Afghanistan proves the failure of US nation building

 By Steve Otto

As US troops pull out of Afghanistan we can instantly see the failure of US nation building policies. Whether president Joe Biden expected it or not, the US puppet regime is quickly falling to the Taliban. The Taliban are quickly taking over the country.

The Taliban are not popular with much of anyone outside of Afghanistan or outside of the US. They are not favored by the left here in the US or in Afghanistan. The US tried to revive earlier factions that ran Afghanistan, hoping they could build popular support for them and their foreign occupiers. Liberal Democrats here in the US like to point out that the Taliban have a terrible human rights record when it comes to women. It is true that many women were kept out of the education system under the Taliban. The west made a hero of Malala Yousafzai, a young woman who stood up to the Taliban. She was a hero. She did stand up to a repressive political force. But any one who is made a hero by US imperialism is doomed to failure in their own country.  

This reminds me of the collapse of the Khmer Rouge when the Vietnamese invaded. All the people I talked to had to admit that there was no popular support for the government run by Pol Pot when it fell so quickly.

Just as in South Vietnam we see that this government has also lost any support it may have had from the Afghanistan people. Such nation building was doomed to failure. That is especially true in a country that has been continually invaded by one superpower after the other.

Now —finally  after all these years, we can finally realize that national sovereignty is not something we can artificially create. People have to develop their own systems of government. Afghanistan has proven that.