One massive reason Afghanistan failed is cultural. It doesn’t matter how many bad men you stop, if you don’t raise up good men in their place. Bad men will always be there, and good men have to be there to resist them or your cause will fail.
Now, I don’t mean to be placing the burden of blame or responsibility on men specifically, as a group. But as a structural fact, in this area, it does lie on them. There is a burden of responsibility. And it can be discharged negatively or positively. Men have strength, they have aggression. They have a willingness to fight and a willingness to die. And part of their burden in life is learning what to do with it. And if you’re thinking that what we should really do is eradicate it or suppress it, that is a genocidal thought.
Men are meant to exist. And they are meant to be men. And you can’t eliminate them chemically or psychologically or sociologically castrate them out of being men. That’s half the species, that’s half of what it means to be human. You don’t get to decide that it doesn’t need to exist.
So men are a problem. Partly because men are highly variable and unstable. They occupy the highest positions on the distribution of outcomes: social, economic, genetic, physical, and they also occupy the lowest. They are both the most and least capable and the best and worst off. And there are good reasons for why they are this way, and they’re so deeply embedded in our bio-genetic natures and in the depths of time itself, in the structure of life and its reponse to reality itself, that they aren’t easily seperated from the very nature of our species and of life itself.
So men are a problem, and they are a problem with two solutions. The first solution is women. Women regulate men, actively, during their lives. Especially when they are in intimate, dynamic, interactive relationships with them. Women make demands on them, they set conditions, they share concerns, they offer counter-perspectives. But Afghan culture limited the effectiveness of this positive influence, in many ways. And solving that problem was beyond the scope or powers of the American military presence.
Women also engage in sexual selection, which has a massive effect. Men want to please and impress and be found acceptable and admirable by women. They want to be chosen. And they will practically kill themselves to get noticed. And after having been noticed, they will kill themselves to protect what they have secured (their mates and children and society). And that leads us to the second solution for the problem of dangerous bad men: dangerous good men.
Afghanistan failed because the good men were never created to resist the bad, to protect and lay down their lives for their wives and children. Someone had to do that job. Someone had to wield strength in the service of love. And America made the mistake of thinking that they had that, in the Afghan army. Years of training, billions of dollars. But they never reached the culture. They never created a new generation of men as passionate to defend their freedom and their homes as other men were to take it. And so Afghanistan fell the moment America left. The army just stood down. They collapsed. They didn’t even fight. The Taliban conquered the country in days. And people were left wonder what happened and why?
Humanity is more than mere political structure, more than training and equipment. When the time comes and the enerlmy is at the door what will give you the strength to stand and fight, to die? You have to have a cause, a meaning, something that your heart pursues more strongly than it pursues the continuation of your own breath. America didn’t have the ability to give that to the Afghan people. Afghanistan is hardly even a country, more a collection of divided and feuding tribal interests. What soldier is going to die for the idea of a country they hardly even believe in? You can’t simply manufacture that in a moment, or even a decade, not even with billions of dollars at your disposal. All the economic and technologicsl capital in the world doesn’t mean anything without the human capital to make use of them.
Napoleon once said that “In war, morale forces are to physical as three to one”. And the German tactician Foertsch said that, “The final word regarding victory and defeat rests not on arms and equipment, nor the way in which they are used, nor even on the principles of strategy and tactics, but on the morale of the troops.” For all the training and equipment we were able to give the Afghans, we couldn’t give them this one thing.
Making Nobody Happy 