Via 1492 or 2021, it’s still "civilizing the savages"

It’s pretty easy to reframe America’s uninvited invasion, occupation, and nation-building of Afghanistan. In order to prove just how imperial our having been in Afghanistan for the last 20-years, rebuilding the country in our own image, is, please do the following thought experiment. Please release your imagination and walk with me for a bit… Just replace George W Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden with Hernán Cortés, Francisco Pizarro, Christopher Columbus, and Pope Alexander VI; replace US Armed Forces with conquistadors; and replace Afghanis—women, girls, boys, elders—with Aztecs, Mayans, Amerindians, Mapuche people; then, replace soul-savings, civilizing, modernizing, and enculturating, with…. the same words. Does that make more sense as to why supporting the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in order to save them from themselves is perfectly analogous to supporting the British colonization of the Americas in order to modernize and civilize the American Indians? A reminder, we were at war with Afghanistan during which at least 240,000 Afghans have died, many of them civilians—over the last 20-years; and, how many of those Afghans were women and girls?

I called this article The war in Afghanistan was a long Khan because:

1. I thought of it and it made me feel pleased with myself and clever
2. This isn’t Afghanistan’s first rodeo: they’ve suffered through long-term occupation by empires so often it’s a cliché trope
3. While occupied cities in Vietnam adapted to French and American occupation by feigning love for Joe, the Vietnamese never really loved Joe, only appeased Joe for reasons of survival during a massively chaotic and terrible war (note all the friendly villagers who routinely blew up their friend Joe in the streets).
4. South Vietnam invited America to help defend against the North; and, more relevantly, the Soviet troops were invited by the official Afghan authorities to help combat the Mujahideen. America wasn’t invited to Afghanistan.
5. Sometimes, the city-based leadership intelligentsia of a country can often be at odds with the will of the people.
6. Local Hawaiians hate their occupier any more than it pays their rent; Okinawans openly hate their occupiers, though what’re you going to do; I know that all of Islam is apoplectic about the mere existence of Riyadh Air Base in Saudi Arabia.
7. People never really fall in love with their oppressor, their occupier, or their hostage-taker. The power dynamic isn’t fair.
8. When you are poor and desperate and your occupier offers you a job, you take that job and milk that job for as long as it doesn’t get you killed and as long as it lasts.
9. Even someone who is beguiled by Stockholm Syndrome eventually snaps out of it—generally violently and without a lot of compassion and empathy.
10. Even HR knows: a subordinate employee cannot give full consent to a relationship with a superior when their job, income, reputation, and life depend on the fickle whims of their boss.
11. There were never only 80,000 Taliban fighters, there were 380,000 Afghani fighters, 300,000 of which were being trained, funded, paid, and supplied by their American invaders and occupiers until the moment we, the USA, left, which was always inevitable.