Now that we’ve seen how this Afghanistan movie ends, the question becomes whether we were ever really prepared for the plot twists we endured.
In the fevered wake of 9/11, President George W. Bush built a coalition to fight the overall War on Terror, and with its assistance we found ridding Afghanistan of the initial Taliban government was relatively easy. Yet the second act of this play turned out to be pivotal: the one where we tried to help establish a functioning Western-style government in a nation where the Taliban had taken power by overthrowing a Soviet-backed strongman.
Indeed, in the beginning there were triumphs. After being a provisional leader in a “transitional government” for two years, the nation elected Hamid Karzai as its first democratic leader in 2004 and a decade later saw a peaceful transfer of power to now-deposed President Ashraf Ghani in 2014. Unfortunately, the Heritage Foundation’s James Jay Carafano notes that the Taliban never really went away — it simply set up shop in the rugged border region of neighboring Pakistan and waited, taking advantage of our system where policies are dictated by the winner of national elections.
Continue reading ➤ Michael Swartz: The Problem With Building a Nation — The Patriot Post
