….The sudden and unexpected capitulation of the Afghanistan government should serve as a warning that more turbulent and dangerous times lie ahead. That’s not a difficult prediction to make. Our defeat in Afghanistan stems in many ways from the same “woke” illusions that have allowed lawlessness and moral chaos to grow and thrive in America.

Indeed, many of our miscalculations in Afghanistan seem to be based directly on the same kind of magical thinking that now plagues our schools, our city councils and even our military. In times of crisis, we rely on our military to keep a level head when dealing with an enemy like the Taliban. But it now appears that our military was one of the first institutions to succumb to “woke” doctrine — that is, to wishful thinking. Like the radical activists who called for defunding the police. radical generals enthusiastically supported programs which led to a moral disarmament of the troops.

Instead of building morale, unit cohesion and readiness, they undermined these qualities by introducing training in critical race theory, systematic racism, white bias, and LGBT pride. Of course, as common sense would suggest, such programs seemed guaranteed to increase divisions among troops: blacks against whites, straights against gays, Christians and conservatives against liberals and leftists. The Air Force’s big idea for boosting morale was to drag in drag queens to entertain the airmen. The people who sanctioned these bizarre training programs and entertainments were not lower-level staff, but the topmost of the top brass. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin presided at a “pride” event in the Pentagon, and, on another occasion, he announced that fighting climate change was the military’s top priority. On the other hand, General Mark Milley, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a former commander of our troops in Afghanistan, seems to think that “white supremacy” is the greatest threat to our nation. Similar oddball positions have been taken by chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Michael Gilday, Air Force Chief of Staff Charles Q, Brown Jr., and a host of other top-ranking officers.

With all of this social engineering on their minds it’s no wonder that the generals didn’t have much time left over to think about the threat from the Taliban. Moreover, the kind of indoctrination that our troops have been subject to not only undercuts unit cohesion and troop morale (suicides are at an all-time high), it also defeats the whole rationale for defending one’s country in the first place. If your country is presented to you as the most racist and bigoted nation in history, why should you risk your life fighting for it? If America is no better than the Taliban (or ISIS, or Al Qaeda) then what right do we have to intervene?

These “woke” myths have greatly inhibited the military’s effectiveness in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But the most dangerous illusion subscribed to by both the military and successive administrations has to do with Islam itself. It’s the illusion that Islam is a religion of peace. It’s the faith-based notion that Islamic culture and religion is not that different from our own: that devout Muslims want the same things that we want — liberty of conscience, tolerance for differing opinions, democracy, and the equality of men and women.

Anyone who is familiar with the Koran, the Hadith, sharia law, or the history of Islam, knows that the more devout a Muslim is, the less likely that he wants any of these things. Many of our policy makers, however, are not particularly religious people, and so they tend to underestimate the importance of religion in people’s lives. But the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram and the like are deeply religious. They are not fighting simply for land, or for natural resources, but for Allah. The wars they fight are religious wars. And one of the main tenets of their religion is that the whole world must be subject to Allah. As Taliban commander Muhammed Arif Mustafa recently put it: “It is our belief that one day… Islamic law will come not just to Afghanistan, but all over the world… Jihad will not end until the last day.” For this reason, most of the carrot and stick incentives offered by America and its NATO allies simply don’t work — least of all Jen Psaki’s warning that the Taliban are in danger of losing favor with the “international community….”

The above comes from an Aug. 16 story in Catholic World Report.