“We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.“

"How many more generations of America's daughters and sons would you have me send to fight Afghanistan's civil war, when Afghan troops will not? ... I will not repeat the mistakes we made in the past" -- President Biden pic.twitter.com/yNONKkJLk5

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) August 16, 2021

Nicolle Wallace: '95 percent of the American people will agree with Biden while 95 percent of the press won’t'https://t.co/GceYBnNu56

— Raw Story (@RawStory) August 16, 2021

Partly because:

This is my article for Politico on why most Afghan soldiers gave up so easily - because of a long tradition of quietly talking to the Taliban, leading to them surrendering in return for credible guarantees they would not be harmed.https://t.co/hcPGQZkll7

— Anatol Lieven (@LievenAnatol) August 16, 2021

I remember how every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields

You could let them alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons

Or you could carpet bomb the fields and then the farmers would join the Taliban

— Laura Jedeed (@LauraJedeed) August 14, 2021

Or you could give the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium poppy, and the farmers would sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million dollar MRAP and maim everyone inside

— Laura Jedeed (@LauraJedeed) August 14, 2021

Clearly victory was only a few more years away! Or you can read this:

Wow, this seems to be really resonating with folks. I'm kind of blown away

I made this post into an article, if that's a thing that people want:https://t.co/PJsvy2EOmf

— Laura Jedeed (@LauraJedeed) August 15, 2021

Cowboy was a good student. His family, who all worked on base, was incredibly proud of him. He wanted to go to college in America. But there weren’t colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too shit. No program to help kids like him.

I looked. I wonder if he’s dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different.

But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet. 

We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing. 

Yeah, you should read that.

And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them. 

I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever. 

There is no third team.

It’s pretty clear where that leaves us:

And so I sit here, reading these sad fucking articles and these horrified social media posts about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can’t stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to face the thing Afghanistan has always been. You can’t keep lying to yourself about what you sent us into.

No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. 

No more hypocrisy. No more pretending it meant anything. It didn’t. 

It didn’t mean a goddamn thing.