The Apathy of the West

Afghanistan is a horrible situation and it’s not going to get better. Outside of Kabul, the Taliban have already started to show their true colors: Killing a woman for not wearing a burqa. Shooting into a protest in Jalalabad. Making lists of people who helped Americans. Supposedly, the Taliban are moderate now. Sure. I’ll believe it if a year from now little girls can still attend school.

I really believe that we as the west no longer have any concept of real morality. What’s our scale? It’s all focused on things like hate speech, micro aggressions, and inclusive language. People are murdered and tortured under regimes like the Taliban for things we do without thinking.

It’s not just the Taliban either—let’s be honest with ourselves. There are literal concentration camps in China targeting an ethnic, religious minority. On social media everyone is called a Nazi except, you know, the people running the concentration camps. There are extremely credible reports of women being raped in those camps. But of course, the NBA will tell you that for some reason when crimes are committed in our society we no longer have the moral standing to criticize government-directed genocide.

What ridiculousness! You are not morally culpable for the actions of criminals in a society. Their actions are already against the law. However, and this is key, we are morally culpable for the actions of our leaders, ESPECIALLY when we return them to office election after election. It starts with our elected officials, but it doesn’t end there. They hire and fire—or more correctly, refuse to fire—all the horrible, unelected bureaucrats who care more about formatting errors in Visa applications than about saving lives. They continued to promote for 20 years the leaders who said Afghanistan would change with just a few more years, a few more billions of dollars, a few more American lives. Funny how that is. It’s always just a little bit more and somehow it will be fixed. I think it is abundantly clear that we have been lied to by many ‘leaders’ who made the situation on the ground look better so they would get promoted.

Well, I would say it’s pretty obvious the situation on the ground was never good. If you’re curious, go read some of the stories that have emerged over the years from service members of their experiences of working with conventional Afghan Army units. Then go investigate the stories emerging from what the Taliban have done to interpreters. I’ll warn you, it’s not pretty. It will either make you want to cry at the depravity of the world or make your blood boil with rage. Now imagine that was someone you knew. Imagine that your job choice was putting your family in danger of murder or torture. Imagine that you weren’t sure if your family would come back every night after they went to work that day. To be blunt, about the worst thing we as Americans have to fear is being murdered. You’re probably thinking, yeah that’s bad. But there are things that can happen before death or to your family members that are much worse than murder. Afghanistan is one place where they know that, but not the only place.

I find it baffling that we are so disengaged. We have some downright gory media these days. You can play a video game or watch a TV show and get a visual idea of the evils humanity is capable of. Yet we have so little empathy. Or maybe we have empathy, but no backbone to act. Our tax dollars, our votes, our governments are responsible for the top to bottom failure of leadership in Afghanistan from today to 20 years ago. Somehow, I doubt more than a handful will be held accountable, despite it clearly being a failure of entire institutions. Literally thousands of people receive salaries and benefits from our government beyond that of an average American household. Yet they all failed at their jobs. Some of them have failed Afghanistan in multiple positions now, because they were promoted for doing such an excellent job there.

Can I be honest for a second? Like brutally honest? If you live in the US, or really any civilized, developed nation, you should be thankful. The worst political violence we experience is situations like Portland or Jan. 6th. Those pale in comparison to what will happen in Afghanistan in the next year. They pale in comparison to what *IS* happening in China right now. Our lives have so little substantive moral conflict, so little actual evil, that we now attack as evil people who make honest mistakes. We ignore the genuine evil surrounding us in the world and the malicious incompetence of our ‘leaders.’

For perspective this tweet is a clip of a child being passed forward. Dwell on that for a second. Course I’m sure someone in the State Department will turn the child away for not having a proper Visa application.

To conclude, I highly suggest doing some serious reading about the conflict in Afghanistan, both pre-US intervention and after. In any conflict, it is hard to be the ‘good’ guys. However, in the age of smartphones and Go-Pros, it’s clear that US and NATO forces conducted themselves well. Their mistakes have been magnified and digitized for the world to see with little regard for the enemies they were fighting or even the conduct of the partner forces they were supporting. Compared to the Taliban and the former Afghan government’s forces, the western forces were saints. They won victories only to see them be given away through bad policies and incompetence. As someone put it, “this one’s on the suits, not the boots.”

This is what the 'boots' are doing right now.