The Left Abandoned Afghan Women - The Atlantic - 0 views
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Get the hell out has, of course, been the liberal position for two decades, until about 72 hours ago, when Democrats suddenly became so concerned about the fate of Afghanistan, you’d think they were at a Dick Cheney revival meeting.
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We did in Afghanistan what we always do when we have lots of troops, an apocalyptic amount of firepower, and no brief on what to do with them. We killed a lot of people, destroyed a lot of things, and lost many of our own young women and men.
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Of course everyone behind this grotesque bit of fiction knows what bringing the Taliban to justice would require: the round-the-clock presence of a massive military power.
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But when nearly 3,000 of your countrymen and women are blown to bits on an ordinary Tuesday morning, you do not take kindly to the nation that welcomed the killers.
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That argument has always failed to move many critics of the war. But even so, it’s remarkable how quickly the left took up the cold calculus of realpolitik. How quickly it forgot its love for Malala,
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You can call for American-troop withdrawal for 20 years, and you won’t be politically or strategically wrong. But you need to be ready to take it on the chin when you get what you ask for and the inevitable happens: girls being forced into child marriage and forbidden to go to school or to leave the house without a male relative.
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But while our soldiers were in that country, America spent nearly $790 million supporting the health, education, and well-being of Afghan women and girls. Female life expectancy rose from 58 years in 2002 to 66 years in 2018. Leave American troops idle long enough, and before you know it, they’re building schools and protecting women. We found an actual patriarchy in Afghanistan, and with nothing else to do, we started smashing it down.
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Contra The Nation, it’s hard to believe that Afghan women “won” gains in human rights considering how quickly those gains are sure now to be revoked. The United States military made it possible for those women to experience a measure of freedom. Without us, that’s over.
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The reason—aside from honor, and quagmires, and the tender mercies of Dick Cheney—that we stayed in Afghanistan so long and at such great expense with nothing to show for it except the safety of that “small sliver” of women and girls is that, for all of America’s sins, our default position is freedom. For all of our sins, we are a great country.
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For a bewildering two decades we had the political will and a large-enough volunteer military to spend our blood and treasure protecting the human rights of some of the most powerless people on Earth: girls.