problem of Afghanistan was that we went in alone with a small patina of international cooperation because the Bush Administration was convinced that American conservatives could run the world by themselves and the human rights concerns of other nations are destructively naïve. That IS imperialism, the results were predictable, and once the Bush administration screwed it up, there was no way to make things right without a forever presence because what other country in a position to help would ever trust our ability to collaborate on it?
The Taliban is totalitarianism, the thing we do everything to avoid; hell on earth as you count your days until you watch your loved ones die. The current American right-wing is really and truly advancing in that direction, and so is the right wing in every Western country, but everything we fear about how trends the leadership of authoritarians like Trump, Putin, Orban, Balsonaro, the Taliban already is. The Taliban really is Hitler, Stalin, Mao...
To this day, this is on Bush, and Republicans have no moral right to demand investigations and impeachments about an invasion they're solely responsible for screwing up, but everything Republicans are at home, Democrats have turned into abroad, and the results are fundamentalist religious takeovers all over the world, both Islamic and Christian. The Taliban is the most misogynistic movement on Earth, even Isil and Boko Haram take a back seat, and people who claim intersectional feminism turn into everything they claim to loathe just because it's Islam abroad, and pretend to be blind to the sufferings of women who endure trials so far beyond trials that woke feminism ever comprehends - and they could comprehend it, but they choose to ignore it because it's inconvenient to their beliefs. The woke claim to be concerned about the plight of people of color, yet they also claim we have no right to speak ou about what happens when injustice is perpetrated by people of color on themselves - but when you're murdered, it doesn't matter whether the person who killed you is white.
Some country is always going to lead the world, and if you think China or Russia would be better leaders than us, what the fuck did you go to college for to be that ignorant? The America-lead world is falling apart. It's a failure of the entirety of America, Republican and Democrat, right and left. If God calls us all to account for what we've done to the world, there is no one in the US who has a sufficient excuse to object.
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