Afghanistan After Party Rant

On paper the war is ending, but it isn’t *really* ending. But that’s neither here nor there.

The war is ending there. A war that was started as a knee jerk reaction to a terrible tragedy.

The response was hubris manifested as a ground war in a country where the most capable and technologically advanced military that has ever existed was losing to people who literally dwell in caves.

There is no responsible end to a war, any war. The country was fucked up before and now it’s even more fucked up. There are people who have been born around the world and in both the US and Afghanistan who have been alive as long as the war has been going on and have no inkling of a world without perpetual war.

It’s finally ending. I remember the day it started and that was a very dark, very strange time. But the U.S. response was painfully bungling and disastrously misguided.

There will be criticism of how it ended, why and when. They will point to the current administration and blame them because that country is a wreck of epic proportions. But we can’t forget what got us and the world into this clusterfuck, hubris mixed with a healthy dose of idiocy. All those flags waving in our face blinded us to the fact that a war on an intangible is impossible and un-winnable.

We went in dropping million dollar bombs on people who can stop an entire military convoy for hours on end by firing one bullet. If this war showed us anything it is that the Afghan people are highly adaptable, resourceful, and incredibly intelligent. We were the raiders not the heroes. We were raging a war against people who only saw is as the enemy, not the liberator. We were the bad guy.

It was an unjust war. It was a war that never should have happened just like the war in Iraq. It has been constant war for 13 years in a country that the Soviets couldn’t conquer. The Bush administration was in the wrong. This isn’t about Republican versus Democrat, Left against Right, it is about the plain and simple fact that the Bush administration led us willing astray and played us like a cheap guitar.

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