Thread by @JosTeunissen2

1)Brendan O’Neill:"This is worse than Saigon.This wasn’t just a territorial battle. It was also a cultural clash. The most important factor in the Afghan humiliation: the West clearly lacks the cultural resources necessary for a clash of civilisations.The
spiked-online.com/2021/08/16/thi…

2) West lacked faith in the very values it claimed to be delivering to that benighted country. It was a war between one side that has very strong beliefs and is more than willing to die for them, and another side that doesn’t know what it stands for anymore and would rather avoid

3) risk and self-sacrifice if at all possible. How can you assert the civilisational authority of Western values when your entire educational and university system is devoted to questioning and demeaning Western civilisation?The West’s post-9/11 bluster was continually undermined

4)by the West’s broader descent into moral relativism.The Taliban have watched the Potemkin nature not only of the Afghan government but also of Western civilisation itself.They have watched as the mighty American military became bogged down in discussions of critical race theory

5)and the problem of ‘white rage’. They know that the contemporary West is shame-faced about its history and its civilisational values and lacks ideas for how to turn its fragile youths into a fighting force, and they will understand their own life-and-death devotion to Sharia as

6) being the opposite to all of this. America and its Western allies are too consumed by wokeness to be able to pursue a moral or military struggle for their values. An intolerant Islamist army gains in strength and plots its return to power while western armies obsess over how

7) to become more trans-inclusive, which gender pronouns to use, how to make training exercises more inclusive (..) and how to fight wars without offending the enemy. The Taliban was fighting to the death for its theocratic vision – the West was squabbling over offensive words"