The Lessons of Afghanistan

We have all been following the catastrophe of the American defeat in Afghanistan. American policy makers made one dreadfully wrong decision after another in their handling of the crisis. But they are missing the primary reason for their failure—their inability to understand culture. To be sure they didn’t understand Afghan culture. But the bigger problem is they do not understand their own culture.

In breathtaking fashion The Taliban in Afghanistan swept to power; trapping 20,000 Americans and tens of thousands of our Afghan allies; Our nation has been humiliated; and these events have called into question whether or not future American commitments can be trusted. This is a colossal failure on the part of the America’s leadership. But there are valuable lessons to be learned. Here are four of them:

Lesson 1: It is extremely difficult to impose your values on another culture; you don’t undo in a decade what has been building for hundreds of years. American leaders made this gigantic error because they do not understand Afghan cultural values or how they got those values. Surely this is an obvious lesson to learn. If you are going to impact another culture you have got to learn what makes that culture tick.

Lesson 2: American leaders, who failed to understand Afghan culture, fail to understand their own culture. For over 200 years western intellectuals have been trying to explain western superiority. And make no mistake; they believe the West to be superior—the West enjoys vastly higher incomes, freer political systems, scientific and technological superiority—it’s interesting that all the weaponry the Taliban uses was invented in the West.  Our elite believe in the superiority of the West—you know how I know? They want to spread our cultural values all over the world. The U.S. spent 800 million dollars in Afghanistan promoting the equality of women. In training the Afghan army we set a 10% quota for female participation. In the Afghan government we set a 27% quota for elected female representatives. We started a masters program in Gender Studies at an Afghan university. So our leaders admit our view of women is superior and should be shared by others, even imposed upon them. You could add such beliefs as human rights and equality under the law; democracy and the right to self-determination; the list goes on and on.

These are all western values that our elite consider worth imposing on others. But they have no idea how we came to possess those values ourselves. More than 200 years ago, during the so-called Enlightenment, intellectuals attributed western superiority to our greater capacity for reason; about 150 years ago Social Darwinism became prominent, arguing the West is superior because of evolution—white, northern Europeans had evolved to a higher level than the inferior races; this was called scientific racism. But Social Darwinism died at Auschwitz when we saw the horrible consequences of believing it; later you had books arguing that the cultural superiority of the West was a result of environmental advantages; but this argument is weak as well as absurd, so, now, our cultural and academic elite just assume it’s genetic—our values are inherent in human nature but they are not. All these explanations are attempts to avoid the real reason for the greatness of the West—the power of Jesus Christ. Every idea our leaders think is worth spreading around the world came from the Bible and is found only in Scripture. The followers of Christ took those ideas and spread them throughout our culture and around the world.

The only places these values exist are where the Bible has influence—in overtly Christian countries or in political and educational systems established by Christians—Japan, or Singapore.

American decision makers thought they could be imposed on the Middle East. They cannot. Not without enormous cultural preparation. Many of our ruling elite simply dismiss the Taliban as evil. That’s the wrong way to assess it. The Taliban are different from us because they hold different theological assumptions. They don’t have our values because they don’t believe the same thing we do about God. Our values originate in the teaching of the Bible. Their values originate in their own tribal customs and assumptions about the world.

Lesson 3: If the West abandons Christ it will lose its Western values.   

Our cultural and academic elite want to impose Western values everywhere while destroying the source of those values at home. Sixty years ago in America they forbade the reading of the Bible in public school. The Bible is the source of everything that is great about the West. It’s the source of every blessing our upper classes enjoy, as well as everyone else. And they did not want children reading it. For sixty years America’s youth have been taught by many of our educators to hate America. And guess what? It’s finally sinking in. Millions of our youth now hold our country in contempt. The intellectuals who dominate our educational system are a far greater threat to our nation than Islamic terrorists.

The young men and women who are burning down our cities have been taught to do this by our educational establishment.  Tell me how Antifa is different from the Taliban? Culture can collapse quicker than you think.

Lesson 4: If nothing else recent events in Afghanistan should teach us humility, the limits of our understanding, and our appalling stupidity. It doesn’t matter how many Ivy League degrees you have, you can still be terribly wrong.

But the decline of the West is not inevitable. God is still on His throne. Jesus Christ is still Lord. I think there are good reasons to believe in a new direction and a new life for the West. I want to state why in my next video.

Thank you for watching. Please check the resources below. May our God bless you this day in a mighty way.

More Resources:

My basic argument—that Western culture is a product of biblical truth—is expanded in my book, Seven Ideas That Changed the World: https://www.amazon.com/Ideas-That-Changed-World-civilizations/dp/173423900X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1584653313&sr=8-1

From the Spectator, Did Gender Studies Lose Afghanistan? https://spectatorworld.com/topic/did-gender-studies-lose-afghanistan/

You cannot change culture using military force. Also in the Spectator (read especially the last paragraph): https://spectatorworld.com/topic/taliban-are-in-shock-kabul-front-line/The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own from a different source.