The American Epoch of Failure
16th August 2021
For 20 years America built a Potemkin village and called it Afghanistan. Now this cardboard democracy has been trampled down in a matter of days by the Taliban. The speed and comprehensiveness of the rout cannot be explained by Joe Biden’s blunders. The war has drawn to a humiliating end not because of a weak president’s missteps in the final weeks but because the entire project was misconceived. Afghanistan was not ready for democracy and trillions of dollars in American aid could not even begin to change that fact.
And that about sums it up.