{"id":31385,"date":"2021-08-23T11:50:51","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T15:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=31385"},"modified":"2021-08-23T11:50:51","modified_gmt":"2021-08-23T15:50:51","slug":"the-ides-of-august","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/?p=31385","title":{"rendered":"The Ides of August"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.sarahchayes.org\/post\/the-ides-of-august\">Two decades ago<\/a>, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me \u2014 the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries to distort or report their words. Over candied almonds and glasses of green tea, they would get to some version of this: \u201cThe Taliban hit us on this cheek, and the government hits us on that cheek.\u201d The old man serving as the group\u2019s spokesman would physically smack himself in the face.  <\/p>\n<p>I and too many other people to count spent years of our lives trying to convince U.S. decision-makers that Afghans could not be expected to take risks on behalf of a government that was as hostile to their interests as the Taliban were. Note: it took me a while, and plenty of my own mistakes, to come to that realization. But I did.  <\/p>\n<p>For two decades, American leadership on the ground and in Washington proved unable to take in this simple message.  I finally stopped trying to get it across when, in 2011, an interagency process reached the decision that the U.S. would not address corruption in Afghanistan. It was now explicit policy to ignore one of the two factors that would determine the fate of all our efforts. That\u2019s when I knew today was inevitable. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Two decades ago, young people in Kandahar were telling me how the proxy militias American forces had armed and provided with U.S. fatigues were shaking them down at checkpoints. By 2007, delegations of elders would visit me \u2014 the only American whose door was open and who spoke Pashtu so there would be no intermediaries [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31385","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31385","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=31385"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31385\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31386,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31385\/revisions\/31386"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31385"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31385"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ok-cleek.com\/blogs\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31385"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}