The Taliban had already been inching into the former Northern Alliance strongholds which had previously never fallen to them, long before 2021. Perhaps if the Coalition had been a bit more insistent about not tolerating rampant corruption and habitual child rape among the warlords it called allies and partners, this wouldn't have happened, but then if the Coalition did that it may never have found anyone to work with in Afghanistan.

Oh well. I'm quite content not to be sending any form of contribution, either in the blood of my countrymen or my own tax dollars, to prop up a wholly unrepresentative regime of child-raping warlords who exist primarily to give cover to massive human & drug trafficking rings and deny Globohomo's geopolitical enemies strategically positioned territory. It is no surprise to me that the most backward Islamic parts of the world, which consistently demonstrate a high willingness to kill basically anyone who remotely violates the tenets of Islam in any fashion from adultery to blasphemy to apostasy, would want to live under backward Islamist regimes. That isn't something I believe any more Western blood or gold should be spent on withholding, especially when it's obvious that doing so would mandate an indefinite commitment from us.

Defeating globohomo at home and securing our borders (by which I mean the lands of and waters around the Americas) should be our geopolitical priority, not waging forever wars in wastelands on the other side of the planet where the people have already violently resisted the approach of civilization for centuries. To paraphrase the words of the Emperor Honorius to the Romano-British after they propped up a chain of usurpers against him, perhaps the rest of the world ought to start looking to their own defenses.

Also, none of this changes the reality that Tom Nichols is a disgusting chickenhawk who cheerleads for wars and shames others for daring to not want to go die in them or fill his weapon-manufacturing friends' pockets with their money even though he's never been a soldier, any sort of REMF, or probably even ever held a gun in anger once in his life.