Here are some of the observations of Sarah Chayes, a US citizen who spent a decade in Afghanistan and who knows both the major players and the people of that nation:
The last speaker of the Afghan parliament, Rahman Rahmani, I recently learned, is a multimillionaire, thanks to monopoly contracts to provide fuel and security to U.S. forces at their main base, Bagram. Is this the type of government people are likely to risk their lives to defend?
Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me — the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: “The Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.” The old man serving as the group’s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.
I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.
For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message. I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That’s when I knew today was inevitable.
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
Is that American democracy?
You can find the rest of her observations and questions here, and I urge you to read her entire essay:
https://www.sarahchayes.org/post/the-ides-of-august
It's instructive that her description of what we did to Afghanistan mirrors what the US elite did to our own country during the same period - they wrecked it. That may imply that many of the American people also may be unwilling to defend OUR government. While it's true we have yet to see widespread civil disobedience or military mutiny, can we say with certainly such things will not occur in our future?
[See the "thought for the day" post above for additional discussion.]
Update - 8/22/2021
Here is additional discussion by Julian Assange:
https://twitter.com/wikileaks/status/1427929346262642688
Now you know why they keep him locked up.
Update - 8/23/2021
Here is an EXCELLENT interview with two men who were there and who know what happened. It's long, but well worth your time:
https://youtu.be/_bo7P_podIk
