ROGER KIMBALL: A Failure of Memory and Nerve.

I write on the 20th anniversary of the Islamic terrorist attacks against New York and Washington, D.C. No matter where you turn, it seems, the message is the same, a combination of injunction and protestation: “Never forget,” “We remember,” the sentiment invariably bolstered with reminiscences of loss and heroism.

The loss and the heroism are real, no doubt, but I am afraid that admonitions about remembering seem mostly manufactured. How could they not? Clearly, we have not remembered, and no amount of barking by the president of the United States about what an “extraordinary success” his shameful scuttle out of Afghanistan was can change that.

If we truly remembered, we would not have allowed four top Taliban terrorists, released by Barack Obama from Guantanamo Bay in exchange for the traitorous Bowe Bergdahl, to assume top positions in the newly formed Taliban government. If we truly remembered, we would not have left hundreds of Americans behind in Afghanistan, ready-made hostages for the new regime.

We spent 20 years and trillions of dollars in Afghanistan—for what? To try to coax it into the 21st century and assume the enlightened, “woke” perspective that has laid waste to the institutions of American culture, from the universities to the military?

Certain aspects of that folly seem darkly comic now, such as our efforts to raise the consciousness of the locals by introducing them to conceptual art and decadent Western ideas of “gender equity.” Writing in The Spectator, the columnist known as “Cockburn” captures the fatuousness of the program. “Do-gooders,” he notes, “established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance,’ so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women.’” I wonder if among the “attitudes” discussed were the penchant of certain Afghan men to stone women to death for adultery? “Under the U.S.’s guidance,” Cockburn continues, “Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house—higher than the actual figure in America!”

We also did our best to educate Afghans on the glories of modern art, and yet, somehow, they rejected the West’s irony and moral relativism. Unexpectedly!