My heart definitely breaks for Afghanistan. They're in a terrible situation and we haven't helped things. We made countless mistakes. We made a mistake with how we exited. I still struggle with seeing an alternative to staying there forever and continuing to lose lives and money. We sunk over 2 trillion dollars into the war in Afghanistan. We stayed for 20+ years. We have an infrastructure at home that is falling apart. Our healthcare system is buckling. If the every country's healthcare system were put into the Olympics, I just read the other week that the U.S. wouldn't even qualify to compete. Our healthcare system is that far behind the rest of the 1st world.
The war in Afghanistan is the definition of the
Sunk Cost Fallacy.
Besides staying there forever, I really don't get what we could've done. At any point upon exiting, the Taliban would've taken over. I think it's possible we could've created a military force that was willing to fight the Taliban, but it would've taken at least 1-2 more generations. This is a system where the Taliban would torture and murder the families of those willing to stand up to them. It's not easy to get a populace like that to fight against that level of barbarism. And colonialism isn't the only reason why Afghanistan is a mess.
Also, Afghanistan is uniquely difficult to prevent outside forces from coming in through other countries to assist the Taliban. If the U.S. hadn't been separated from Britain by the Atlantic Ocean, we probably would not have been able to maintain our independence.
I feel so bad for these people, and I hate how we left, but I think it's time we spend the Afghanistan War resources here at home.
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