Silver Linings to the Taliban Takeover

To avoid this article being misinterpreted or having lines taken out of context, let me be clear from the start: I do not support the Taliban or any Islamic-based regime.  The enemy of my enemy is not inherently my friend.  However, looking at a shifting situation and the effects of it is useful. Additionally, one can always laugh at your enemy when they lose a game without being on the side of the winner of that game.

Disclaimer out of the way, let’s get to the takes. As most of you reading this know, the Taliban have taken Kabul.  This is shocking only in its speed, not in its outcome (when I began drafting this article, I had intended to say “the Taliban are on the cusp of taking Kabul”).  The U.S. military pulled out without having a strong national government in its place, so anyone with half a brain could tell that the Taliban were going to take over.

For those of you too young to remember, before the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban had largely ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.  Over the past 20 years, they’ve only ruled portions of the country, but apparently are now running 85% of it.  To put that in perspective, the CIA has asserted that Mexican cartels run 20% of Mexico, and therefore the Mexican government only runs 80% (though the cartels could run far more than this share and the CIA just doesn’t wish to admit it).

One of the few good things about Islamic rule is that they can be harsh to degenerates.  It is hard not to remember the horrible practice of “bacha bazi” in Afghanistan and how U.S. troops were instructed to “turn a blind eye” to it when it was being practiced by the native Afghanis that were our “allies” in the war on terror (notably police and soldiers we were training to support the government which the Taliban has just toppled).  Presumably, the Taliban will execute such people as they execute other sexual degenerates. However, it is certainly possible they will act inconsistently on this front, as we saw with ISIS, but at least no longer will our tax dollars be going to finance the sexual degeneracy there.

In addition to likely increased restrictions on sexual degeneracy, they may take a harder stance on drugs.  Now, some news sources will say the Taliban profit and profited off of opium production, and that is true (particularly in the years preceding their takeover of Afghanistan).  However, once the Taliban had fully entrenched their control of the country, they engaged in an impressive anti-drug campaign that led to a reduction by 99% of opium production in Taliban-controlled areas.  Interestingly, the lowest amount of opium production was right before the U.S. invaded.  We can see that opium production grew incredibly under the U.S. occupation, higher than at any point under Taliban or other rule, indicating why the U.S. government was really involved.

The rise in opium production in Afghanistan matches pretty well with the rise of the over-prescription of and deaths due to opioids in the United States (also known as the Opioid Epidemic).  Correlation is not causation, but it is safe to say that with the elimination of the Taliban and growth of opium production, opium therefore became easier and cheaper to find on the market which meant opiates became cheaper to manufacture and therefore more tempting to overprescribe. With the rise of the Taliban again, we may see a reduction of these terrible prescriptions and the ill effects of them. 

The other silver lining is how embarrassing this result is to the United States government and military.  How shocking that a military focused on encouraging trannies and women to join, while discouraging or preventing people with Southern pride from joining, is incapable of handling an international crises.  

We’ve talked about this a bit, but the military has been decreasing in efficiency since World War 2.  People that want to pretend that a multiracial and multi-gender military can function need to remember that we have not won a war since desegregation of the military back in 1948.  It should intuitively make sense that the more diverse a combat force is, the less likely it will succeed (Austria-Hungary’s performance in WW1 is another testament to this theory).  One has to wonder if mixed race units perform less well than monoracial units, similarly to how all-male units perform better than mixed. Again, the only shocking thing here is just the degree to which the military has declined, not the fact of decline itself.

None of this is to say it is good that the Taliban have retaken Kabul or that they will lead the country, only that there are some positives to draw from this situation.  Less opium production is certainly a good thing which should happen.  Likewise, the U.S. military getting embarrassed is always good because it makes good people less likely to enlist.  There’s also the possibility that this embarrassment will lead to the top brass getting flustered and getting into some other boondoggle to recover the lost pride (or maybe to recover lost gay pride flags from being destroyed in Kabul).  This basic schadenfreude of the Imperial government and Biden looking the fool can’t be overstated.  One thinks of Voltaire’s prayer: O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous. Thankfully, God has answered it.