The United States has not spent $ 300 million a day on war in Afghanistan.

[The Grand Nudger]

(bold mine)

I do see the withdrawal of the U.S. from the world sphere as a problem, as there are plenty of enemies who want to crush even the idea of democracy.  That is why I disagree that people in Afghanistan will eventually enjoy freedoms. 

Yeah, so..that's one of my many beliefs, and I respect that you might have this right and I have it wrong.  I personally think that you can only punch a human being in the face so many times before they burn every trace of you to the ground and do exactly what they want to do.  Enfranchisement, in my view, is an inexorable product of human being.  Every moment of every day we compulsively seek to employ our agency, and to extend the purview of our agency.

I don't see freedom as something that can be retained without the willingness to die for it, and I see very little will for that in any nation.  Democracy is not a default condition - it requires a balance between a strong educated populace, and a government strong enough to keep order.  If either side gets too powerful, we get populist autocratic revolution or an elitist oligarchy.

Right, that's where we (may) differ.  I do see democracy as a default.  That people will do whatever they collectively do no matter what the government says and that ultimately that's the shape of government efforts to reform local activity in the mold of it's overarching legal structure. 

Take some actual taliban nutjob, age of 17, male.  He will one day..... inevitably..... want something outside of the boundaries of his descriptors warrant, and be committed to that desire.  

I see myths as central to the existence of a nation.  The myth of "divine right" held together kingdoms.  The myth of divine succession holds together theocracies.  The myth of "inherent rights given by a creator" holds together liberal democracies.

Today, most people don't give a damn about liberal democracy, as long as they can buy the next iPhone.

What about a bind outside of myth?  I don't believe, for example, that human rights are rightly premised or persuasively argued for on notions of a shared Creator. I've never understood why the status of some creator's existence applied rights to it's creations. Human beings, for example..make many things - and literally none of the things people make have human rights. I guess what I'm asking you, is that if human rights are true, do they or even can they actually be premised on some silly ghost story, or even on the rights (whatever those are) of their very human creators? Such that, if the ghost story were false, human rights would be untrue....or, had they been designed by a computer program, they would have none?