Why nation-building in Afghanistan only wound up failing

Here's an excerpt from Jesse Petrilla's recent book, "If It Takes a Thousand Years: From Al-Qaeda to Hamas, How the Jihadists Think & How to Defeat Them", which explains why, so long as Islam rules countries like Afghanistan, nation-building there won't be possible:

I was serving in the U.S. Army as a Liaison Officer to the Afghan secret police, and facilitated the interrogations of over 400 captured Taliban and Al-Qa’eda members while there. A Taliban leader once told me “You have me in a cage, my fight is over for now, but my children will fight you, and if they don’t win, their children will fight you. If It Takes a Thousand Years, we will win.” Although it didn’t take the Taliban a thousand years to win the battle of Afghanistan, it demonstrates the drive that our jihadist enemies have. They fight generational wars against the West as a whole.

When analyzing our Islamic extremist enemies, it is important for the American people to understand the tribal mindset that so many of our enemies come from. Islam developed from tribal cultures, and many tribal cultures over the past 1,400 years developed under Islam. The Islamic world itself is divided into what I would describe as tribes; you have the Sunni tribe, the Shia tribe, and within that are thousands of other tribes, one of the most recent being the “Palestinian” tribe which has become somewhat of a self-appointed identity by various lost members of other tribes. But in Afghanistan, tribalism is at a level that is virtually unparalleled in the world.

It is human nature to coalesce together into groups, but when you add Islam to the mix, it fuels different dynamics that are completely alien to Westerners. The tribal mindset is so vastly different than our own that it often makes it impossible to reason with them, and they will not respond logically or rationally as you might assume an American or other Westerner would. To Westerners, the tribal mindset may contain many elements that are quite shocking and deeply disturbing.

Part of our training upon arrival in Afghanistan included multiple briefings on Islamic and Afghan culture, since we would be working with locals on a daily basis. In one such briefing, the Afghan-American man leading the discussion began by stating; “You must understand that everything about your way of life in America, is completely different in this planet.” He quickly corrected himself to say “in this country,” but his misspeaking was not too far from the truth. From the way people say hello to the way they go to the bathroom, everything is different, and it is like another world to a Westerner.

In Pashtun tribal law, the largest tribe in Afghanistan comprising almost half the nation, there is something known as khun, or blood money. It can be paid to make amends for various transgressions such as murder, property damage, theft, kidnapping, etcetera. In addition to khun, women can be given to become sex slaves as well as female babies to eventually turn into sex slaves. Women and female babies count as two-thirds of the khun.

Just as in every other part of the Islamic world, Pashtun women have far less status than men. To divorce a woman, the man only needs to declare “I divorce thee” three times publicly. Many Pashtuns also believe that women have something called the “evil eye,” that they have special powers and the ability to cause bad things to happen.

In Pashtun tribal law, if a woman is kidnapped by force, and coerced to consent to marry her kidnapper, but she does not get her father’s permission, the father has the right to kill her. Any inclination of a woman having dishonored the family is rapidly met by her murder. In one of the detainee interrogations, I was truly shocked and saddened when the detainee was describing his family, and nonchalantly said “I have eight children, I had nine but one of my daughters dishonored the family and so I killed her,” a story I unfortunately would hear similar versions of on more than one occasion from multiple detainees.

With women and children relegated to 2nd-class status via Islamic sharia, it's no wonder things are as horrific there as they still are. That the government of Dubya did nothing to prevent many of these repulsive cases behind the scenes is another reason Afghanistan's "liberation" was doomed to failure. We must hope Donald Trump's incoming government will do whatever possible in the meantime to reverse what Biden's bunch enabled upon retreat. But it's doubtless going to be a very long, grueling trip to put an end to the suffering there.