Even if you don't care, there are enough stories/videos/message of Afghans in tears at losing the little bits of freedoms that western military and billions could grant.
About the economic exploitation argument: I fail to see any scenario in which any of coalition countries could have hoped to gain even a tenth of a percent back of the money the war in Afghanistan has cost them.
It's right next to China and Iran. So it represented a geopolitical pincer attack on Iran to get to their oil. Which, you know, mattered about twenty years ago.
Afghanistan has a ton of natural resources that the West wanted to exploit.
And of course, China was right next door, so yet another geopolitical game of ta thorn in their side.
Yeah, they're going to think it's disaster.
But from what I've read on the couple times I've looked into Afghanistan:
- The Taliban always ruled rural Afghanistan.
- The Afghan government was so corrupt it make other corrupt regimes embarrassed.
- The Afghan government was basically an opium/poppy narco-state supported by our troops.
- The western desire is to have centralized control over a country to economically exploit it. Thus the ECONOMIST is going to view that as terrifying.
- We did not "bring civilization to the savages", the old big lie of building schools for the conquered so that we don't feel like Ghenghis Khan.
So is this article basically the predictable neolib hangwringing about not being able to extract resources from the third world?