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Stop your bedwetting over Afghanistan

It was always a terrible idea, and an unwinnable war

Markokenya
3 min readAug 14, 2021
How much for your goat?

Democrats and Republicans alike are hand-wringing over the awful fate of Afghans as the Taliban seems to face no opposition rolling into city after city, claiming easy victories and swiftly claiming a basket case country as its pet. Biden faces pressure from both sides even though both have been yelling about what a terrible was it always was. Now he’s the bad guy and they want us to rethink our decision. Not really.

We never had a chance. The extreme corruption of Afghan society at all levels of government, public services and military make it an endless money pit for US defense budgets and nothing to show for our hard earned tax dollars except disappearing billions and no real change in the heroin trade, the arms black market, the offshore accounts of senior officials and bureaucrats, and the continued dominance of organized crime and religious oppression.

Why did we bother? No foreign power has truly won a war in Afghanistan in recent centuries. It may be in part because after discovering the mountainous terrain and arid plains, you also find out there isn’t much there worth conquering — unless you like goats. Afghans have not known freedom in a great many decades so they are not well positioned culturally to embrace democracy, capitalism…

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Markokenya
Markokenya

Written by Markokenya

San Francisco geek, entrepreneur, wannabe economist, mediocre equestrian

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