Afghanistan Opinion: It's Victory Day But Afghans Are Still Voiceless Decades Later (Mull)

Josh Mull, the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. also writes for Rethink Afghanistan:

Happy Mujahideen Victory Day! This is the national holiday when Afghans celebrate their victory over the communists in the 1980's. We remember the Mujahideen of course, they're the folks to whom we gave all that CIA training and Stinger missiles so they could kill Soviets. We all at least saw the film version of Charlie Wilson's War, right?

Afghanistan: How Many Soldiers Does it Take to Screw in a Light Bulb? (Mull)

The basic historical narrative is that the Soviet superpower bad guys  (who incidentally invaded in the name of democracy and development) are defeated by the heroic good-guyAmericans, who saved the hapless, incoherent hillbillies, the Afghans, by giving them lots of weapons. Yay for freedom fighters!


The danger, our story warns, is that we abandoned Afghanistan after Mujahideen Victory Day, causing America to become the victims. Blowback! Poor, foolish America should have interfered more with Afghanistan I suppose. But we're ignoring the Afghan version of history and completely missing the point of Mujahideen Victory Day.


Let's take a look at their celebration, via Pajhwok Afghan News [subscription]:

[Deputy President Qasim Fahim] urged Afghan citizens to join together to find a solution to the problems faced by the country.

He said there were some people, both inside and outside the country, who were trying to destabilise Afghanistan.

A strong army, a vigilant fight against corruption and smuggling and respect for good government and the rule of law were some ways in which Afghanistan could retain its strength. Corruption, he said, was the fifth pillar of terrorism.

Fahim delivered a warning to unnamed countries who he said were meddling in Afghanistan's affairs, saying they would find themselves mired in similar problems if they did not leave.

Oh yeah, he's got our number all right. We are definitely "meddling," which is a nice way of saying occupation. And boy are we ever having similar problems! Indeed our meddling mires us in corruption, what with the billions lost to waste, fraud, and abuse by war profiteers. And rule of law is sure out the window since the President can now lock you up forever because he calls you a terrorist or just assassinate you. But notice that the Afghans don't think of the holiday as a time to pine for American intervention: Mujahideen Victory Day is about throwing off any foreign occupation, be it Soviet or American.

And the dirty secret here is that nobody abandoned Afghanistan. We like to take Afghanistan's decades of war and blame it on the Afghans being xenophobic, or "tribal," or some other backhanded way of saying they're all backwards idiots. If only they would just let us manipulate them, they'd have peace. But the history of Afghanistan's "war-torn" decades is a history of nothing but foreign meddling. Take a look at these snippets from the Washington Post:

Already, efforts to jockey for future control of Afghanistan have been seen among Pakistan, India, Iran and even Russia. [...]

Karzai and most Afghans fear that if Washington waits too long to decide about talking to the Taliban, control will fall to the ISI as happened in the 1980s and 1990s -- when Washington abandoned Afghanistan to Russia and Pakistan but the ISI played favorites and was unable to end the civil war among Afghan factions.[...]

Pakistan's maneuvers have prompted India to try reactivating its 1990s alliance with Iran, Russia and Central Asia, which supported the former Northern Alliance in a civil war against the Pakistan-backed Taliban regime.

See all the meddling? Iran, India, Pakistan, Russia, all of "Central Asia" apparently, plus all of our meddling. Everybody had a hand in it. And check out that bias: "ISI played favorites and was unable to end the civil war". Gee whiz, I wonder why they were "unable" to end it when, a few sentences later, we see that a lot of other folks seemed to have been around as well.

Afghans don't need more of us, they need more of themselves. Everyone but Afghans has a say in their affairs. Remember the outrage over President Hamid Karzai appointing Afghans (scandalous!) instead of foreigners to the election commission? Guess how many foreigners regulate the elections in Montana? Zero.

Now, don't misconstrue this as a defense of Karzai's fraud, it's simply illustrative of our rejection of Afghans at every step of the process. We whine about abandoning the women of Afghanistan, instead of letting them do it themselves. We complain that Afghan electricity isn't sufficiently dependent on our puppet in Kabul, instead of helping them develop their own energy capacity. And rather than allow Afghans to develop their own security, we support child molesters and drug addicts who ravage the population.

Just take a look at this movie showing in Afghanistan, keeping in mind that this is only one anecdote, from an American no less:

Last weekend, at the university where I teach, the new documentary film Addicted in Afghanistan by director Jawed Taiman, a British-Afghan, was shown. At point, one of the young boys in the family of opium and heroin addicts the film follows shouts to the camera that his addiction was produced by the U.S.-led occupation. The overwhelmingly student audience erupted into applause. I later heard that some shocked faculty members walked out in disgust with students. One, an American, reportedly said the incident has her reconsidering whether she will return after this semester.

I was stunned that my colleagues were surprised. Our students are not going to speak up in a well-lit classroom in an “American university” and tell their instructor what they honestly think about the United States. Some of the older students lived under Taliban rule. All of the students were directly impacted by the chaos of civil war and the latest bloody foreign occupation. Every Afghan understands that what you say in public can earn your execution.

But in the anonymity of a darkened gymnasium, with abundant peer support, they can exercise their frustration, disappointment, anger or disgust in a collective manner that affords both plausible deniability and little likelihood of reprisals. Popular resistance always finds, or creates, opportunities to express itself.

That's how battered and beat down by foreign interference they are. They can only express themselves anonymously in the dark. They're completely voiceless in the fate of their own country. Then there's that Pajhwok article I noted. They have to hide their exclusively Afghan voices behind loads of ads and a paywall just to keep the lights on.

But there's good news here. You are not behind a paywall, your voice is not confined to the darkness. Listen to what Representative James McGovern said on a recent conference call about Afghanistan:

I have to tell you as a former staffer and as a member of Congress-- pressure works, grassroots pressure works. It really makes a difference here," he said. "And when many people do it it's a movement. And what we need to create here in a very short period of time is a movement to try to change course on Afghanistan.

I was on that call, and I can tell you he very strongly emphasized that point over and over again. Pressure works. Calling your member of congress works. Writing your member of Congress works. Hell, even shutting down their office works. They have to listen to you, they desperately need you to tell them what to do. Unlike the Afghans, your voice still counts for a lot, and you can demand that the US stop interfering in Afghanistan, primarily by ending our bloody and expensive military occupation. Tell them the Afghans need to solve their own problems, they don't need us there manipulating them.

It's super easy, too. Take Peace Action West, for example. They've got a form all ready for you to tell congress to end the war, you just have to fill out your personal details. Click "send" and, poof, it goes straight to your specific members of congress. There are dozens more organizations out there just like that one, too. And of course it's always effective to just straight up call them at their office and speak your mind. And you won't be alone in doing this. Contact your representative, then join us on Rethink Afghanistan’s Facebook page and collaborate with the tens of thousands of others around the country working to bring this war to an end.

From Nukes to Banks: How Smart is President Obama? (Matlin)

The Department of Defense has announced the deployment of Prompt Global Strike in 2014. According to the US Government, a new conventional warhead of enormous weight, delivered at high speed with precision accuracy, will destroy its target with the destructive power of a nuclear weapon but without the radiation fallout. Because the weapon is not ballistic, it will be easy to control.

Viewing America: North Carolina, Tea Parties, and the Supreme Court (Matlin)

One might think that cruise missiles would be destructive enough for our American cousins, and as for pinpoint accuracy, well, we’ve heard this before. In an episode of The West Wing, President Bartlett is urged by his Chief of Staff to go to the Situation Room to witness the result of the latest Star Wars test.


“Intervention in fifteen seconds,” the President is told by a General.

Twenty seconds later, the President asks, “Did we hit it?”

The General pauses. “Not exactly, Mr. President, one hundred and thirty eight.”

The President leans towards his Chief of Staff, whispering, “one hundred and thirty eight feet, not bad.”

“Actually, it was one hundred and thirty eight miles, sir,” comes the response.

I suppose spending loads of taxpayers dollars on the latest war toy might be justified by the administration because of the huge numbers of people employed in the American munitions industry. But why, in the face of the recent nuclear treaty with Russia, is it necessary to add a new weapon of such destruction to America’s phenomenal arsenal?

I wonder if the administration is playing really cool, getting the Russians to agree to disarm nuclear weapons on a one for one basis. “You disarm a nuclear weapon and we won’t build a GPS missile” could be the deal. If so, what a clever move it might be, especially if this new American weapon system would never have been built in the first place. No money spent and missiles deleted. Obama has demonstrated more than once that he values “smart” as much or more than “tough.”

Is Obama being smart about financial regulation as well? The Republicans in Congress object to new financial regulation rules. These laws challenge the complete freedom hitherto enjoyed by the economic elite on how they run the hedge fund industry, with the federal government seeking to introduce transparency and fairness. Obama’s point is straightforward and well-taken. He has told Wall Street, “Unless your business model depends on bilking people, there is little to fear from these new rules.” into the hedge fund market.

Republicans are protesting on grounds of “more socialism” and “denial of freedom” by the federal government. Yet not so long ago, these same Republicans were very keen to have the federal government bail out their banker friends. Then they stood mute whilst the heads of suspect financial institutions paid themselves huge bonuses, to the disgust of the American taxpayer. Whoever said “the lunatics have taken over the asylum” was right.

Who do these bankers think they are? There seems to be a parallel with the way some Premier League football (soccer) players are treated in England and the acceptance of a separate set of social rules for the sporting prima donnas. The stars can rightfully claim to entertain hundreds of thousands every Saturday as they play the beautiful game, not that this is any excuse for some pretty deplorable behaviour on their part. In comparison, however, investment bankers play their game only for the very few and can make no claim for “the beautiful deal”.

Last week, we, the taxpayer bailers of the banking system, were treated to disclosure of the kind of behaviour that got the global financial world into the disaster from which we all suffered.

In 2007, as the American housing market showed signs of weakness, Goldman Sachs, the doyen of Wall Street investment bankers, sold an investment product based on the housing mortgage market. The product was inherently bound to fail, something which Goldman knew but neglected to mention. Worse, another Goldman client and customer, John Paulson Inc., was certain to profit from the inbuilt capacity for failure of the Goldman investment. As a result, the federal government has commenced a civil suit against Goldman at the very time that the new financial laws are coming to a voting boil in Congress.

I have no doubt that within the hundreds of pages of small print attached to the investment in question, Goldman will have warned buyers that investments can result in losses, that independent advice should be sought before purchase, and probably in a few words buried deep in the documentation, that the buyer would almost certainly lose. However, it is clear to me, as someone who worked in the City of London for many years, is that Goldman has behaved unethically and, in any view, wrongly by breaching conflict of interest principles.

Goldman has already sought refuge that an individual rogue director was solely to blame, claiming that this person was working on his own. That won’t fly. Does Goldman suggests it doesn’t have a vetting process for financial products and that its lawyers don’t write the small print? Methinks this banker doth protest too much.

Still, I dislike the probability that Obama’s administration has manipulated and politicised the Goldman affair, hoping to embarrass Republican legislators into accepting the new financial regulation laws. It may be a smart move politically but this is not the right way to pass important legislation. New law should be judged on merit alone.

It has been timely for me to get away to North Carolina. Beaufort, pronounced “Bewferd,” is a jewel of a town on the Crystal Coast. Part of the Inner Banks, The town was settled in colonial times and there is much West Indian architecture to admire.

I also took a boat ride to the Outer Banks, an Oceanside wilderness which has hardly changed since the founding fathers’ time. I have seen wild horses, all kinds of bird life, dolphins and maybe a whale --- one glimpse was too quick for confirmation. The boat ride, the beauty and peace there, the restaurants --- don’t miss Amos Mosquito ---- and the sights and sounds of the coast provided a refreshing change to large American and European cities.

So while I still ponder whether President Obama, from nukes to finance, is being “smart” as well as “tough”, I do hold this clear, immutable, and unchangeable opinion: on any view imaginable, the Inner Banks and Outer Banks of North Carolina are infinitely better than all of the Wall Street banks.

Viewing America: North Carolina, Tea Parties, and the Supreme Court (Matlin)

The University of North Carolina, located in Chapel Hill, is a wondrous place, an oasis of liberalism within a desert of reaction. Only here, since it is hunting season, might a visitor be treated with a juxtaposition between higher education and wild turkeys.

My own hunting has been less successful. I have been here for ten days and have yet to meet or track down a Republican.

I’m pretty sure I saw one on my ride from the airport, with the clue lying in the “Impeach Obama” sticker on the driver’s truck. Beyond that, however, it seems that this is an enclave free from members of the Grand Old Party. I am told that at a faculty meeting at the university last year, the subject of diversity arose.



“We have too many white men,” said the first speaker. “This needs to be addressed.”

“I agree,” came a response, “let’s find another Republican.”

This doesn't necessary mean, however, that Chapel Hill is a bastion of liberalism. There are Democrats and then there are Southern Democrats, and the twain do not meet with any comfort. A Southern Democrat is not necessarily a Republican in other clothes, but both on historical background --- tread carefully when approaching the story of segregation and civil rights --- and in contemporary context, there are tensions on political, economic, and social issues.

This complexity is overshadowed now on the national scene by two sweeping stories. The first, the Tea Party, should not be an issue at all. This is a collection, predominantly of late middle-aged, middle-class, comfortably well-off folks don’t want to pay anything for those Americans less fortunate than them. They are able to make sufficient noise to give certain areas of the media the opportunity to blow the alleged importance of the TP out of all proportion.

At first sight, the Tea Partiers could be mistaken for supporters of Ross Perot, the businessman who ran a third-party Presidential campaign in 1992. In that time of economic distress in the 1990s, a distrust of Washington gave rise to a desire amongst a minority to support an "independent" for President and shake up the established order.

So, where are the differences? First, Perot supporters came from both sides of the political aisle. Tea Partiers are from the right-wing of the Republican Party, screaming their love for Sarah Palin when she says, “We’ll keep the guns and our religion and they can have the rest.” Second, Tea Party activists seem to be older and wealthier than Perot fans. Third, TP ideology is focused on taxes and "Big Government". Perot’s supporters had much wider issues of concern.

The second big issue is President Obama’s next Supreme Court pick. Within a day of Justice John Paul Stevens’ decision to retire, Congressional Republicans threatened a filibuster if Obama did not choose a middle-of-the-roader who accorded with Republican thinking.

Presently, the court is pro-business and leans to the right. Surely, the Court needs a "left" thinker, capable of articulating the views of ordinary Americans and who understands how court decisions affect ordinary lives. But I am even more concerned, given the Republican stance, over their fear of a differing point of view on the Court? Why is diversity suddenly a dirty word?

US "National Security": Obama to Break Link Between Islam and Terrorism?

Darrell Ezell writes for EA:

Preparations are under way by key National Security Council officials, reshaping the US National Security Strategy, to break the Bush-era linkage of Islam to terrorism. While this symbolic move is essential to restoring relations with the Muslim world, it promises to unleash a firestorm among conservatives in Washington.

According to sources, Pradeep Ramamurthy, head of the White House Global Engagement Directorate (a four-person NSC team), and his deputy Jenny Urizar are making progress in their rewrite of US national security documents set for release before the President’s trip to Indonesia in early June. They are focusing on the dynamic of language and how a respectful tone in communication, avoiding loaded religious rhetoric, may aid in restoring US–Muslim relations in the world.


It is no secret that the language in the Bush period linking the religion of Islam to terror contributed to ideological tension between the US and Muslims after 9/11. Statements by President Bush such as “This crusade, this war on terrorism is gonna take awhile…” or academic arguments presented by Bernard Lewis and Samuel P. Huntington that America is facing a “clash of civilizations” contributed to a misinterpretation of the religion of Islam and Islamic society by U.S. officials. This narrow misreading provided the intellectual framework and vocabulary for the 2006 U.S. National Security Strategy (NSS), which asserted, "The struggle against militant Islamic radicalism is the great ideological conflict of the early years of the 21st century and finds the great powers all on the same side – opposing the terrorists."

The 2006 NSS accomplished, on the surface, two specific goals: 1) It identified in clear terms America’s “new” enemy (“Islamic radicalism”, terrorists, and rogue states) against whom the US planned to defend itself at all necessary cost militarily; and 2) It set out a course of action for rebuilding key nations in an effort to promote effective democracies within countries identified as failed states.

To assure the Obama administration does not fall into the ideological traps set up by this approach, Ramamurthy’s office will pursue a set of 2008 recommendations outlined by the Counter-Terrorism Communications Center ("Words that Work and Words that Don’t") and the Department of Homeland Security ("Terminology to Define the Terrorists").

Acknowledging the damage caused by the Bush administration’s choice of language, the January 2008 DHS report made the recommendation that the U.S. government consider more strategic terminology.

The terminology that senior government officials use must accurately identify the nature of the challenges that face our generation....At the same time, the terminology should also be strategic – it should avoid helping the terrorists by inflating the religious bases and glamorous appeal of their ideology…If senior government officials carefully select strategic terminology, the government’s public statements will encourage vigilance without unintentionally undermining security objectives.

That is, the terminology we use must be accurate with respect to the very real threat we face. At the same time, our terminology must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists who argue that the West is at war with Islam.

The shift in national security language indicates the Obama Administration is comprehending the dynamic of communication as a tool to improve or further deteriorate future relations with Muslims. Iraqi government spokesman Ali al-Dabbagh declares, “It’s a good message of assurance, and differs from the former American administration’s position on this matter which showed no real understanding of Islamic countries….This decision by Obama will help to reform the image Muslims have of America.”

The conservative backlash has already begun with FOX News featuring the assertion of Senator Joseph Lieberman (as a former Democratic Vice Presidential candidate, a key ally for Obama's opposition) calling the shift in national security language “dishonest, wrong-headed, and disrespectful”. Arguing against the White House’s use of more strategic language, Lieberman insists:

It's a group of Islamist extremists who have taken the Muslim religion and made it into a political ideology, and I think if we're not clear about that, we disrespect the overwhelming majority of Muslims who are not extremists.

Senator Lieberman’s position points to the danger of a continued marriage of the terms Islam and radicalism in US national security documents. Underneath the surface, he, like most conservative writers, seeks to keep the current war on terror framed in religious/ideological terms. That position may make it easier for scholars to follow the narrow-minded resolution of Lewis and Huntington through the call for the religion of Islam to "reform", assuring its compatibility with the West. However, the use of the loaded terms sustained the ideological context of a global debate dominated by the tension between US foreign policy and groups like Al Qa'eda and the Taliban.

By dropping the unhelpful vocabulary, the White House sends the message that it is willing to discern the value of promoting a language of understanding over the theme of "combat". It is essential that the Administration make this linguistic shift, not just to apply political correctness to U.S. foreign policy, but to implement a more engaged framework of communcation before the President's summer address to the Muslim world in Indonesia.

Afghanistan: Death And The Prices We Pay for Intervention

Stephen Walt ,  writing on Foreign Policy about the recent Wikileaks release on the killing of civilians in Iraq in 2007 by US forces, touches on the idea that massacres like the one in the Wikileaks video are to be expected as part of the price of our interventionist policies:

Notice that I am not suggesting that the personnel involved failed to observe the proper "rules of engagement," or did not genuinely think that the individuals they were attacking were in fact armed. Rather, what bothers me is that they were clearly trying to operate within the rules, and still made a tragic error. It reminds us that this sort of mistake is inevitable in this sort of war, especially when we rely on overwhelming firepower to wage it. When we intervene in other countries, this is what we should expect.

Afghanistan: The Humanity Missing From Our Debate

It's an excellent point, but unfortunately it's too easily dismissed with the old "war is hell" cliche, as in this piece from Bouhammer:

Soldiers cannot get wrapped around every single life they are forced to take by virtue of being in combat. Soldiers (and I use soldiers generally describing all service-members), use dark humor and take it all in stride when they have to take lives. They can’t be effective by getting wrapped around the axle over taking human lives. So what you hear in this video is soldiers being soldiers. Nobody likes killing innocents, especially children and that is evident when the soldiers on the ground immediately start calling for a MEDEVAC to come get the wounded children.

Clearly not everyone sees killing people as an unacceptable price of war, particularly when it's soldiers doing it. Bouhammer simply took Walt's adviceand expected the horrible deaths as a natural result of the policy.

But there is a bit more to the price of war than just the loss of lives. So let's get a little cold-hearted for a moment and just accept that we need to murder these people as part of our strategy. Even if we're OK with that, the price of this strategy is still astronomically expensive.

Let's start just with the cost of transporting supplies to our troops. Not the supplies themselves, just the cost of transporting them. Tom Engelhardt explains:

Believe it or not, according to the Washington Post, the Defense Department has awarded a contract worth up to $360 million to the son of an Afghan cabinet minister to transport U.S. military supplies through some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan – and his company has no trucks. (He hires subcontractors who evidently pay off the Taliban as part of a large-scale protection racket that allows the supplies through unharmed.) This contract is, in turn, part of a $2.1 billion Host Nation Trucking contract whose recipients may be deeply involved in extortion and smuggling rackets, and over which the Pentagon reportedly exercises little oversight.

That'sthe US taxpayer, paying $2 billion just for trucks run by corrupt warlords and Taliban interlopers who will use them to smuggle  God knows what, possibly drugs or guns used to kill our soldiers. Lovely. But we have to pay that, because in order for our war strategy to work we've got to have soldiers in "some of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan".

That's just for the trucks. How do we get the supplies on to those trucks? Well, they come through an airbase in Kyrgyzstan. The price for that is the usual support for a police state dictator and paying rent with US taxpayers' money. And that price is about to go up:

The news of ongoing unrest in the central Asian republic has been received with concern by Washington. The U.S. embassy in Bishkek said it was "deeply concerned" about "civil disturbances" in the country, in a statement released on Wednesday.

Saying that the situation in Kyrgyzstan was "still very fluid", John Kerry, the chair of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, expressed "regret for the loss of life" in the country and called on all sides to be "calm and refrain from violence". He called upon Kyrgyz parties to address the "underlying political, economic and social issues" in a "transparent process that brings stability and fundamental rights to all."

The U.S. State Department said that transport operations at the Manas military installation outside Bishkek have been "functioning normally." The U.S. military has used the base over the past several years as a staging post for its operations in Afghanistan. Despite the call for the base’s closure by opposition leaders reportedly in charge now, it remains to be seen whether the new government will take practical steps toward that end.

There are worries in the U.S. that the new opposition-led government may increase the rent for Manas base by renegotiating the terms of its agreement with the U.S., according to Foreign Policy’s Cable blog. Such a renegotiation, Cable said, may offer Russia an opportunity to influence an agreement over the base.

So our pet dictator was ousted in a violent uprising (I won't get into the awful stuff he did to deserve that here), and now the new opposition government is going to be raising the rent, if not evicting us completely. This also apparently gives Russia, who we desperately need in other matters like the Iranian nuclear file, a bargaining chip to play against the US.

But the cost goes beyond rent or trucks or anything you can put a dollar sign on. We're also actively working to subvert European democracies as part of the cost of our war:

A newly leaked CIA report prepared earlier this month analyzes how the U.S. Government can best manipulate public opinion in Germany and France -- in order to ensure that those countries continue to fight in Afghanistan. The Report celebrates the fact that the governments of those two nations continue to fight the war in defiance of overwhelming public opinion which opposes it -- so much for all the recent veneration of "consent of the governed" -- and it notes that this is possible due to lack of interest among their citizenry: "Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters," proclaims the title of one section.

We're paying the CIA to figure out how to screw over the voters of France and Germany, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same chicanery was happening in American politics. We're way past blowing taxpayer funds and into the territory of destroying our own national values. And for what? Who actually stands to benefit from all of these prices that we're paying?

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has slammed Western backers for the second time in a week, accusing the United States of interference, The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday.

In a private meeting with up to 70 Afghan lawmakers Saturday, Karzai also warned that the Taliban insurgency could become a legitimate resistance movement if foreign meddling in Afghan affairs continues, the Journal said, citing participants in the talks.

During the talks, Karzai, whose government is supported by billions of dollars of Western aid and 126,000 foreign troops fighting the Taliban, said he would be compelled to join the insurgency himself if the parliament does not back his bid to take over Afghanistan's electoral watchdog

That's right, we're paying a couple billion to Taliban warlords over here, propping up a police state over there, subverting democracies all over the place, and all for a corrupt mountebank like Karzai who wants to join the Taliban. And remember, I'm just picking examples out of thin air here; the cost of trucks, the Kyrgyz airbase, the CIA memos. These aren't even the total cost of the war which will wind up costing in the trillions.

Let's go back to Walt's piece:

It reminds us that this sort of mistake is inevitable in this sort of war, especially when we rely on overwhelming firepower to wage it. When we intervene in other countries, this is what we should expect.

See, Americans do expect these costs. They understand the cliches that "war is hell" and, indeed, expensive. But Americans do question why they're paying these costs only to prop up criminals like Karzai. Why are we paying billions to Taliban smugglers and police states and anti-democratic intelligence operations just to build a country for a guy who wants to join the Taliban? And he's the best thing we've got over there, we've been there for over 9 years, there is no one else.

Americans aren't opposing the cost of this war because they magically turned into pacifist hippies, they oppose the cost because we're paying for nothing over there. The best case scenario for the current price we're paying is we shell out trillions in deficit money, leave our soldiers to keep dying and killing innocent civilians for the next few years, subvert democracies worldwide, and destroy our own national values. All so Karzai will maybe not join the Taliban. Whatever goals we have in Afghanistan are simply not worth the price we're paying.

Josh Mull also writes for The Seminal and Rethink Afghanistan.