'Those who guide this people mislead them': America, Afghanistan and the meaninglessness of forever war
A word from Isaiah 9, which warns of the day when there are no adults at the table.
Isaiah 9:16: “Those who guide this people mislead them, and those who are guided are led astray.”
America has withdrawn from the Afghanistan War.
That sentence may be the closest to an admission that it was a war we were in all these 20 years.
And if not for a one-term president, the forever war would’ve gone on as planned. Forever.
If it were a war America was fighting in Afghanistan, there would not still be a Taliban. Those people would not still exist.
If it wasn’t a war, what was it? Whatever we were doing there, why was it worth doing halfway?
Those who guided our military misled them. And those who sacrificed their lives to defend their country were led astray.
We did not recognize the problem in Afghanistan because we live our own versions of it.
We eat fake food that does not fill us up.
We half-listen during conversations, always one eye on our phones. When we sit with the people who texted us, we still look at our phones. The contentment of a millisecond is always a push alert away.
We get so much fake dopamine that, hey, who has the time chase the real stuff?
Our friendships, our sexual relationships, our “beliefs” are all fake, all liable to be deplatformed if some IT guy in San Francisco flips a switch.
We don’t commit to anything beyond automatic rebilling. A 20-year situationship, renewed monthly. Not until it’s too late, until the damage is irreversible, do we realize we’re in trouble.