it is not only the failure of B, it is the failure, of the entire military business establishment of the last thirty years, it is the moral and spiritual failure of the whole West … reading Oswald Spengler would be good for many
An answer to the [P]rince
Rarely has we seen anything more stiff, patched up, badly done than this cowardly retreat, more vain, filthy, and indeed interested in this betrayal. Let the darkness rise again. The subsequent shame is already appearing, erasing the Afghans from memory, the drawer is prepared to store them next to the Vietnamese, Cambodians, Somalis, Kurds and Iraqis.
In Kabul our world, exported by force, provisional, worm-eaten, collapsed in a few hours.
We have not even tried, to hide the shame of defeat, to reach out to those who remained there, so there will be no airlift, in the hope that they would not reject it with too much disgust: that you did so that we would be less unhappy?
They will ask us: what have you done to make us live in peace? In another place in the world where we lose other wars, the Sahel, an old man with the vigorous and calm air of a menhir, to whom you would give ten centuries, who has the youth and serenity of a mountain, said to me with a sigh: you Westerners you have no friends, you only have interests. Yeah: the Afghans would agree with him now.
Who after this so explicit betrayal will still believe our words, who will think that our announcements of democracy, tolerance, our magnificent word rights, are nothing but dust if it does not coincide with our interests? Where will we find allies since we are only looking for temporary caudataries and accomplices?
The similarities between Kabul and Saigon, between the escape from Vietnam and that from Afghanistan are deafening: the negotiation with the Archenemy up to a minute earlier unpronounceable, the withdrawal, the local allies left alone with stammering and corrupt satraps, with crumbling armies and accustomed to acting as extras, regimes that dissolve, presidents who flee, uniforms and weapons thrown away, the helicopters, always theirs, who take away ours and, if there is room, even some of them.
The same question: why do theirs fight and ours don't? Is it only fifty years later the replica of the military stupidity of some new Westmoreland slicker? No. It is a method.