Afghanistan

hi everyone this is charles hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny colorado always warm always sunny sometimes colorado so today is august 17th 2021 and from time to time i opine or discuss current affairs and events because they are relevant to all of us i'm 33 years old and every generation has some form of defining event when i was younger more than 20 years ago now almost 20 years ago september 11th occurred so barely a teenager and september 11th kicked off the defining event of my generation which was the war on terrorism the prior generation got to witness the fall of the soviet union and the generation before that got to witness the loss of the vietnam war in many ways afghanistan is our generation's vietnam and it was the endless war it was a war that four u.s presidents presided over and many of my peers in my generation fought in the war and they faced tremendous hardship i personally know a lot of people who lived in afghanistan fought in afghanistan and came back with less of themselves than when they traveled there missing limbs bodily injuries mental problems ptsd broken families and divorces a lot of blood and treasure was spilled over the last 20 years and we lost this is the equivalent of saddam hussein coming out of the grave and returning and becoming dictator of iraq again it's the equivalent of hitler taking back germany at the end of world war ii the taliban is returned and what's extraordinary to me is that if you look at the facts and circumstances the taliban never really fielded more than 100 000 people current strength is about 75 000 and from 2007 and on the taliban was operating a shadow government all throughout afghanistan every providence and it had a governor there was a taliban governor as a police chief there was a taliban police chief and they would effectively run a shadow government in that respect its biggest open secret of the occupation for the last 14 years and those shadow regimes had in many cases more popular support than the kleptocratic government that afghanistan had under president ghani and karzai and the others in that regime in a country of more than 10 million less than 1.9 million people participated in the democratic process for the election of the recently deposed president there really was no democratic legitimacy or expectation thereof billions of dollars were spent training over 300 000 soldiers in the afghan defense forces and those forces when it came a decision time for whether they would fight or not decided not to because they were fighting for nothing the leaders that they had there were not legitimate the government that they had there was not accepted in a sense and there was no reason to continue the fiction anymore and now the world is left with a reality that a regime that's more comfortable with the 8th century is now in charge of a country in the 21st century it's a very bad day for women's rights it's a very bad day for gay rights it's a very bad day for human rights and books will be written memoirs will be written people will try to answer the question why did we lose i honestly don't know myself read a lot of books on afghanistan i've talked to so many people there a lot of good people tried their best it certainly wasn't for lack of fighting a lack of money a lack of brain power and ambition and technology and yet still we were beaten by people who have no business running a country who have no business being in a global community and now we see the horrible aftermath just a prior generation saw in the fall of saigon there are videos on twitter where bodies are lining the streets because for 20 years the taliban has kept a list of who's a friend and who's not and those who are not friends on the list are currently being drag court shot tortured and worse the people who supported the united states they were promised that they would get some form of relief they would get an opportunity to not suffer the consequences of being on the wrong side of war and we abandoned those people thousands if not tens of thousands a lot of veterans and this whole week they have been showered with messages emails panic things saying can you help us get out of the country unfortunately as much as the desire is there the political process is not going to save the majority of the people who want to leave who earned the right to leave and even if they could leave they're not allowed to take friends family and other people who will serve as a substitute for their perceived crimes against the taliban our companies in the systems business and what that means is that we think a lot about how people should live and how the world should be what rights we as human beings have and how do we build governments that push power to the edges and ensure that you can live your life the way you'd like to and yet somehow some way the world can take care of its problems regressive totalitarian theocracies are artifacts of the past we saw that during the middle ages the brutal reign of the old catholic church that was so willing to cling to power and dominate every aspect of people's lives that just mere opposition to doctrine could result in an inquisition and being burned at the state saw that during the crusades and we've seen that all throughout human history the roman persecution of the christians for example and we see it today in isolated examples of evil regimes that are so in love with their doctrine that they're willing to punish anyone who doesn't subscribe to their beliefs i like to believe in the better parts of humanity and that overall things are getting better but i was deeply dismayed to see china say that they're prepared to legitimize the taliban regime the same for moscow because it benefits them geopolitically regardless of whether it's the right thing to do so i get asked a lot what do we do well we have to figure out some meaning in all of this and recognize that in every tragedy there are people at the end of it there are a lot of women in afghanistan who have a lot of uncertainty right now they lived lives where they were trying for the first time in their lives to integrate into society as equals instead of subordinates learned to read they built a digital life they started working driving doing basic things that we take for granted on a daily basis they will now be punished for taking those steps into the uncertain future the number one thing that people in afghanistan are doing right now on the internet is trying to figure out how to scrub their social media delete their facebook accounts clear their twitter pages get rid of any social footprint because they understand that the mere expression of their lifestyle is now a liability and those 20 years of history can potentially be used against them for torture execution humiliation or exile from any notion of society i wonder if staying was the right idea or leaving we were not as a nation prepared for empire building we don't have the stomach for it we're not the roman empire we don't subscribe to decades-long integration and slavery and crucifixion and the level of brutality necessary to transform a society over a long period of time into subordination we aren't the british empire and being prepared to do the things that were done in china and india in the 19th century we like to believe we're the good people but we weren't prepared to be the people necessary to defeat an enemy like this so while we never lost a battle we never lost an operation that mattered and we killed certainly a lot of the people that pissed us off and were responsible for why we started the war in the first place we lost the war because the war was redefined as changing afghanistan's nature to become more like us not recognizing that we had to become more like them to beat them and yet we were told this again and again and again if you go to amazon and just enter in afghanistan you'll see books written in 2006 2008 2010 2011 2012 2015 and many more to come now that we've lost and every single one of them said we're not going to win this we're not going to win this and stubbornly we as a nation clung on to the fantasy that if only we stuck around for a little bit longer somehow someway at least the stalemate will occur and then we can responsibly leave i see american helicopters today blackhawks with the taliban flag flying on them we didn't give it to them we gave it to the army that we bled for and trained and when they cowardly fled their posts those weapons american weapons are now in the hands of our enemy who is better equipped today than they were when we invaded in 2001.