As everyone already knows, the greatest irony of the United States’ failed endeavor in Afghanistan is the fact that the enemy we fought for twenty years is the same enemy that we trained and funded to fight the Soviets during the Cold War. After 9/11 many of those same mujahedeen fighters had become our enemies in the Taliban, who took control of Afghanistan in the mid-90’s and provided a sanctuary for Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. As we have just witnessed, after 20 years of combat, trillions of dollars wasted, and thousands of American service members killed and wounded, a deeply Islamic Afghan people rejected the overtures of our Western techno-democracy and welcomed the Taliban back to power with mostly open arms. It’s a sad moment, as the Taliban truly represent the worst excesses of human tyranny justified by religious belief, but at the same time, I am having a hard time finding sympathy for the defeated West.
Many of my fellow veterans are having trouble coming to terms with what has just transpired, but we must remember that we did what we could to win and that it was not the military who was defeated, but our weak political leadership and the general officers who bowed down to them. Nor was it the American people who were defeated, although as a culture we share some blame for not holding our leadership accountable. What the Taliban defeated was the idea that Western Corporate-Oligarchy, disguised as free market democracy, is the ultimate authority figure in international diplomacy and that this big government apparatus has the right to dictate its interests across the globe at the expense of local and traditional beliefs.
Yet this isn’t unique to Afghanistan, or Iraq, or any other nation that the global leviathan has tried to influence for its own benefit. Having plundered the rest of the world, these powers have now turned inward on their own people in the West. In the United States, soulless technocrats rule our country from marble government buildings, silicon valley board rooms, Wall Street banks, and university lecture halls. Traditional American values such as faith in God, the importance of family, self-determinism, and a general desire for liberty have been stripped away and replaced with an irrational need for dependence on government, science, the healthcare industry, and corporations.
Unfortunately most Americans have just shrugged their shoulders and accepted our fate as slaves to the global elite. We’re afraid to jeopardize the high standard of living that the empire affords us in exchange for compromising our values. Netflix and PornHub provide us endless entertainment without having to leave the house while DoorDash delivers processed food straight to our doorstep. Why care about your personal health when pills and potions can cure all your ills.
Perhaps the most depressing part about watching the Taliban cruise to victory in Afghanistan is the realization that these guys, as bad as they are, actually possess the intestinal fortitude to stand up and defend their homeland against the woke ideology of the global regime. Meanwhile, Western men stand by while the government defrauds us of our tax dollars, companies outsource our jobs, and the public school systems subvert the minds of our children.
The silver lining to this situation is that history often repeats itself. As noted, the United States trained the mujahedeen who would eventually become part of the same Taliban who have now just dealt a crushing defeat to the global machine. As that machine turns inward and labels many traditional Americans terrorists of the domestic variety, it forgets that the wars it waged overseas were conducted by many of those same Americans- men with years of experience conducting counterinsurgency operations and possessing relevant skills needed to resist tyranny.
Overall, there is no legitimate defense of the Taliban and we should make no mistake that their brand of authoritarianism is just as evil as the tyrants in our own countries. As days go by, it seems the government machine appears more and more willing to use force and coercion to solidify control. The United States was founded on limited government and personal sovereignty, and these are the principles to which we must return. Americans who still value those ideals must stand up and say no to these tyrants before it is too late.
The Christian War Journal 