The Afghan withdrawal: Far more painful than heroin withdrawal
By Greg Strange
web posted August 23, 2021
As with every other left-induced debacle in contemporary America, the debacle of the Afghan withdrawal leaves rational patriotic Americans shaking their heads in disbelief and disillusionment. As with all the other debacles – COVID response, open borders, mollycoddling violent criminals, pushing socialism, transgender madness, out of control trillion, zillion spending – they are left to ask the question: How can all of this be happening in the greatest country in the history of mankind?
But let’s focus on Afghanistan for now, while keeping in mind the context of an America in severe decline. Look, whether we had twenty years or a thousand years, there was never going to be a way for us to fix Afghanistan. Why, we could no more fix what’s wrong with Afghanistan than we, apparently, can fix what’s wrong with . . . Portland! Or San Francisco! Or Baltimore! Or Chicago! Or you name the ruined, Democrat-run American city. Or for that matter, you name the particular section of the ruined American heartland, which is fast and deliberately being filled up with endless illegals.
So, maybe it was time to get out of Afghanistan (though an argument can be made for maintaining a minimal presence to prevent total chaos).
But how do you get the withdrawal so colossally, breathtakingly, catastrophically wrong? We all knew the Taliban would soon take over again, but how do you not get all of the thousands of Americans out first? How do you leave behind billions of dollars worth of equipment and weapons (including, reportedly, helicopters, tanks and drones) for the Taliban to scoop up? How do you abandon those Afghans who helped us to the tender mercies of the Taliban?
As with seemingly everything else in America these days, depravity reigns supreme and this withdrawal is no exception. Look at our leadership. First, surreal doesn’t even begin to describe the circumstances in which a doddering, diminished codger like Biden – who was wrong about everything even in his prime – could have been chosen to lead the most dynamic and consequential country in the world. And whether it was voter fraud or not that got him into office, the fact remains that approximately half of American citizens preferred him along with all the destructive insanity that comes with the Democrat Party.
In other words, our citizenry has become unimaginably degraded. When that happens, you get depravity, both domestically and internationally.
But what about our vaunted military leaders? When you have guys like Mark Milley serving as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff . . . Well, let’s just say our enemies – even backward primitives like the Taliban – have a distinct advantage. Remember this guy, Milley? He was more interested in our soldiers reading the neo-Marxist ravings of Ibram X. Kendi than instructing them on how to defeat our enemies. Commentator Mark Steyn referred to him as “Thoroughly Modern Milley.” I wish I’d thought of that, but I’ll take the liberty of bumping it up a notch: “Thoroughly Post-Modern Milley,” given his obsession with critical race theory and trying to understand “white rage.” He’s also down with every gender-bending, intersectionally nuanced absurdity masquerading as Homo sapiens who, bizarrely, want to join the military because it’s all just so fabulously inclusive and tolerant. (And because one’s sex reassignment surgery can be paid for by the government.)
Conservatives used to console themselves when fretting about a civil war by assuring themselves that the military would be on their side. That all seems so quaint now. That was so pre-Obama, who filled the leadership ranks with rank leftists. And now the chickens have come home to roost. These guys are fast turning the military, like our schools and corporations, into laboratories of leftist social experimentation. The rainbow flag is now just as important, if not more so, than the stars and stripes. And why not, since the latter represents endless oppression, racism, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia and Islamophobia.
Again, the Afghan withdrawal debacle should be seen in the context of an America in freefall. Every institution has been infected with and corrupted by the woke virus. As long as that virus has a hold on us, nothing will ever function properly because it destroys all common sense, all perspective on history, all appreciation of timeless wisdom and all gratitude for everything we have.
So, while Americans at home – at least the white ones – are systematically being taught to hate themselves, their history and their civilization, terrified Afghans were clinging to the outside of an airplane taxiing for takeoff without much consideration for the survivability of such a desperate gambit. They just wanted to get to America, which they believed to be infinitely better than their own country, but unaware that half of Americans don’t agree with them and vote for policies that aren’t far removed from what amounts to nihilism.
So here we are, another humiliating, catastrophic mistake, compliments of the woke gang that couldn’t shoot straight. Consequently, we get a Taliban spokesman saying, “We have defeated a great power.”
Actually, no, you haven’t. Don’t even begin to flatter yourself that way. Your “graveyard of empires” is nothing more than a backwater of illiterate, squabbling tribes who have nothing better to do than wage endless war against each other and anyone else who wanders onto your hapless antediluvian land. The “great power” could still effortlessly incinerate your crap-hole of a country. The “great power” could have continued to dominate you until doomsday with a few airplanes and a handful of its magnificent troops on the ground. On a civilizational scale from Neanderthal to the space age, you barely register.
No, the reality is the “great power” has defeated itself and your gang of retrograde Islamic losers gets zero credit for that. You are the lucky recipients of America’s cultural, spiritual and moral decline, the result of which is personified in our current inept president and woke military leadership. And by the way, Taliban, that didn’t happen because America is an infidel relative to Islam. It happened because America has become an infidel relative to Judeo-Christianity, which is what made it great to begin with. Without that incomparable foundation, everything eventually crumbles, as we are seeing all around us.
Well, at least we’re finally out of the quagmire of Afghanistan, right? Unfortunately, our military, along with the rest of our society, is currently neck deep in a quagmire of cultural Marxism, identity politics and social justice, from which it may not be able to extract itself anytime soon, if ever. And that’s to the absolute delight of our enemies around the world who are going to be like pigs in slop for as long as it lasts.
The foreign policy consequences of this botched and craven withdrawal could be earth-shaking. To say that bad actors on the international stage have been emboldened is the understatement of the post-Trumpian world order. For instance, if I lived in Taiwan right now I’d be shaking in my boots. Likewise if I lived in any region formerly terrorized by Isis, al-Qaeda and the like. Likewise if I lived in any former Soviet Republic that Vladimir Putin takes a shine to in his delirious desire to reconstitute the fallen Soviet empire. Likewise on down the line.
Oh well. But at least we know we’ll take the House back in ’22, right? And then we’ll say, “Take that, President Harris!” 
Greg Strange can be reached at gpstrange30341@yahoo.com. (c) 2021 Greg Strange.