While Isis Rampages Through Iraq, Afghanistan Continues to Crumble

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While this past week has seen the newsfeeds swamped with stories of America’s Ebola outbreak, it’s easy to lose sight of the global picture. The virus just happens to be the most visible and alarming story to be reported. All across the planet though, there are nations that are being hollowed out by economic collapse and war, and the fabric that holds this world together is being frayed at every corner.

One story that has been impossible for the news to completely ignore, is the devastation ISIS is inflicting against Iraq and Syria. As we speak, a dog eat dog fight for the city of Kobani is being fought between ISIS and the Syrian Kurds (I think we’ve armed both of them at some point), while an Iraqi base has been abandoned near the town of Hit. 180,000 people have fled the fighting, many of them heading towards the city Ramadi, which ISIS can now attack from two sides. That city is expected to fall in the weeks ahead.

There should be no doubt that the Iraq War was a total failure, and any claim that we were there to build a democracy, is a complete farce. Not only did we fail to rebuild their infrastructure and economy, but we failed to leave them with a competent military that could have fought off the likes of ISIS. We systematically wrecked their nation at every level, and left them to the dogs. It should be clear to all, that a free nation, or even a barely functional nation, cannot be built on the shoulders of a foreign invasion.

So since it’s established that our nation’s attempt at Americanizing Iraq has been a complete waste of time, money, and lives, how is our other nation building experiment coming along?

KABUL (Reuters) – A suicide car bomber rammed a foreign convoy along a major road out of Afghanistan’s capital Kabul early on Monday, killing at least one person, authorities said.

Taliban insurgents claimed responsibility for the attack on the Jalalabad Road, a main thoroughfare with a U.S. military base and a housing compound for U.N. and other international contractors and aid workers.

That’s not all. Within the same day, another Taliban attack annihilated a convoy of nearly two dozen Afghani soldiers and police.

At least 22 members of the Afghan National Security Forces have been killed in a Taliban ambush and seven others kidnapped by the armed group in a mountainous region in northern Afghanistan, an official has said.

Taliban fighters attacked a convoy carrying Afghan security forces on Monday,killing 22 soldiers and police, kidnapping seven, and injuring eight others.

The attack happened in the mountainous Laghman Valley in Sar-e-Pul province, some 340km northwest of Kabul, as security officers travelled to reinforce colleagues in another district.

“They were ambushed as they were going from Laghman area to Alaf Safid. Twenty-two police were martyred, eight wounded and seven were taken captive,”Governor Abdul Jabar Haqbeen told the AFP news agency.

If 22 American soldiers were killed and 7 captured by the Taliban, you probably wouldn’t hear very much about Ebola that day. It would be completely unprecedented. The Taliban has never been able to inflict those kinds of casualties against American forces, especially not with ambushes and small arms fire. The news cycle wouldn’t let you hear the end of it for months.

So why hasn’t this story been thoroughly dissected and plastered across every news channel and website? Because it’s uneventful. Because, Afghani troops being slaughtered by the Taliban isn’t unusual. Because they either lack the training, equipment, or air support (or all of the above) to properly suppress the Taliban, their deaths are no longer surprising.

Much like Iraq, we’ve failed to leave them with a functional government, infrastructure, or military. If the American military couldn’t destroy the Taliban with all of its missiles, drones, and helicopters, then how could the people they trained, do it without the high tech weapons? They’re not going to have any of those advantages after we pull out. And if the Taliban can still bomb Kabul on a whim, then it’ll be looking a lot like Baghdad in no time.

The best we as Americans can do, is learn from this. We failed to learn the folly of nation building after Vietnam. In 10 or 20 years (if not sooner) when some dimwitted politician tries to push for another nation building crusade, let’s not forget what happened here. Let’s not forget the soldiers we lost, the civilians who were butchered, and the new threats our wars have spawned.

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