Take away our history

[cincinnatus_c]

I have no insight into the particulars (which I find bewildering, haven't begun investigating, and feel like it would be exhausting to investigate) of what is happening[1], but I feel like the fall of Kabul (without a fight!) is the most remarkable geopolitical thing that has happened in the world in my lifetime. (ETA: more than '89, etc.? I mean, that's an absurd claim, isn't it? I dunno, maybe it is, maybe I just have an incredibly massive case of recency bias here, but:) I remember in the late '90s people on the left looking to radical Islam as a counterpoint to the Fukuyama end-of-history narrative. (ETA: so, if it's not absurd, this is why: the fall of Communism was a major resolution in the narrative. The fall of Kabul represents a breakdown of the narrative.) I thought they were totally wrong; I thought it was a rearguard that would fade, like militant Christianity had, as a basis for anti-liberal politics. (Surveying the global scene as a whole, now, though, it looks like what the Taliban is an extreme representation of is various forms of tribalism, not, at root, divine transcendent commitment.) When Fukuyama himself addressed that question after 9/11 he thought the issue was whether nuclear-armed terrorists could defeat the global liberal democratic consensus by sheer (threat of) force. (ISIS, which opposed the Taliban and everyone else, really was grounded in divine transcendent commitments, and so was never really a geo-political force, and so was always doomed to defeat, barring divine intervention (which it was nominally counting on) or its otherwise somehow becoming irresistably armed.) The fact that the conventionally armed Taliban has been allowed, by all parties, to re-take Afghanistan without a fight seems to me like a sign that that consensus, which was always assumed to be a little ways off in the future anyway, after China came around and Russia got itself together, is now officially dead. Fukuyama worried that the last men after the end of history would have nothing to fight for. A different kind of Republic-an take seems closer to the truth: because there is no fight in the last men, they are not the end of history.

I kinda wanted to give this post the subject line "life in Kabul is such a drag", after one of John Everett's riffs on a.g. I see it went like this:

> Living in Kabul can be such a drag.
> The Taliban just blew up you best idoltry mag.

That was from April 2001. Plus ça change, oh my goodness.

[1] [ETA2: I don't suppose I'll ever dig into the details as I might've in my library-dwelling days, but I'm guessing this is at the heart of it: "Russia maintains close links with the Taliban for good reason. It sees the US involvement in Afghanistan winding down. It is deeply concerned about the rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region spreading in its direction. And it sees the Taliban as one potential bulwark against this."]

--
Currently under my porch: 17.6. Currently at Belmont Lake: 15. High there today: 26.2. Back into drought, 8 mm in the last two weeks, getting down to the bottom of my rain barrels again, and the wheel turn round.