Taliban now controls one of the world’s biggest lithium deposits

I really wish I had any positive vision for the world helping people & places build their sovereignty & power & capabilities.

I was so ashamed of my country invading Iraq, invading Afghanistan, especially with so little plan for what to do after military conquest. It seemed like a transparent neo-conservative ploy to try to exploit a land and people, to bolster American arms & might. And I wish that cynical view didn't feel so justified right now. I wish America had had a better chance to help, had vision & will to engage the real struggle to start a new legitemate, capable, helpful, & self-empowered government. As America withdraws I wish the world had some ideas, on how we might help a people & their land harness & use their land effectively, some idea how we might invest in them, give them some sovereignty & capabilities to harness their resources.

None of that seems even imaginable. The world seems mired in impossibility. Swayed & controlled by the crude & the strongmen. Genuousness is the one enduring thing ye the one element that we seem unable to select & maintain. Cruder signals & symbols radiate so much more easily, sway so much more readily. Alas.

It feels more than a little crude to be talking about natural resources & lithium &c as a land falls to theocratic totalitarianists. But at the same time, this ought have been an avenue to support & prop up self rule, a way to empower a people & a re-birthing sort-of nation. The question, of what we can do to help civilization form & support itself, natural resources or no, is a question that seems ever more hauntingly important & real, & so rarely with any answers or even hope. America's attempts have been so flawed, so tragic, but if anything, these countless failures show how necessary it is that the world at large try to get better at this, at helping give other places a change. We have our own struggles, but trying to help those truly ailing, I think, can be a rallying point, a way to understand & grapple with realer challenges than the showmanship driven political psycho-dramas that we have come to let grip us.