History Coming Hard And Fast

A look at what the collapse of the American Empire may bring. I sincerely hope Dreher is being over pessimistic! God help us if he's correct.

From The American Conservative

By Rod Dreher

reader writes:

I work in state politics now, but I started out more interested in international relations, did a masters degree in that and in the process interned at the State Department in the summer of 2009. I had the great fortune to study with some really hard-nosed foreign policy realists (some that have published in The American Conservative), but then to contrast that to the people I was around in DC — I got a heavy dose of the “foreign policy establishment.” Everyone I worked with went to a small cluster of schools on the east coast, and likely their parents worked for State, DoD, CIA, etc. — and there was one way of thinking of things. I was accustomed to really questioning foreign policy in our graduate seminars and asking hard questions about what is in the American interest, so I got a lot of weird looks. I could write a book about their cluelessness, but either way, it was eye-opening.

One day in the cafeteria I saw Richard Holbrooke, who had recently been appointed as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, having lunch with James Carville, and it made me think: Is this whole thing is a charade? Are they bringing in Carville to help give some sort of veneer of authenticity to this so-called election and the notion of ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan? Is this whole thing a PR ploy? I don’t know what Carville was doing there, but either way, Holbrooke was sort of a living legend among the elites then given his background with Bosnia (and of course other aspects of Clinton Inc.), but a fellow intern of mine made a comment at the time that I’ve never let him live down along the lines of: “I hope the Afghanistan mission isn’t over and the country fixed before I get a chance to go serve there.” I laughed out loud. He had another year of grad school and didn’t know if there would still be anything for him to do there when it was done. I was really just thinking through the lens of my realist professors who had pressed all of us to think about things like — what does ‘victory’ in Afghanistan look like? How do we know when we get to leave? Of course, none of us could give a plausible answer, and I became a big skeptic of the war.

Either way, he finished his master’s degree and went to Afghanistan as a defense contractor — he really wanted to be a part of the solution — but one tour made him a skeptic. The ‘bacha bazi’ stuff was real, and as disgusting as it is described. They were instructed to overlook lots of sexual abuse. He came back very jaded about the incoherent mission, and the waste he described made even him — a big-government, east cost liberal — a skeptic of government spending.

When you see this stuff up close — with even a little bit of skepticism — it changes how you think.

The “bacha bazi” stuff refers to a Pashtun practice of forcing boys to dress up like girls and dance, and then become the sex slaves of older men. Here’s a 2015 story from The New York Times that will infuriate you. Excerpt:

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

We empowered the boy-rapers to protect Afghanistan from the head-choppers. Lovely country, that.

Here’s a powerful essay by Tanner Greer, the gist of which you will get in this excerpt. Emphases are in the original:

My youth was witness to a catalog of catastrophe. Our leaders proved unworthy; our institutions were found unsound. One after another, disasters rolled: the invasion of Iraq. The criminal mismanagement of its occupation. The inundation of New Orleans. The open misery of global recession. The quiet suffering of opioids turned epidemic. The election of Donald Trump. The constant churn of crises produced by his misrule. The malfunction of one governing body after another in the face of a global pandemic.  Through it all, the slow unraveling of America’s civic culture.

Yet in this chronicle of shame the American intervention in Afghanistan stands exceptional. There is no partisan dodge that escapes it. There is no domestic rival to pin blame on. There is nothing to shield any of us from the sting of this defeat. Yes, events of this week reveal enormous and largely unnecessary failures in intelligence, logistics, operational planning, cross-government coordination, public communication, and broader strategy on the part of the sitting administration. Yet we must see these humiliations for what they are: the final chapter of two decade long disaster. The scale of these failures are too big, and they occur on a timeline too long, to be excused as the other side’s fault.

American policy in Afghanistan has always traced closely the impulses of the American people: we entered Afghanistan with an unparalleled majority of our nation in support; we surged into it ten years later with another national majority rallied; we now leave the country with a commanding majority of the country in agreement.  Only one congresswoman voted against the initial invasion; regardless of which party has controlled the Hill, each subsequent step of this war has been waged with strong congressional backing. Four presidencies, two from each party, have presided over our long defeat. This is disaster a borne by us all.

16 commanders of American or ISAF troops Afghanistan, ten commanders of CENTCOM, six Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ten Secretaries of Defense, two special envoys to the region, seven administrators of USAID, 11 Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, seven Secretaries of State, nine Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, seven Directors of National Intelligence, ten National Security Advisors, five chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee, six chairmen of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Select Committee on Intelligence, seven chairmen of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, their staffs, and several dozen secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy assistants, desk officers, station chiefs, and division or brigade commanders have directed this defeat. The war in Afghanistan is not the failure of a man, or even of a few men, but of an entire leadership class.

Now, lessons must be learned.

Read it all.One of the most interesting things about the essay is now Greer begins by talking about how weirdly exhilarating the post-9/11 period was. So many of us felt alive, confident, sure of ourselves, revitalized as a nation. They had started a fight with the wrong people. And here we are twenty years later. The next year in the life of the United States is going to be one of the most difficult we have ever lived through. We will either begin to arrest our national decline, or accelerate it.

Here’s some information I picked up today on Twitter from a political scientist:

We as a nation decisively turned away from God at the turn of the millennium. Look at this chart from 2012:

Let the reader understand.

I talked by phone to a Catholic friend today in a major East Coast city. Hadn’t spoken to him since last autumn. He told me that his family and some like-minded ones, along with sympathetic priests, are already starting to put together the rudiments of an underground church network, like Father Tomislav Kolakovic did in pre-Communist Slovakia (I tell the story inLive Not By Lies). Most fellow Christians he knows, however, “are just walking around in a fog.”

I checked in this afternoon with one of the sources for that book, an emigre to America from a Soviet bloc country. He told me that he believes things are about to fall apart in a truly catastrophic way. He’s trying to convince his adult children to leave the US and go to the country with which they have dual citizenship. He’s not sure what he’s going to do.

Last night I talked to a reader who has become a friend, and who works in a position that gives him a great deal of knowledge about things going on in the world (I have to be cagey here). He told me that we have now entered the times for which The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies were written. Coming from this particular friend, given his expertise, this really landed powerfully with me. I have a big decision coming up about a future path that has everything to do with the extension of this work. I can’t say a lot about it here right now, but I can say that it doesn’t involve leaving TAC; it’s rather about a new initiative under consideration that would put the network-building into action. Events happening in the world right now, and the quickening that we can all feel, as well as this friend’s analysis of what is happening and where it is going — all of it is bearing down hard.

History is coming at us fast and rough right now. Keep your heads. Watch closely. Prepare.

UPDATE: A reader who served in Afghanistan writes:

As far as bacha bazi is concerned, I think a lot of Americans do not understand it even if they are aware of it. While pederasty has been an issue in Afghanistan going back to the Greeks, it is heavily prevalent among Pashtun police and militia forces largely as a domination and shame tactic to sever recruits from their social and communal ties so that they cannot return, and are instead broken into the militia. They also incorporate the Greco-Roman dynamic on sexuality where the active participant is not considered unmasculine, something that is extremely important in the hyper macho culture of the Pashtuns.

The idea that the Taliban doesn’t practice pederasty is taking the group’s propaganda at face value. Sexual misconduct and grooming are rampant in the madrassa culture from which they emerge. The idea of taking sex slaves and war brides among large pools of unmarried young men is very appealing to the group’s recruiting pool for the same reason it was for Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun.

The key thing that a lot of Americans do not understand about Afghanistan is that the Soviets dropped everything but nukes on it and before that had killed off or driven out most of the non-communists as class enemies. The only people who thrived in such environments are the most ruthless, which is why so many look like refugees from Mad Max or Escape from New York.