Twenty-one years. That’s how much time has passed. A child born on September 11, 2001 — and surely there are many thousands (think of how they feel when filling out forms!) — is now a full legal adult. In the scope of his young life, both the dominant factions in America — the neocon, establishment GOP, and the Woke, interventionist Progressives — have wielded power continuously.

For all the noise made by antiwar leftists, “realist” centrists, and America-first populists, none of their protests finally mattered. If the U.S. had been run by a committee of five people — Dick Cheney, Mitch McConnell, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney — it wouldn’t look any different.

The More Afghanistan Changes, the More it Stays the Same

Neither would the nation of Afghanistan. On this date 21 years ago, that country was ruled by the vicious theocratic terrorist-harboring Taliban, which that very day signed a treaty of alliance with Communist China. Terrorists it hosted from al Qaeda launched the worst terror attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, killing thousands and endangering many thousands more. The feckless incompetents in the Bush administration had failed to prevent it, but vowed to avenge it. They swore to root out the Taliban, transform Afghanistan into a pro-Western regime, and rip out the sources of terrorism worldwide. A tall order indeed.

Instead, they bumbled and let Osama bin Laden escape, wasted trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives trying turn Afghanistan into New Hampshire, invaded the bystander country of Iraq for no real reason, and unleashed a genocide of Christians there. Meanwhile, Afghanistan became a dreary quagmire where our troops and allies played whack-a-mole against elusive guerrilla enemies, and stayed a decade longer than any American ever expected.

We’ve Never Cut and Run So Abjectly Before

Donald Trump managed to stabilize the situation there to stop Americans dying, but when Chinese-compromised Joe Biden was elected, the fight went out of our allies. They knew the end was coming. They didn’t know — how could they? — how suddenly and abjectly Biden would surrender. Never before, not in Lebanon, or Vietnam, not in the worst military defeats our nation ever suffered, had our forces just cut and run. We left behind hundreds of U.S. citizens, and tens of thousands of Afghan allies to whom we’d given visas and promised safe harbor. We fled like terrified children from a burning school.

And at the end, we left the country even worse than we found it. It is now again ruled by the vicious, theocratic terrorist-harboring Taliban, and even more closely aligned with China. It now has some $80 or $90 billion worth of military equipment which Biden left behind, more than the annual military budget of almost every country on earth. It no longer has a Northern Alliance of ethnic minorities fighting against it as in 2001; those people trusted the American-sponsored regime, and put down their arms. Don’t you wonder what’s happening to them now? Perhaps you’d rather not know.

Most of us don’t want to know what’s being done to the translators, nurses, doctors, drivers, and others who served alongside our soldiers, who now are marked for death. We’d rather not think about the fate of Afghan women who went ahead and got educated, despite the Taliban’s warnings. Or of the thousands of Afghans who embraced the Gospel of Jesus, during the brief lifetime we guaranteed religious freedom in their country.

America as a nation has lost the power to deter its fanatical enemies. They know that the U.S. can dish out some short-term pain, but that it will fold in the end. We have also squandered the trust of future allies whom we will need. They know we will leave them hanging … figuratively and literally. 

Making America Stone Age Again

All these foreign disaster are things we don’t like to dwell on. And the Biden regime is helping to distract us by foisting new chaos on us at home. Soon, thanks to artificial energy shortages caused by the Green New Deal, we might well be shivering in our homes. No, we won’t be as bad off as the Afghans deprived of coal for having once helped the Americans, but that comparison is cold comfort. Our border is out of control and open to drug smugglers and terrorists, just as Afghanistan’s was in 2001. Our people are bullied by a government driven to enforce a false religion — though in this case it’s Woke secularism, not jihadist Sunni Islam.

So maybe in the end, the neocon promise to make Afghanistan and the U.S. more alike didn’t go unfulfilled. Like a twisted story by O. Henry or Saki, it turned out true but in a horribly perverse fashion. With their joint jihad against populist, Christian Americans, the establishment GOP and the Woke, fanatical left, have remade America in the image of the Taliban’s Afghanistan.

You can’t say that History lacks a sense of humor.

Jason Jones is a senior contributor to The Stream. He is a film producer, author, activist and human rights worker. Subscribe to his podcast, The Jason Jones Show.

John Zmirak is a senior editor at The Stream, and author or co-author of ten books, including The Politically Incorrect Guide to Immigration and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Catholicism. Together, Jones and Zmirak wrote The Race to Save Our Century, and “God, Guns, and the Government.”