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Who Are The 15,000 "Americans"?

Reader comment on item: Reflections on the Debacle in Afghanistan: Interview

Submitted by Renox (United States), Aug 23, 2021 at 00:03

Apparently, no one knows how many private "Americans" are still in Afghanistan – and equally odd, no one seems to know who they are and why they're there to begin with.

In fact, one wonders how they got into the country in the first place – it can't have been as easy for a US citizen to just amble into Afghanistan as he could, say, stroll into Denmark or Portugal.....especially if he was coming in for a prolonged period to live and work.

Tourists? Maybe a few, intent perhaps on eventually "writing a book". Family? Some, I would imagine. After all, there are nearly 100,000 Afghan-born US citizens already permanently in the USA. No doubt some of them still have familial connections in the land of their birth and visit them on occasion.

But ten to eighteen thousand US citizens currently stuck in the Land of the Poppy Fields? No, not tourists and not family.

I suspect for the most part that these are the fanatics associated with the so-called NGOs, churches, missionary groups and the assorted do-gooders that have accompanied US incursions into foreign lands in the past like plagues.

It is they, I believe, in their newly acquired "woke" garb, that have largely precipitated the Afghan calamity we see today.

There is no way the Taliban could have taken over the Afghan provinces and sauntered into Kabul – because that's what they did - with barely a shot being fired. Not without the express nod of approval by the provincial and tribal elders and leaders who, since the invasion by the US, have witnessed the slow erosion of their customs, their Islam and their way of life.

I can just imagine the "critical theory", "intersectionality" ideas, gender studies and the rest of it the Afghan populace has had to put up with as wave after wave of "woke" locusts descended on the country.

Now that it's over, we can only hope that the idea of exporting democracy – our kind of democracy- around the world – by war if necessary – will now take a backseat in our foreign policy decisions and instead concentrate on peaceful negotiations within a complex world.

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Daniel Pipes replies:

I suspect they are mostly contractors for the U.S. government.

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