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Zenofawn's avatar

At the end of they day, Abdul will return to his tin shack, and at the end of some longer time period our President's press secretary will eventually return from vacation. One hopes we never need to think about Afghanistan again, but 26 years after the US evacuated Saigon it should have been clear that the invasion would end badly, what with Pashtun tribesmen surely caring less about Liberal Democracy than the South Vietnamese. I guess American tolerance for the sexual enslavement of children wasn't enough of a lure; unrelatedly, I wonder what those parachuteless skydivers thought they would face if they remained in Kabul.

Everybody but the professional idiots on cable can puzzle out why it couldn't have worked, hence Jake Tapper's job: distract from the obvious descent into senility of the regime, to say nothing of our CinC. They have lost the Mandate of Heaven, it's a Crisis of [America's] Third Century, et cetera, et cetera. It might be safe for Don Lemon to lightly criticize the foreign policy establishment if he then insists we put a woman in charge.

On a different note: Machiavelli's wisdom holds up now, but it has a shelf life, and it will expire long before modern militaries deploy Matrix-style Sentinel drones. The technology for mass surveillance at a scale and depth as to entirely prevent insurgencies like the Taliban's will soon exist, if it doesn't already.

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Laramie's avatar

It's true that nations are fictions, mental constructs, lines that exist on a map but not in the physical world. But, is is also a fiction that "we" care much about the 12-year old girl we've never met, who is denied an education and resigned to a life of sexual slavery. Those who profess to care are peacocks. Where are they now? They are the same people who will say 'it's not as bad as depicted,' or 'it was the military's fault,' or 'it was this administration or that administration's fault.'

The sad truth is "we" care a little. We care until it is too much trouble, too costly, or until the media shines something shiny in our faces. Then, come what may. We got mileage from claiming we cared. It's the national virtue-signaling that counts, not actual betterment. We'll now move on to the next issue that social media tells us we should care about. And we'll virtue signal on social media to prove our worth. A couple likes should get the job done.

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