Yankees, Go Home!
Very few commentators have anything good to say about President Biden’s policy of withdrawal from Afghanistan—which, of course, is the same as President Trump’s at a somewhat accelerated speed. In fact, taking American troops out of one of the world’s principal shitholes is the new administration’s sole applaudable action in its six months in office. We shall know before year’s end whether Biden will compromise, or even cancel, the benefits of his pull-out by following it up it with policies regarding immigration and asylum that offer the repatriation of half the population of Afghanistan in the United States, or even a minuscule fraction of it.
If so—as now appears likely—the familiar pattern of America’s enthusiastic engagement in ideological wars in barbarian countries, followed by her defeat there and her subsequent admission of hundreds of thousands of Third World refugees to the United States, will repeat itself. The argument for granting them entry is always the same: The United States has a moral obligation to rescue the thousands of natives who directly aided and abetted her in their homeland and tens of thousands more who would prefer to live in a Western liberal democratic country rather than remain in their own unenlightened —i.e. traditionalist—cultures, subject to authoritarian governments. While this argument is obviously not without merit, the fact remains that the aboriginal abettors of the U.S. Army have been—presumably—fighting at least as much on their own behalf and that of their countrymen as they are in the interests of a foreign country.
There is no evidence that the Afghans who allied themselves with the American forces acted merely from the goodness of their hearts, or because they admire liberal democracy as a system, or because they love America and Americans, and “freedom.” The reasonable assumption is that they abetted the Americans from self-interest, hoping to gain something from their cooperation with our troops–protection from the Taliban especially. In other words, they gambled. And the fact that they gambled and lost does not entitle them to the further protection of the United States. If victory by the Taliban means they must flee their country, they should either fight heroically on their own or look to more secure societies in the region that share their culture and—most importantly—their religion. (Why should the United States continue to receive people, and still more people, from foreign cultures wholly alien and frequently antagonistic toward the Western nations?) Meanwhile, Afghanistan—including their wives and female children– and its future are now entirely their responsibility, not America’s. (If, by the way, you would see the results of Western liberal democracy’s concept of feminine nature and of womanhood, look around you. In Asia, naked and half-naked women have historically been confined to harems.)
Many of the same American liberals who have opposed the American war in Afghanistan for two decades are now reconsidering: What will become of those millions of poor Afghans consigned to the customs and habits of their noble indigenous cultures, so superior to our oppressive Western one? What will happen to them once they have been abandoned to the mullahs of Islam, a religion so much more enlightened and humane than Christianity? Their future once the Americans’ withdrawal has been accomplished is so dreadful to contemplate that Washington has an obvious moral obligation to rescue them from it by bringing them to the United States, a nation rooted in slavery and one-half of which voted last year for the ur-racist, Donald Trump—an inhumane solution, one might think, on the order of bringing black slaves from Africa to this continent. While liberal thought has always prized itself on its openness and pragmatism, flexibility to such a degree is astonishing even for it.
The principal aim in invading Afghanistan in 2001, as stated at the time by President George Bush, was not to Westernize Afghanistan and replace the existing government with a modern democratic one. It was to track down the agents responsible for the attacks of September 11, punish them, and make certain they never had either the ability or opportunity to damage the United States again. That goal, it seemed to me at the time as it seems still, could be more efficiently—and infinitely less expensively in terms of blood and money—achieved by real “immigration reform:” strengthening the nation’s borders to the point of impermeability and shutting down immigration to this country entirely as most of the Founders of the Republic, arguing that the United States had nothing to gain from admitting newcomers, proposed doing in the 1790s. Immigrationists, including those in the White House, have always insisted that sealing the border is a physical impossibility while demanding that other governments—notably in the Middle East—do exactly that.
The new American President, whether he thinks the thing impossible or not, clearly believes that it would be undesirable. Indeed, he has erased the international border in the American Southwest and watched with apparent satisfaction as almost anyone who wished to enter this country, no doubt including drug smugglers and human traffickers, international criminals, and terrorists, crossed over from Mexico into the United States. He is just the man, therefore, in the opinion of liberals to preside over (if that is the appropriate term) the indiscriminate reception of hundreds of thousands or millions of immigrants from Afghanistan into the United States, 95 percent of them perhaps unscreened by federal officials.
Welcome Talibanis all! The intrepid United States Army will meet and defeat you on home ground, whether the deserts of Arizona and Utah, the rainforests of the Northwest, or the High Plains of Wyoming. Or not—just so you free your women and girls from servitude and exploitation, and leave ours alone.
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