(FreedomBeacon.com)- Ten years ago, then-Congressman Ron Paul delivered a speech on the House floor urging the US to leave Afghanistan, arguing that if the US did not leave by the end of 2011, “we’ll be there for another decade.”
Paul argued that the Soviet Union fell in large part because it attempted to occupy Afghanistan. He said that the US cannot change Afghanistan, and even if we could, we do not have the moral or constitutional authority to do it.
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Ron Paul was right.
America’s mission-creep in Afghanistan, its attempt to impose American values and a central government on a country full of disparate tribes was destined to fail. In the end, the only thing keeping Afghanistan’s US-imposed civilian government in place was the presence of US forces.
The longer we stayed, the more dependent Afghanistan became on the US presence.
In short, the United States set up a façade of Western governance in a region that could not sustain such a system without us.
This is why the Taliban had no problem sweeping across the region and overtaking the country. There was no civilian government or military apart from the US. President Biden’s repeated assurances that the Afghan government and its military forces were up to the task of stopping the Taliban were based on pure fantasy.
Ron Paul knew that a decade ago.
Joe Biden, who has been a part of the DC establishment since Richard Nixon was president, did not.
In 2019 the Washington Post published the Afghanistan Papers – eighteen years of documents that told the truth about America’s failures in Afghanistan and the lies that were told to the American people to maintain a US presence in that backward country.
The failure of Afghanistan did not begin with Joe Biden’s disastrous handling of the withdrawal. The Afghanistan Papers revealed that the failure was baked in from the beginning.
It was inevitable that the US-imposed civilian government would crumble once the US left. It was also inevitable that the Taliban would retake the country.
Biden based his decisions on a fantasy – that the fragile, unstable system America created would survive once America was no longer there to prop it up.
