I was on social media recently and a US-American liberal was engaging in some justifiable criticism of the Taliban in Afghanistan. But I pushed back because that sort of thing tends to include a general amnesia about the utter and complete failure of NATO (the most powerful, wealthiest countries in the world) to contruct a political-economic order in Afghanistan that could meet the very modest hopes of the Afghan people. In fact, our "government" of a corrupt, powerless puppet in Kabul (who had to be protected by NATO troops from his own people and from the warlord narco-gangsters that took over as provincial governors) was actually so bad, that honest journalists such as Chris Hedges and Tariq Ali (among others) demonstrated that the general population preferred the Taliban to it.
Furthermore, I mentioned the sickening cruelty of Biden petulantly freezing Afghanistan's foreign currency reserves and how, combined with inflation in the price of grain and fertilizer (that inflation itself being a product of Biden provoking a war between Ukraine and Russia) meant that many Afghan women, along with Afghan children and men, would soon starve to death, thus sparing them from the Taliban's misogynist tyranny.
Now, don't get me wrong: I said at the start of this that criticism of the Taliban is justified. But when Biden carried out Trump's exit from the country, I also pointed out at the time how the media was framing it as the abandonment of the women of Afghanistan, as if we should have stayed there for twenty more years until the violence, corruption, theft, rape, murder eventually won the "hearts and minds" of the people.
The problem remains that the same imperialist voices who initiated this shit-show; who cheered it on for twenty years of stupid lies; are still the voices that are being sought out by the corporate oligarch, pro-imperialist media. Assholes like William Kristol, Max Boot, and the whole stinking lot of them are allowed to give their opinions while the people who have been proven right continue to be marginalized.
The narrative is that this is a disaster for Afghanistan, especially with regards to women's rights. And it's sickeningly true. The Taliban are horrible on women's rights. But if Afghan human rights and happiness (of both men and women) had been at all important to Western leaders, they would have done more to ensure that the government that they subsidized was a good one that did things for the people of Afghanistan. They didn't care so they didn't. Instead they subjected them to thieving rapist gangster warlords and thieving rapist gangster police and burned their cash crops and bombed their houses and invaded their homes in night raids and droned them from the skies for twenty fucking goddamned years.
With the lesson presumably being that illegal, hideous occupations should continue until the oligarchy is 98% agreed that they should be ended and not a second shorter.
Anyway, ... some other liberal was wandering by and accused me of being an extremist who didn't understand how the real world worked. Saintly Joe Biden shouldn't be condemned for, well, aything I guess, because there are limits to US power, and maybe Biden didn't handle the withdrawl perfectly but he is still our Last, Great, Hope and a fine man and certainly not as corrupt as Trump and his family.
And with that world salad, they could all go on continuing to cling stupidly to the party of Biden, Pelosi, the Clintons, Buttigieg, Clyburn, Rahm Emmanuel and Debbie Wasserman-Shultz.
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