There is only one argument to be made in favor of maintaining American troops in Afghanistan, one that, strange to say, has rarely appeared in print, though I have heard it argued privately by supporters on many occasions. This is simply that we are not fighting a war in Afghanistan but rather colonizing it, a venture we should not expect to pay off for another 50 years or more. The idea, I suppose, is that we are supposed to be transmitting something called “values” and that this takes time. How refreshingly old fashioned.
But imperialism is a serious business for a serious people. The United States is a country that can be brought to its knees trying to decide whether we should spend $6 billion on pieces of concrete. We are a nation whose elites can be fixated for as long as 72 hours on the question of whether a 17-year-old boy in a hat possibly said a rude thing to an activist. Americans have no meaningful universally agreed-upon values to share with one another, much less with people abroad.
Our failure in Afghanistan is a fitting symbol — perhaps a perfect one — of America in 2019: exhausted, divided, reckless, unable to achieve anything of value, unwilling to abandon the frenetic pursuit of success despite being incapable of agreeing on what would even constitute “success” as such. A country like ours cannot win a long and difficult war, much less head an empire.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member