The Death of Truth

In a recent article in the New York Times ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/13/opinion/Alabama-Covid-vaccine-politics.html?referringSource=articleShare ), associate professor of creative writing at Auburn University, Anton DiSclafani, writes “the idea of truth has suddenly become slippery. There is no truth, it seems. Only what you choose to believe, and how.”

Mikhail Gorbachev, who oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989 after Moscow’s failed decade-long campaign there, said that NATO’s own deployment to the country had been doomed from the start. According to Former President of the Soviet Union Gorbachev, “Like many other similar projects at its heart lay the exaggeration of a threat and poorly defined geopolitical ideas. To that were added unrealistic attempts to democratise a society made up of many tribes.”

Carter Malkasian writes in Politico ( https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/07/06/afghanistan-war-malkasian-book-excerpt-497843 ) , “As the United States leaves Afghanistan after 20 years of war, there can be little doubt that we lost the war.” This is something Mr. Gorbachev understood intimately.

There are many who “chose to believe” that The United States lost the war in Afghanistan because President Biden withdraw American troops, leaving Afghanistan’s defense from the advancing Taliban to to an utterly unmotivated and incompetent Afghanistan defense force. However, if the Afghanistan people cannot defend themselves who can afford the cost of defending them?