Kabul fell to the Taliban today, Afghanistan is again ruled by the sect that ruled it before the American invasion; perhaps they are much better organized now, they certainly have vastly more military firepower, courtesy of the Pentagon. They face no opposition—they are no longer terrorists or insurgents or even a faction in a civil war—they are the regime; we will all now learn about them on social media, whether they are competent, tyrannic, obeyed by the population… But nobody expects them to care anymore what Washington D.C. wants or believes. As usual, America’s DEEP STATE turned out to be doing its job well: Lying to American elites &, occasionally, to the people on TV. Despite the assurance of the “intelligence community,” Afghanistan didn’t last three months; it didn’t last a week. Biden, a man who’s been in foreign affairs in the Senate for more than a generation, who was then VP for eight years, & who is now zombie-President of the United States, has outfoxed the spooks! Somehow, apparently because he wanted to get the troops out before the 20th anniversary of 9/11, he managed to put an end to America’s longest ever war. At any rate, here are his lies about how it would be ok, before executing his masterplan, which he is now following up with resting at Camp David, well deservedly. The people were not invested in breaking the record for another year, granted, but the generals & all respectable people among the elites wanted to keep it going as long as possible. The Pentagon loved this war like you might love your child… This Sunday, the most pious silence was observed by elite Democrats; only Speaker Pelosi boldly stepped forth to claim, also piously, that America really has to take care of the girls in Afghanistan. Feminism will surely save America’s reputation & the lives of people facing the Taliban…
This is the news, & it seems to come as an inevitable punishment for elite madness, which has been in authority for a generation. Everything has been wasted. Neither feminism nor any other part of the liberal ideology is now in charge of Afghanistan: Here’s the man now running the place. Americans helped arrest him in Pakistan in the days of Obama, in 2010. Then in the days of Trump, he was released, in 2018. In the days of Biden, he’s in the presidential palace, August 15, 2021. A remarkable success story &, no doubt, well deserved, since this Islamic warrior called Baradar is a founder of the Taliban state from back in 1996, before the days of Bush, who started this war, as you might remember. Today, for the first time, I learned his name & saw his face. I wonder whether he will last; perhaps surviving the folly & fickleness of so many American presidents is the hard part of his work & now he’s got the 31 million people of Afghanistan in his grasp.
Now, for the first time in 20 years, it’s possible for Americans, even liberals, to learn about Afghanistan. All ideology has failed, all politics has failed, the Pentagon has proven to be corrupt & cowardly. Perhaps delusions can now be dispelled. Who these Pashtuns are, what they believe, & how much they can control of the country; who the Tajiks are & what they can do to reach an agreement with the Pashtuns; what Pakistan & Tajikistan will do; what Iran will do; what Russia & even China will do—we will see all these things without the silly lies our politicians have told us for a generation. The American people no longer care, but we will have to learn somehow, since this event marks the first military catastrophe of the greatest empire the world has ever known. We will find out what the consequences are in time. After all, China might want to conquer Taiwan one of these days—not a particularly well defended island.
For now, I can assure you twitter is full of opinions & also of videos of desperate people stuck in the roads leading out from Kabul, in cars, trucks, buses…, & stuck in the international airport outside. Moving pictures of American choppers flying desperately out of Kabul, like Saigon in ‘75, as well as pictures of the abandoned American embassy or the newly-occupied presidential palace, where the Taliban brandish American rifles, occasionally with sights, alongside the traditional AKs (here’s Al Jazeera). I can also assure you that wikipedia already has a page for the Fall of Kabul. History is being recorded everywhere on the internet, although our elites assured us it would never happen, at least not this year! Nor can these elites censor it. Perhaps they will try to let everyone forget & then rewrite it, we’ll see about that later—for now, here’s NBC’s man on the ground reporting, of course with a mask on his face, since he’s a liberal. There’s no reason to believe, after all, that international failure is going to persuade anyone among our elites to stop trying to reduce Americans to servility.
This is the famous image from the last time American elites decided to do nation-building somewhere exotic, with “liberal values” & all the weaponry, technology, & non-liberal troops they could get. Here’s a famous documentary about Saigon ‘75 on youtube.
Americans are stuck singing Springsteen’s song again. Ordinary people, but perhaps especially the most patriotic young men, were dishonored by president after president, both parties taking turns, by the elites in Washington as well as New York, as well as Los Angeles, & elsewhere. The country is so much worse off—so many millions of people are suffering so much more misery—while elites thought they could engineer politics in places they knew nothing about, among people they didn’t bother to learn about. Born in the USA is a song about the corruption of elites told through the suffering of people who know they’re being abused, but don’t see that they can do anything about it. What’s more awful to an American than that feeling of helplessness? But there’s some nobility in not consenting to the mad, & therefore tyrannic, elites. There’s pain & beauty in that song & perhaps this generation must now learn it.
Born down in a dead man's town,
the first kick I took was when I hit the ground.
You end up like a dog that's been beat too much,
till you spend half your life just covering up…
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Got in a little hometown jam,
so they put a rifle in my hand,
sent me off to a foreign land
to go & kill the yellow man.
Born in the U.S.A.
I was born in the U.S.A.
Come back home to the refinery,
hiring man says "Son, if it was up to me…"
Went down to see my V.A. man,
he said "Son, don't you understand…"
I had a brother at Khe Sahn fighting off the Viet Cong.
They're still there, he's all gone…
He had a woman he loved in Saigon,
I got a picture of him in her arms now.
Down in the shadow of the penitentiary,
out by the gas fires of the refinery,
I'm ten years burning down the road,
nowhere to run, ain't got nowhere to go…
Born in the U.S.A.
I'm a long gone Daddy in the U.S.A.