The Lesson of Afghanistan is a Simple One, But Probably Not What You Think

 Joe Biden is being roasted for his indefensible handling of the Afghanistan exit.  As well he should be.  Indeed, his incompetence is so legion that he’s actually getting roasted by a media whose only job appears to be to prop up the Biden regime.  Both the New York Times and the Washington Post pilloried him while over at CNN: 'the debacle of defeat and chaotic retreat in Afghanistan' is a 'political disaster' for President Biden. The Wall Street Journal suggested his statement 'washing hands' of Afghanistan 'is one of most shameful in US history'. 

They’re of course right.  This may be the most incompetent diplomatic / military exercise in American history… and it came straight from the Commander in Chief and his incompetent cabal of woke advisors. 

Given the tragedy unfolding today, one wonders if Americans will learn the real lesson of Afghanistan.  Sure, while one lesson would be to never put a senile incompetent leftist in the position of Commander in Chief, that’s not the real lesson to be learned…

American direct involvement in Afghanistan started out twenty years ago after the attacks of September 11^th.  It didn’t take long to discover that the Taliban had been giving Osama Bin Laden and Al Queda training bases and a home from which to attack the US.  George W. Bush sent troops in to rout them, which was largely accomplished within months.  But of course the troops didn’t come home. They stayed, with the ostensible mission of helping Afghanistan craft a nation that would no longer be a haven for terrorists, and a government unwilling to protect them.  We – Americans, not me personally as I did not serve during that time nor in that theater – built roads, schools, bases, buildings, shepherded the writing of a constitution, facilitated elections and helped form a government with all the trappings of legitimacy.  One of the most laudable efforts was help to give girls and women opportunities that they had essentially never seen in Afghanistan.

Of course, the Taliban, while defeated in terms of running the country, never quite went away.  They hid in the hills. They hid in Pakistan and actually took parts of it over.  They operated under the cover of night and gave a constant reminder that they were never far away, having been funded and shielded by the ISI, Pakistan's intelligence service.  

All of this “progress” cost a great deal, both in terms of money and the lives of brave servicemen.  When all is said and done, the United States will have spent somewhere between $1 and $2 trillion seeking to build Afghanistan into a democracy with a functioning military and government.  At the same time, 2,500 American servicemembers lost their lives executing that mission. 

All for what?  Not much, apparently.  In just a number of days the Taliban took over the entire country.  The president fled. Americans were airlifted from the roof of the embassy.  Girls are now being stolen from their families to be given as wives to Taliban fighters.  Those who assisted the Americans and local police are being rounded up and killed.  The Afghan military has essentially evaporated, leaving the Taliban in possession of tens of billions of dollars of American supplied weapons and equipment.  Soon the Taliban will bring Afghanistan back to the 7^th century, from whence they came.  Sharia law.  Women in bondage. No freedom.  Economic backwater.

The lesson of Afghanistan is not that the United States couldn’t turn The Graveyard of Empires into a thriving democracy, such as our own. That was never in the cards.  The American colonies grew up as part of the British Empire and had been marching slowly towards a representative government with individual freedoms for centuries, culminating in the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the ratification of the Constitution.  Of course neither of those was the final word and the United States has been evolving towards a More Perfect Union ever since. 

Afghanistan doesn’t have anything resembling the history we have.  Just the opposite.  The nation, to the degree that is actually a nation, exists largely on a map.  The people are far more tribal than they are Afghani, and most live lives like those their ancestors lived 1,000 years ago.  Nation building in Afghanistan was always likely to be a failure, whether the United States spent $2 trillion or $20. 

And therein lays the lesson of Afghanistan, through the words of Ronald Reagan.  “Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.”

Americans live in the greatest nation in the history of man, one that took literally centuries to get where it is today.  It’s far from perfect of course, and it’s always evolving, but the fundamental principles of limited government, individual freedom and free markets have been guides the entire journey. But because it’s not perfect, the left wants to destroy it.  Tear down our Founding Fathers because they didn’t think about 21^st century mores when they were busy carving out a new nation.  Eliminate free speech because mean words offend vulnerable sensibilities.  Eliminate free markets because they do not provide for a perfectly equal distribution of wealth.  Divide the country by an endless array of hyphens so that professional victims can identify their “oppressors”. 

The freedom that Reagan spoke of, the prosperity the United States has created and the opportunities Americans enjoy are not predestined. They aren’t written into our DNA, not guaranteed by God and not irreversible.  Just as a generation of Afghanis who grew up in a relatively free nation are about to discover, what is here today is not guaranteed to still be here tomorrow.  History is important. Culture is important. Shared values are important.  Twenty years and $2 trillion dollars in Afghanistan prove that and demonstrate how quickly rights and freedoms can evaporate.  

To the degree that pampered leftists who, in a global sense were born on third and think they hit a triple, want to change the rules of the game called America, change the dimensions of the playing field and change the players in the lineup, they’re playing with fire. They think they know where those changes will lead.  They’re wrong.  Free speech, and the respect for the free exercise of such, once gone are almost impossible to regain.  Private property, once taken, almost never makes it back into the hands of the rightful owners and with it goes free markets and prosperity.  Government programs, once launched almost never end, and edicts, once written are almost never rescinded.  A government unleashed from the constraint of the Bill of Rights will never find its way back into the cage.    

Some people know that reality while others clearly don’t.  Compare a 25 year old Afghani woman who is now facing home detention, a burqa for life and a husband she didn’t choose to a 25 year old American grad student standing in $300 sneakers holding a $1,000 phone and barking “F the police”.  One clearly understands what freedom is while the other wallows in his utopian fantasy utterly clueless of how the world actually works.  There’s a reason millions of people risk their lives every year to come to America or literally cling to the wing of a flying plane in order to escape Taliban Afghanistan.  It’s called reality. 

It would be nice if the left would learn the simple lesson of Afghanistan, that freedom is fleeting and must be prized and protected, but sadly they are unlikely to allow machinations in the real world intrude on their delusional fantasies.   

Barack Obama as Commander in Chief ... The Pentagon as a social experiment

I’ve probably cited this before, but it’s easily one of the best speeches ever uttered in the movies. In A Few Good Men Jack Nicholson’s Col. Jessep explains life to Tom Cruz’s Lt. Kaffee:

“… And my existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves lives. You don't want the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. We use words like honor, code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline. I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way, Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon, and stand a post.”

This speech came back to me a couple of weeks ago as I was reading about women being given special treatment so that they would pass the Army’s Ranger school. This is just the latest example of Barack Obama misunderstanding – or more likely, not caring about – the fundamental mission of the United States military.

From Berghdal to troops being kicked out of the military for beating up child molesters to gays in the military to women in combat roles, to the dangerous Rules Of Engagement troops must operate under, the Department of Defense has become a playground for political activism and social engineering rather than what it actually exists for, which is to defend the United States from external enemies.

One reason that liberals like Obama feel like they can manipulate the military is because they see it as simply another arm of the government, rather than the unique entity it is. Wherever on the political spectrum one sits, the general role of government is to protect the freedoms of citizens, prosecute those who violate the laws and support economic prosperity via the issuance of patents & trademarks and enforcing contracts, etc. That definition is pretty opaque, but whether we’re talking about the SEC, the FDA or the EPA, the primary goal is not (theoretically) to be prepared to kill hundreds or thousands or millions of people while putting the lives of thousands of Americans at risk.

That however, is exactly what DOD does. The role of the Department of Defense is to defend the nation from external threats, which often includes killing the enemy in large numbers, often violently. At the same time, by definition, it involves putting at risk the lives of American personnel. That fundamentally makes DOD different than HUD or the GPO or the Education Department.

Given the extraordinarily high risks and dangers associated with putting the military in the field, the primary driver of policy should be to further the mission, not social agendas. But the reality is, Barack Obama doesn’t agree with that. To him, putting women in combat or moving the goalposts so that women can “pass” Ranger school is more about combating the “War on Women” than it is about a military prepared to face real combat.

To Barack Obama, gays serving openly in the military make perfect sense as gays can work in law offices or coffee shops or big box retailers with no impact on operations. But the military is not Wal-Mart, Starbucks baristas don’t train to kill people and in most law offices men don’t spend hours and weeks and years training with one another in close quarters where emotions and tempers and jealousies and hormones come into play and put people’s lives at risk while doing so. It’s true, that on the field of battle when the bad guys are shooting at you it doesn’t really matter if the guy next to you is gay or straight or confused if he’s on your side. The reality however is that 99.9% of a military man’s job is not spent in the heat of battle, it’s spent in the classroom learning, in the field training, on back on base regrouping. It’s in those environments where soldiers and Marines spend most of their time that the problems associated with gays in the military are felt, not in the foxhole.

The perfect demonstration of Barack Obama’s view that all government programs are but tools for his social agenda can be found in something tangential to the Defense Department. In 2010 Obama’s NASA Administrator said the following: “When I became the NASA Administrator — before I became the NASA Administrator — He (President Obama) charged me with three things: One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math, and engineering.”

For Barack Obama the Pentagon is nothing more than a vehicle for achieving his progressive goals. That alone makes him an unfit Commander in Chief. Unfortunately the next Commander in Chief will pay the price for Obama’s folly. Not only will he inherit a military with morale at the lowest in years, he will inherit the smallest Navy in a century, a powerful and growing enemy in ISIS that is a direct result of Obama’s incompetence, and most dangerously he will inherit a world that increasingly lacks respect for American strength... which ironically, and unfortunately, increases the likelihood of actually having to use the military.

But on the upside he will have female rangers, gay couples and transgenders openly serving and a JAG Corps that has been cowed into towing the administration's line on Berghdal. No doubt that should make him feel better.

How much is your country really worth to you?

Over the course of the last ten years millions of brave men and women have served in the United States military. Those people, those fathers, mothers, sons and daughters deserve every ounce of respect that Americans of all stripes have.

It says a lot about both the country and these individuals that they still see something in the United States worth defending and that they were willing to sign on the dotted line to do so.

Unfortunately, that is simply not enough. Not that those brave men and women aren’t giving enough, but rather, the great sacrifice they have been and are making today is simply not sufficient to save the United States.

The United States is far more than a military power. In reality, military power is but a small part of what makes America great and a leader in the world. People around the planet have been flocking to watch Hollywood movies for decades. They’ve also been sending the best and the brightest of their progeny to study at our universities. During the Cold War it was Levis and Pepsi that Soviet citizens were clamoring for. According to Interbrand, ten of the ten most valuable consumer brands in the world are American, including names like Coke, Disney, McDonalds and Google. None of these things were accomplished with a barrel of a gun. From Star Wars to Big Macs to our private and public universities, people around the world see the United States as a place where seemingly everything is possible, where great ideas come from and where anyone can find success. Little of that is the result of American military intervention. It’s the result of accomplishments and achievements Americans have forged throughout the nation’s history… although winning two world wars certainly didn’t hurt.

The bottom line is, the United States’ military is strong because America is strong. Not the other way around. And what has made America strong is her people, the individual freedom and liberty they have enjoyed since June 21, 1788 and the economic strength that freedom has created.

Unfortunately the liberty and economic strength that underlie two centuries of success are under assault today like they have never been before. As much as I dislike Barack Obama, the blame is not all his. He may be the worst president this country has ever had, but the problem that is undermining the foundation of American greatness has been going on for seven decades. No, the majority of the blame does not fall on the shoulders of Barack Obama, or even the collective presidents of the last 70 years… The fault for the situation we find ourselves in is the fault of the American people.

A free people get the government they deserve and we are to blame for what Barack Hussein Obama has wrought as well as what George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and their predecessors did. Government is a dangerous weapon in the hands of mere mortals with their natural failings of greed, vanity, arrogance and avarice among others. Our Constitution was specifically designed to temper the worst inclinations of men and to limit the scope to which a citizen’s life might be impacted by government action. Staggered terms, a Senate appointed by state legislatures, an independent judiciary a bill of rights. Everything in our Constitution was written to give citizens the greatest degree of liberty possible.

None of that matters when the government simply decides it wants more power and the people do nothing to stop it, or as in the case of the 17th Amendment, assist in the takeover. A government of men can be expected to try and expand its power and reach and James Madison’s Constitution and George Mason’s Bill of Rights were intended to stop such expansion.

Today however both might as well have been written on an Etch-a-Sketch. How does this happen? Simple. Two symbiotic developments resulted in the situation we find ourselves in today. The first is the division of labor. When Cyrus McCormick freed mankind from the yoke of the farm he unleashed a parabolic curve of innovation such as the world had never seen. The specialization wrought an increase in the standard of living that was exponentially more powerful than anything that had come before. Simultaneously Americans began to enjoy something that few people in the world had ever enjoyed and no people had had on that scale: leisure time.

The division of labor meant that while citizens were able to focus on their jobs stamping engine blocks, editing books, testing scientific theories or flipping burgers, everything else was magically available to them at far less than it would cost them to produce or procure on their own. As their lives became more silo like, they began to understand less and less about things with which they had little contact. For a while they relied on family, friends and community organizations to help fill in the gaps. Then government stepped in and decreed that it was their job to tell citizens what was good and what was bad and what needed to be done, when, and by who. Government is, after all, there to help… isn’t it?

Then of course there is the money. Government largesse becomes a powerful weapon when combined with citizen’s ignorance. As government started providing more information and benefits it started issuing more and more regulations. Today we have the situation where the government seeks to control virtually every aspect of a citizen’s life. Indeed, half the population pays no income taxes, one third of the population relies on the government for most if not all of their income while the entire population is burdened with regulations around every corner. This regulation is particularly onerous to entrepreneurs and businessmen, the backbone of American progress.

Today, with individual liberty and capitalism under fire, the foundation of American greatness is withering away like the grains of sand through an hourglass. The question is, can the country be turned before the sand is fully drained? This is one battle that the men and women of the military cannot fight for us. This is a battle that will be fought in the voting booths across the country. But the real battle is going to go on long before November 6th. The question is, are you going to join the battle? How far are you willing to go to preserve the greatest nation in the history of the world? Politics is rarely a pretty thing and sometimes it causes real pain when you disagree with people close to you. Such is life. Would you rather keep the peace with your brother in law or friend at the cost of watching everything you hold dear slip away, or do you want to take a chance and try and change someone’s mind? It may not work. You might end up talking to yourself or having someone yelling at you. The battle between now and November 6th is not a hot war like what is going on in Afghanistan, but it no less important.

The pending nomination of Mitt Romney demonstrates that conservatives cannot depend on the GOP to light a fire under the American people about the dangers of the leftist agenda and profligate spending. The danger posed by your mother in law or your best friend are nothing compared to the Taliban or Al Qaeda and the other real dangers our men and women in uniform face every day. How much are you willing to do to make sure that their sacrifice is not in vain? Are you willing to do what it takes to help send the Democrats home? Are you willing to do what it takes to help put the United States back on track to greatness and prosperity? Pick up the phone, buy your buddy a beer. Start a conversation. Have a dinner party. Post something on Facebook. At some point someone has to do it. If not you, who? If not now, when? How much is your country really worth? How much are you willing to do for her? Are you going to sit back and watch as the sands of liberty and prosperity pass or is a free Republic worth fighting for? Twenty years from now when someone asks you what were you doing during the most important election of your lifetime, what do you want to be able to say? Do the things today that you will be proud to speak of tomorrow... make a difference, help save your country.