Liberalism’s Graveyard
28th August 2021
Gerard Araud, the outspoken former French ambassador recently tweeted that “Afghanistan will go back to its geopolitical destiny, being a buffer state and a marginal backwater. Any country which forgets it is doomed to fail.” That is almost certainly true; in foreign policy and military grand-strategy, geography is often destiny.
But this most recent Afghanistan war may also go down in history as one of the consequential ones. Quite possibly one of the most paradigm-shifting events this century. Because Afghanistan throws open many more questions about contemporary social science than it provides answers for. It is the graveyard not just of empires – a rhetorical cliché even a neoconservative should grasp – but rather the place and the idea of the place is the graveyard of ideologies.
Afghanistan stands as a living refutation of the Progressive dogma that people are infinitely malleable and can be lathed into whatever sort of Model Citizen one wants merely by applying money and propaganda.