Archives for August 2017

Nearly one month after President Trump’s ambiguous and perfunctory ban of transgender men and women from the military (which he announced without further elaboration on Twitter), the White House has provided an update on his decree. We still know not when, nor even if, it will ultimately be put on the books and codified into law, but at least for now it’s become a renewed topic of consideration. Most likely, the ban will be enforced. Until it becomes so officially, transgender men and women attempting to join the military will be barred. They’ll be proscribed from enlisting and fighting and defending our nation overseas.

In its essence, this ban will be a return to the status quo ante, whereby transgender or transitioning civilians were denied open enlistment in every branch of the armed forces. This was the accepted position before 2016 and henceforth, so shall it be. It wasn’t until President Obama’s final year in office, when the topic of transgender rights had evolved into the socially, culturally, and politically combustible issue that it is today, that in the military, the controversy was addressed. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, in the last leg of Obama’s tenure, announced that transgender individuals would be allowed to serve openly in the American military. They could do so for the first time without fear of repercussion, ostracism, humiliation, or persecution.

By many Democrats, Republicans, Independents, and Libertarians—so long as they shared in being socially liberal—this measure was seen as a great success. It was seen optimistically as a step forward. At the time, Carter summed up the move best by highlighting its moral propriety as well as—on a note more relevant to the armed forces that he oversaw at the time—its efficacy. He called it “the right thing to do for our people and for the force”. He went on to say that the military “can’t allow barriers unrelated to a person’s qualifications to prevent us from recruiting and retaining those who can best accomplish the mission”. The martial spirit is indiscriminate and Obama and Carter indented to find it wherever it might hide.

Even if it’s to be found in a transgender American citizen. But problems can and potentially do arise when in these citizens that spirit is found. Many questions regarding the integration of transgender troops into a historically cis-gender association have been raised. Requiring answers, those questions are just beginning to be explored. This is precisely what General James Mattis is bent on doing. Mattis, who now succeeds Carter as Secretary of Defense, is in the process of analyzing, as objectively as possible, the influence of transgender troops on things like battlefield cohesion, combat readiness, physical endurance, and an arduous inclination toward war.

Mattis hasn’t yet released the findings of his analysis, but when he does, they’re likely to be reverberative, telling, and demonstrative of this White House’s bias. They’re likely to inform exactly how and for what legitimate reasons this administration is to pursue its agenda on proscribing transgender people from joining the military. And likely, they would have credibly done these things, had not President Trump jumped the gun.

Before Mattis had the chance to complete this philosophically broad and sociologically demanding analysis, the President announced his ban. That said, it won’t become fully implemented until Mattis and the Departments of Homeland Security and Defense publish their findings. At this point, though, the data will be nothing more than superfluous, as the decision seems already to have been made. It’s just a matter of putting it into place, but when exactly that will be is unclear. The transgender troops will simply have to wait to learn their collective and imperiled fait sine die.

Up till and including now, the president’s proposed ban hasn’t been received favorably by the public. A majority believes that transgender servicemen ought to be able to serve in the military with every cis-gender privilege and right. On this, socially progressive Americans on either side of the aisle tend to agree. Thus has spawned the lawsuit being currently heard in federal court. On Monday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit, Stone v. Trump in a district court in Maryland. The plaintiff, Petty Naval Officer Brock Stone, who is himself a transgender serviceman with eleven years of military service, lends his name to what might prove in time to be a memorable case. Along with Stone, four other transgender servicemen and one servicewoman are also involved as plaintiffs in the case. The ACLU organized this case immediately after the president’s original tweet.

Two additional, independent suits are also being charged against President Trump and his military commanders. The National Center for Lesbian Rights and the GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders have teamed up with hopes of vitiating Trump’s proposed ban, as have Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN—both of which represent many clients in civil rights cases.

The ACLU, in its scathing thirty-nine-page lawsuit, is alleging the administration of having violated the “constitutional guarantees of equal protection and substantive due process” enumerated in the Fourteenth and Fifth Amendments. It goes on to claim that in 2016, the Pentagon effectively concluded—in no small part because of the commissioned RAND Corporation’s analysis and findings—that there was “no basis for the military to exclude (transgender) men and women from openly serving their country”. The ACLU lawyers are further contending that Trump’s “actual motivations (for banning transgender servicemen) are purely political” and that these motivations “reflect a desire to accommodate legislators and advisers who bear animus and moral disapproval toward men and women who are transgender”.

Exactly how far these lawsuits go will be have to be seen in time. One needn’t look far, though, to see in a glimpse the developing struggle festering in this situation. The president is, at the end of the day, the Commander-in-Chief of the military. It is his ex officio right to determine precisely how the armed forces are organized and run. This is up to his better judgment or his caprice. Regardless of the fact that he hasn’t even a paucity of knowledge when it comes to military science and the art of war, he is the ultimate military authority to whom all American generals must turn; not to do so would be subservient, mutinous, and reasonably tantamount to treason. The case for civil rights might be strong, but the case for military hierarchy might be stronger.

In his battle for Charlottesville, the president’s moral lance has been broken. Irreparably, it’s been splintered in two. No longer does he wield any real moral authority over the American conscience, nor does he sit as the nation’s coxswain as it encounters these and future truculent waters. That seat was relinquished and won’t soon be ascertained. He lost it after favorably comparing the white supremacists with the leftist protestors who clashed last weekend at the University of Virginia. Ultimately, it was a member of the former who drove his car into a crowded street and murdered a young woman representative of the latter. The blame that warranted placement was supposedly clear. Quite obvious to all was that there was no moral equivalency in the aftermath of that which had transpired. There was merely right and wrong, clarified—if needed it be—by life and death.

Yet, even so, most of the cabinet members around President Trump have been atypically quiet in their responses to the Charlottesville event in general and to Trump’s comments in particular. A few Republicans from outside of the administration did chastise the president’s take on the matter. Among them were Senators Rubio and McCain, both practiced in the art of justifiably criticizing President Trump. Most other Republicans, though, were somewhat mute, or at least veiled in their anger. While Rubio and McCain explicitly denounced the president’s moral lapse, other Republicans (likely fearing reprisals from constituents at the voting booths) were more suggestive, though less clear in their denunciations. They avoided at all costs mentioning the president by name as they condemned the very racism that he condoned.

The first member of the Trump administration to candidly vent his frustrations about the president’s response was Gary Cohn. In an interview circulated by the Financial Times on Friday afternoon, Cohn laid bare his thoughts on the subject. In Cohn’s words, one senses immediately the tensions of a troubled man. He discussed at length the personal, professional, and ethical quagmire within which he now finds himself. He frankly admitted that, at the urging of his family and friends, he’s been considering resigning because of this. He explained that he had “come under enormous pressure both to resign and to remain” as the Chief Economic Advisor to Trump and to the nation that very much needs his good work. “As a patriotic American”, Cohn continued to say, “I am reluctant to leave my post because I feel a duty to fulfill my commitment to work on behalf of the American people”. Notwithstanding that fact, he explained that he was “distressed over the events of the last two weeks”.

Cohn is a unique and vital character in this administration. He’s a Jew born of Cleveland, and a Democrat reared of New York. It’s that first attribution, that of his being a Jew, that made Trump’s attempt to equate neo-Nazis with liberal protestors especially painful for Cohn. Mind you, those same white supremacists were heard chanting “Jews will not replace us” the night before the attack. Responding to those neo-Nazi demonstrators, those vile men and women spending their days reading Chamberlain and Gobineau, listening to Wagner, and philosophizing with Heidegger and Nietzsche, Cohn assured them that they wouldn’t “cause this Jew to leave his job” and that he wouldn’t so easily nor willingly be replaced.

Cohn then shifted his attention from reprimanding the white-supremacists to reprimanding the administration. Cohn said that the administration, by which he meant President Trump, “must do better to consistently and unequivocally condemn these groups”. He didn’t point to Trump explicitly, and that’s something that I can’t help but bemoan, but Cohn’s denunciation of the White House’s response to Charlottesville was the strongest of its kind.

Yet his denunciation of Trump wasn’t merely a gossamer wing flapping in the breeze. Cohn intended to act on his moral outrage. It wasn’t confided to the Financial Times, but those whose knowledge of the situation is most intimate have said that Cohn had actually planned to quit. After Trump’s remarks on Charlottesville, he’d gone so far as to pen a resignation letter. He was preparing to leave on his own terms one of the most important jobs in America. It’s hard to overstate the courage this required, or to underscore the simple and admirable pride he displayed.

As stated, though, Cohn was rather alone in displaying these virtues. One might’ve expected Steve Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury and former colleague of Cohn’s at Goldman Sachs, to have responded in a manner similar to the way in which Cohn did. After all, he too is Jewish and was standing—as was Cohn—directly beside the president when he made his infamous “fine people” on both sides remark. Doubtless, Mnuchin heard and absorbed Trump’s comment just the same. However, perhaps lacking in the same quantity of Semitic solidarity, Mnuchin was unmoved. He opted instead to defend President Trump. Quite at odds with what President Trump had only just expressed, Mnuchin claimed that “in no way” does President Trump believe that “neo-Nazis who endorse violence are equivalent to groups that demonstrate in peaceful and lawful ways”. He continued by saying that the media was contorting that which Trump had explicitly said.

As there was on Cohn, there was external pressure on Mnuchin to resign in the wake of Trump’s remarks. He was urged to do so by over three hundred former Yale University classmates. His 1985 university cohort called upon him as a “friend, classmate, and as a fellow American” to resign from his position as Secretary of the Treasury “in protest of President Trump’s support of Nazism and white supremacy.” Wielding the guilt card, they added that “We (your classmates) know you are better than this, and we are counting on you to do the right thing”. They iterated, as if it needed to be said once more, that “(President Trump) has declared himself a sympathizer with groups whose values are antithetical to those values we consider fundamental to our sacred honor as Americans, as men and women of Yale, and as decent human beings”.

It was a strong pitch, but Mnuchin was resolute. In commenting on the open letter, he redoubled his intent to stay in the administration and continue unperturbed with his work.

These disparate responses from Cohn and from Mnuchin were of much interest to the media because they’re the White House’s two most conspicuous Jews. But there was room enough for another top-tier administration official to make his position on the matter clear. Rex Tillerson, the former ExxonMobil executive and current Secretary of State, was pressed on the topic by Fox News’s Chris Wallace. On his Sunday morning talk show, Wallace asked if America’s values (and their reception abroad) had been in any way compromised or at the very least complicated because of Trump’s Charlottesville remarks. Initially and rather adroitly, Tillerson avoided talking about the president specifically. The probing Matthews, though, proceeded to ask if it was or was not “harder to push American values around the world when some foreign leaders question the president’s values”. It was a pointed question, and it elicited a telling response. Tillerson said that America’s values are expressed to the international community “from the State Department” and that this message has “never changed”. Implicit in this statement is that the values are not expressed from the White House—or at least that they aren’t at this time. Wallace, the agile interlocutor that he is, pressed Tillerson further. He more directly asked the Secretary of State whether or not the president’s personal values, forgetting for the nonce American values, were now in question overseas. With staggering pith, Tillerson responded by saying that, indeed, the “president speaks for himself”.

Such a statement is unprecedented. In but a few words, the Secretary of State—who is, one might add, supposed to work hand-in-glove with the president in representing his and nation’s interests overseas—drew a line between him and Trump. Tillerson made clear that Trump’s values are not those same ones to which he and probably millions of other Americans adheres. While we’re traditionally led to believe that the president’s values coincide with and magnify our own, Tillerson made it known that at least in his estimation, they don’t. His values are completely distinct or completely absent. It’s good to know that those of some of the braver members of this administration, men like Tillerson and Cohn, aren’t absent as well.

In 1727, Benjamin Franklin—aged at the time twenty-one and finding his niche in a newly adopted city—created a club. He was youthful, ambitious, and above all else, eminently industrious, but he wasn’t yet the quintessential polymath we exalt today. He hadn’t yet captured lightening on his rod, nor the attention of nearly every serious scientist abroad (including James Watt, who solicited Franklin’s advice for his steam engine).

He was decades away from boarding a ship and, as a lay oceanographer, discovering the warmed Floridian waters known to us today as the Gulf Stream. Bifocals were an ingenious spectacle he would construct in good time. The fire departments and libraries weren’t yet passing thoughts. The glass harmonica, odometer, and his namesake stove also awaited their day.

Before any of these gadgets, insights, and paradigms came to be, Franklin had his club. He named it the Junto, which today is a relatively recondite term. In Franklin’s time, however, a “junto” was well-known to be a political faction or group sharing common interests. Franklin named his newfound club the Junto to capture the ideal he wished to realize. He recruited and gathered Philadelphia’s finest men; they were an eclectic hodgepodge from each corner of society.

Franklin’s earliest members included cobblers, land surveyors, mathematicians, printers, and politicians. Their professions varied, but between them was an inescapable link. All were stimulated beyond repression by an insatiable inquisitiveness and a lust for learning. It was a club of “mutual improvement”, whose goal was not only to be inclusive, but to be ameliorative. They tasked one another with presenting topical questions and pursuing their ends. The original twelve members discussed and wrote on “any subject he pleased”, whether it be morality, politics, ethics, or natural philosophy.

The spark was in one another’s company, the fire in their inquiry, and the light shone through their discoveries.

Revering Franklin as I do, I took this as a chance to capture his Junto’s essence. I chose the name “The Juntoo” in homage to his quaint, pre-Revolutionary club. The terminal “o” neatly pegged at the Juntoo’s end brings with it a hope that we can continue what Franklin began. Just like Franklin, this site seeks always to favor eclecticism over dogmatism, disinterested inquiry over constrained ideology, and ideas that are pointed, as opposed to those that are merely sharp. I hope you’ll enjoy being part of this club.

It’s said that many men can get along just fine without truth, but that none is so strong as to do without illusions. Our inclination toward that which is illusory, if we are to take seriously the French sociologist Gustave le Bon’s acute insight into the nature of man, is heavy and pre-ordained. As such, we’re chained to those things that conveniently deceive us. We’re shackled and subdued to thinking wishful thoughts. We’re made to be, as another Frenchman Rousseau might’ve said, happy slaves, fettered not by material society in this instance, but by our imaginations within. Even in knowing this, we aren’t strong enough to break free. Knowledge in all other cases is power, but on this occasion, it isn’t potent enough. We haven’t the muscle for verity, nor the tolerance for sobriety. And as our strength isn’t sufficiently strong to do away with this illusory yoke, our trunks bend under its weight. Our brows sweat, our knees quiver, our ankles collapse, and we give in.

That’s not to say, though, that we shouldn’t at the very least put up a fight. Reality is too precious—it’s something for which we must always strive. But the task isn’t easy, especially when you recognize that illusions are not only within you, but around you in every place. Wherever there is a person, there is an illusion, and the grander the person, the larger the illusion.

President Trump is, at the very least in his own calculation, the grandest person. On that point, many will quibble, but what is demonstrably true is that his illusions are indeed the largest amongst mankind. They simply exist in a category of their own. Their size is incommensurate and their scope unparalleled. And as they are the largest, they are—by nature of his position as the world’s most powerful man—the most consequential and possibly the most dangerous.

One could, with agility and with ease, jump to the claim that the president is a liar. As many have, one could charge him with mendacity and deceit. And you might not be wrong to do so, but I think he’s really something different from a willing and habituated liar. He does get along just fine without truth, this much is sure, but he’s absolutely submerged in illusion. It’s on this point we can distinguish Trump from other politicians, who have an equal propensity to tergiversate and to veil their terms, but as a means to an end and not and end in and of itself. One gets the sense that when other politicians mislead the public audience, they do so knowing full well their maneuvers and their ultimate deceit. For them, it becomes a matter of bad faith.

President Trump’s illusions, on the contrary, are the ends. He knows not where reality finishes and where hyperbole begins. His speech in Arizona on Tuesday night exemplified this odd and disquieting idiosyncrasy of his. It was another rambunctious campaign-style event that brought together in the Phoenix Convention Center his most ardent and devoted fans. The president began his speech with prepared remarks from the teleprompter. He spoke of love and of unity and of camaraderie. It was supposed to be a mollifying message, an olive branch to heal wounds, but it wasn’t authentically Trump. You can always tell immediately when it isn’t, for it’s an unnatural oratorical skill for him to stay faithful to the prompter.

After these scripted, prefatory remarks, the illusions welled up and burst from his seams. He proceeded to re-litigate his response to the Charlottesville attack and at that moment. In order to show the audience just “how damned dishonest” the media had been in its coverage of his response to the event, Trump read aloud his remarks that he’d made from New Jersey immediately after the Charlottesville tragedy on August 12. Wanting not to “bore” everyone with his unprompted divagation back to Charlottesville and to his ugly response, Trump recited his statement, but not in its entirety. Carefully, he omitted the final few words that were the most invidious.

He omitted the three words “on many sides”, which were the precise three words that have in the subsequent weeks caused such controversy—and rightly so. He told the crowd that what he was saying there before them was verbatim and the historical truth, but this is only to be believed if one is just as equally imbued with illusions as he. It appears, though, that they were. They rejoiced and cheered upon hearing Trump set the record straight. Actually, though, he simply set it anew and rigged it to fit his illusory specifications. Pundits were quick to point out the manipulation of the truth. MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell interrupted the live event in medias res to accuse the president of lying. CNN’s Don Lemon was a bit more patient, waiting as he did until Trump’s peroration to go live and inveigh against the president’s perfidy.

While both Lemon and O’Donnell were completely justified in assailing the president for his dishonesty, it’s not that which is my main concern. As you can guess, what concerns me more at this point is not the president’s lying, but inextricable existence in an illusory world. We know that illusions are strong, resilient, and obdurate. They’re not easily overcome, if they are to be overcome at all. I’m worried about them become contagious. I fear that these illusions might infect like a virus does its host millions of gullible Americans, who will soon be living credulously in a world of illusion. They might become communicable, spreading from one person to the next. They’ve found receptive and vulnerable crowds eager to breathe in their disease.

Afghanistan’s instability has been and will continue to be a disease that plagues the Middle Eastern state. It’s an ailment that’s both ancient and ineradicable, debilitating and chronic. For centuries, no prevailing force—from within its borders nor from without—has been able to successfully influence or improve the nation. Afghanistan, in this way, is distinct in having successfully thwarted all efforts of the imperialist and the meliorist alike to its own detriment. The former sought in Afghanistan land, commodities, trading routes, and labor; the latter wanted only an elevation of morals, ethics, and deeds. Neither have acquired those slippery things, tangible in one case and ethereal in the other, that they so laboriously sought.

The Persians and Mongols concerned themselves not with cultivating and edifying the spirit of Afghanistan, but with subjugating it. At one time or another, one or the other held Afghanistan, but they couldn’t maintain their grips. Instead, each decided to cut its losses and move on. The voluptuous Persians pursued more tractable interests in the Middle East, while those virile Mongols reverted to plundering the north.

Cleaved of influence from the East, Great Britain next made a go at Afghanistan. The Britons attempted, futilely, as ultimately their efforts proved, to make the Afghan region a protectorate of the crown. They saw in Afghanistan not only a tributary state, one with a modest potential to be profitable in the likeness of an India or Rhodesia, but an important buffer between her interests and Russia. The Romanovs maintained an enduringly strong influence over South and Central Asia for years. This was due in part to the fact that Russia thought very little of meddling in the Asian religion at that time (as it is in this)—Islam. Aside from its having been religiously tolerant, Russia also had an interest in establishing its presence along the southern coast, where it would have renewed access to international trade. It’s not as though Russia was itself a burgeoning economy (it persisted until the 1860s to be a mostly feudal state), but a stronger presence on the beaches of the Arabian Sea certainly couldn’t hurt. With its eyes settled on the south, Russia began maneuvering through Kazakhstan, itself uncomfortably close to British India.

Understandably, this disquieted the British Empire. Frightened at the prospect of Russia being so near, it hastened to annex more territory and ensure its Asian market. The British wanted above all to secure its beloved “jewel in the crown”, that is, India, and Afghanistan was the perfect cushion to do the trick.

Such, the “Great Game” between Britain and Russia ensued. There was no winner, nor was there an obvious loser. Of course, in saying so flippantly there was no loser, one necessarily ignores the plight of Afghanistan in a time of strife and war and the tumult through which its indigenous people lived. Resiliently and quite importunately, if you were to ask a British statesman of the day, the Afghans didn’t take to their colonizers warmly. They bristled violently against what had become an imposed Anglican fate. Having no recourse nor choice in the matter, they responded as any imperiled and militant population would. Out, then, broke the Anglo-Afghan Wars, which constituted all of three battles over the span of fifty years. They were fought from the mid-nineteenth century throughout the end of First World War. Thus, the “Great Game” transitioned into and lasted longer than did the “Great War”.

In time, after the Treaty of Versailles and after the British crown decided to turn its attention elsewhere (mainly toward Africa, South America, Melanesia, and Polynesia) English intrigue in the Indian subcontinent waned. Sensing its opportunity to make itself more intimately known in the Afghan region, Russia was eager to fill in this gap. Now the Soviet Union—what with Czar Nicholas II and the last vestiges of the Romanovs having been since deceased—Afghanistan found a friend in this new Bolshevik regime. Before the Anglo-Afghan Treaty (or Treaty of Rawalpindi) was even finalized, the Soviet Union jumped quickly to acknowledge Afghanistan’s sovereignty. In so doing, they established an early and amiable diplomatic relationship with the Afghans. To reciprocate the move, Afghanistan later became one of the first nations in the world to recognize the Soviet Union’s inchoate Bolshevik regime.

The Soviet and Afghan relationship was relatively amicable for greater part of the twentieth century. It wasn’t until 1979 that it was irreparably strained. It was then that the Soviet-Afghan War incited under the leadership of President Brezhnev, who would later be succeeded by that ill-fated liberal reformer Gorbachev. It came to be clear that Russia’s war for control of Afghanistan was becoming a costly and decidedly unnecessary intervention. For a decade Moscow squandered its resources, soiled its respectability, and alienated its civilian’s morale in an unpopular war. The Russians surely didn’t anticipate the local Afghans to be so patriotic and capable. What they might’ve expected, though, was for America to have an interest in the affair. The Cold War was at the time in its adulthood, and a Soviet failure in Afghanistan might just accelerate its end. Knowing this, America furtively involved herself in a sort of proxy war, whereby she armed the insurgent, anti-Russian mujahedeen who fought the Russian’s with renewed zeal. Eventually, the Russians withdrew and the Afghans—as is their wont—were victors. But for the Soviet Union, the loss in Afghanistan was more than just a military defeat; it was a bellwether for the imminent toppling of the world’s first and most sobering experiment with Marx.

Too much ink has been spilled already in discussions about America’s intervention in Afghanistan after September 11. I’m hastily assuming that this was the next seminal moment in Afghanistan’s attempt to preserve itself. Needless to say, we fared little better than did any of those old imperialists of yore. Afghanistan—be it the nineteenth, twentieth, or twenty-first century—proved just as intractable and unmanageable as ever before.

It’s because of this that we need more clarity regarding our position in Afghanistan moving forward. The man invested with providing us with this direction forward is, of course, President Trump. He attempted to do so during a speech at Fort Myer in Arlington, Virginia on Monday night. That which he said was unremarkable and stale. Save for the debased syntax, what Trump ended up saying could’ve just as easily been said by Presidents Obama or Bush. The expectation, especially amongst those perched on the isolationist and nationalist right, was that Trump would commit to an immediate withdrawal from Afghanistan America’s troops. This appeared to be his preferred choice for many years. In 2008, he supported Obama’s platform to do the same and in 2013, he tweeted incessantly about the need for a “speedy withdrawal” from the region.

While crying, “bring the boys back home” reads well on bumper stickers and campaign pins, as Obama learned in 2008 and again in 2012, the circumstances on the ground often subvert rosy campaign ads. The feasibility of such a speedy withdrawal became an impossible task. It was a political chimera—a message that was rousing but evasive. Too much of everything had been invested in the re-structuring of the Afghan state. Sixteen years, billions of dollars, and thousands of soldiers had been lost along the way. And for what, exactly? The West brought its liberal institutions and its blueprints for modern governance, but Afghanistan hadn’t acquired the taste for such heady and delectable things. The Afghan government, if one could be so generous as to call it that, was woefully ill-prepared to absorb these lessons from the West. Reluctant were they not only to learn, but to implement our ideas. Thus, a vacuum was created, and in it, the expediently Taliban inserted itself. Many local Afghans saw in this terroristic cabal a more genuine form of government than that which the West propped up. They were more sympathetic to the Taliban than they were accepting of that which they considered to be an Americanized “puppet” government.

The Taliban spells in bold letters everything antithetical to the West. Its religiosity ardent, its ideology radical and severe, the group champions Medieval ideas. Such has been the case since 1994, when the group was founded. The Taliban is founded upon the doctrine of Sunni fundamentalism. As a corollary, it believes earnestly in the rightness and piety of Sharia Law. Liberals in the West will tend to obfuscate just how popular Sharia Law is. Statistics, though, cannot be long avoided. Afghans, be they supporters of the Taliban or not, are largely supportive of this Medieval code of law. One can’t help but shutter upon learning that ninety-nine percent of Afghans support adopting Sharia Law as the codified law of the land. Remarkably, this figure, obtained from the Pew Research Center’s reputable dataset, is the highest among all queried Islamic nations (in second place on this list is Iraq, with ninety-one percent of its population in favor of the adoption of Sharia Law. Common among the two nations, of course, is that within the last twenty years, both have been on the receiving end of America’s aggression and subsequent “help”).

The odds, as they pertain to the likelihood that Afghanistan adopts in the near future Western ideals, are clearly against us. I think it’s high time to acknowledge this anti-climactic fact. In the eyes of most Afghans, America has become an oppressor and an invigilator—a bully trying to impose upon it her will. Reform there has failed and nation-building has failed, but not because America didn’t try. Afghanistan simply isn’t educable. You can’t take a nation whose population nearly to the last imam believes in Sharia Law and expect it to become modernized, humanized, and liberalized without many decades of work. The current culture (not the religion, per se, but the more radical aspects that inspire it) must be extirpated, dusted off, and beautified. Only in this way will Afghanistan ripen into what it might become.