WHY does the United States insist on going to countries and changing them into secular, modern liberal states?
Part of the reason is economic, and partly military. But I think the deeper answer is mythical.
Back in World War 2, the US transformed Germany and Japan – both very right-wing societies – into secular, humanist and pacifist nations. Those accomplishments defined America in the post-war period, and it is that very same myth that has driven them to try and spread human rights, women’s rights, egalitarianism, secularism, and democracy as they define it.
The US could have easily bombed Afghanistan into nothing. The same is true for Iraq and Vietnam. They could have bombed those countries and call it a win. But that’s not what the goal was.
Theirs was an ideological mission: to bring nation states that existed outside the global system and the global market into it. The US wanted to do for Iraq, Afghanistan and to a lesser extent Vietnam what it was able to do to Germany and Japan.
But America’s failure in those countries is not just their own failure. It is also the failure of the global system, and if the global system failed in Afghanistan, it’s vulnerable in other areas as well.
Now, this doesn’t hold true for working- and middle-class Americans, especially for the non-interventionist left and the isolationist right. It does hold true, however, for America’s policymakers and military industrial complex, the very same people who initiated the invasion into Afghanistan decades ago.
It is them and their progressive, secular view of history that is driven by the myth of American victories in World War 2, and ultimately, it is they who have suffered more acutely from the Taliban’s victory./PN
