Afghanistan has fallen. The Taliban are the newly inaugurated genocidaires to now rule that nation. Women between the ages of 15 and 45 have already been ordered to make themselves available to slavish marriages with the male martyrs of their new global vision and rule by their distinct, and yes anti-Muslim, interpretation of Islam. Public stonings of women will return. Publicly spectacular executions will return. Systemic sexual child abuse will exponentially increase.

In 2017, I wrote a piece entitled, “President Obama’s Genocide.” The analysis detailed the rise of ISIS simply predicated upon the faulty political notion promoted and enacted by President Obama and Vice President Biden that a precipitous withdrawal from Iraq was the best policy for the United States, Iraq, and the larger world. What plainly ensued was one of the most spectacular genocidal insurgencies of the present short century.

Tens of thousands of Muslims, Christians, Yazidis and almost any fragment of dissidents one can conceptualize were savagely and publicly annihilated in the aftermath of shredding a status of forces agreement established by President Bush to provide structured and necessary relief to the government of Iraq as U.S. forces withdrew. This brazen disregard for the creation of global genocides should not be encouraged by anyone with a serious interest in minimal thresholds of global conduct.

The new government of Afghanistan is led by Taliban leader Muhammed Arif Mustafa who told CNN:

Islam will keep on fighting, It’s our belief that one day mujahedeen will have victory, and Islamic law will come not to just Afghanistan, but all over the world. We are not in a hurry. We believe it will come one day. Jihad will not end until the last day.

Taliban leadership has access to Twitter, unlike President Trump. This Taliban will try to create a thousand 9/11 events like the one they celebrated on September 11, 2001. Nearly 800 civilians were killed by the Taliban in May and June of this year. More than 1,000 civilians were killed in July.

With complete victory in Afghanistan alongside one of the largest caches of U.S. military equipment in the world, the Taliban are fiercely equipped to carry out exponential annihilations with a military force of more than 85,000 men. Such internal violence is precisely spelled out by experts like Daniel Goldhagen who document the cruel human habit of genocidally exterminating enemies and rivals in a manner he termed “Eliminationism.” Civilians will have no defense against these annihilations or the larger spectacle of these killings designed to elicit absolutely obedience and fealty to genocidal cruelty.

ISIS chapters are already at work in Afghanistan and the incredible defeat of the most powerful military in the world will draw Islamic supremacists from around the world to begin building again the kind of network that nearly killed 3,000 Americans in Washington D.C. and New York City on September 11, 2001. The American 20th anniversary of this outrageous nihilistic fantasy will be celebrated with gloating certitude in Kabul. The New Yorker provides this recent description of Taliban genocidal habits:

The Taliban zealotry grew so great that children were forbidden to play with dolls or to fly kites, in favor of prayer sessions, while ethnic minorities and members of religious sects other than the extreme Sunni version of Islam that the Taliban espoused were persecuted. In one incident, it is estimated that the Taliban killed at least two thousand ethnic Hazaras, who are Shiite. Public executions became a norm, as well, often of women accused of various moral offenses. The killings were often carried out on sports fields or in stadiums, with the condemned sometimes stoned to death, or summarily shot in the head, or hanged, or, in the case of homosexuals, crushed and suffocated by mud walls toppled onto them by tanks. Before ISIS, in other words, there was the Taliban, showing how to do things.

The inevitable resistance and demolition of Islamic supremacism embodied by sovereignties as varied as Al Qaeda, ISIS, Al-Shabab, Boko Haram, the Taliban, Hezb’allah and the Shia Supremacist movement of Iran could be delayed or be denied by foolish rationalizations. Among these pathological rationalizations are the idea that anti-supremacism is anti-Muslim. Every one of these terrorist groups has killed Muslims first and foremost and by the thousands.

A second pathological rationalization paving the way for these genocidal hells is that American strength stirs the greater success of these groups. Somehow dialogue and reconciliation will subdue them. If the past 20 years demonstrated anything across multiple continents it is the show of weakness that led to the same results seen in the preceding century for weakness shown to Shinto supremacism and Nazi supremacism.

The third pathology is related and imagines that ‘leaving them alone’ will pacify them or lead to reflective self-contemplation within borders. Again the empirical violations of sovereignty by grave acts of terror dooms this nonsensical lullaby. The plan by these supremacists is continuously expressed without remorse: ‘We will take over the world and subjugate it violently.’

Understanding these pathologies and resisting them does not mean a return to the potentially futile or exasperating projects of nation-building. It does however involve recognizing the strategic power of the United States and her allies exerted both in soft and hard power.

The unflinching assassination of Solemani in Baghdad stands as a singular new methodology going forward. Constant reminders of costs that can be imposed without warning while still being spelled out as continual expectations daily.

The human rights regimen is not optional or in some way provisional. The annihilation of civilians will be met with stern unexpected and swift deep costs in the way of symbolic leaders killed. These strikes should leave the foe apparently impotent and everything that is not ‘the strong man on the strong horse.’

The charade that the caliphate is slowly re-emerging to swallow the world like another Third Reich must suffer regular and recognizable losses that lead to logical conclusions built in realism. Anything short of rational persuasion in the path of growing sovereignty is doomed as a political project.

‘Coalitions of the willing’ are more than able to overwhelm the silly pretenses of caliphates emerging in Egypt, Turkey, Iran, or Pakistan. The rapid demolition of ISIS in Syria in 2018 is a sure marker of this potential reality. No rationalizations of the current failure in Afghanistan can prevent the emergence of the necessary American idealism to thwart the genocidal praxis now upon us in Kabul.

The inconsistent incompetence and negligence of President Obama and now President Biden cannot ultimately suppress the natural human desire for a world more predicated on freedom and liberty than ultimate forms of orthodox insanity mounted by the latest iteration of Islamic supremacism.

Ben Voth is an associate professor of rhetoric and director of debate and speech at Southern Methodist University. He has published four academic books focusing on questions of genocide and ethnic violence. His latest book Rwanda Rising, looks at the global struggle against genocide.

Image: Pixabay

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