Frank's Musings

Senator Tim Kaine said it best:  The U.S. failed to create a Western society in Afghanistan since 9/11 because we want something for the Afghans that the Afghans don’t want for themselves.  We’ve spent a lot of money and lost a lot of lives ridding the country of Al Qaeda and Bin Laden; but we haven’t installed a Western style democracy with Western values.  Against all our and our allies’ power, the Taliban is taking over Afghanistan’s order now that we are leaving.  

It is disappointing that a reasonable authority like Leon Panetta insists that the U.S. can’t risk allowing the Taliban to govern that sui-generis mountain territory whose people have succeeded in resisting foreign domination for millennia.    Some Afghans have taken advantage of modern telecommunications to adopt Western values on their own.  They have a right, because of American reliance on them to protect our national security, to emigrate from their immutable community to obtain admittance to our own country.  However, the U.S. would ignore the lesson of history at its own unlimited cost and risk if it tried to change the way life is lived in this crossroads between East and West, ground and sky, that will never evolve or be transformed into a haven for the human rights we hold dear.