The Taliban are coming. The Taliban are coming… The Taliban are here

The Taliban are on the march—in Afghanistan and in the United States.

In the United States the Republicans having failed to take power in the Capitol through election or insurrection, are purging their dissidents, starting with Liz Cheney, the very conservative number three ranking Republican in the House of Representatives. Cheney long marched in lockstep with Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, not breaking rank in opposition to all the debacles, cruelties, and lies of the Trump administration.

Then came Trump’s effort to foment an insurrection, steal an election by nullifying the Electoral College results, and justify it through the Big Lie by claiming the election was stolen from him. That was finally too much even for Liz Cheney. Unlike other top Republican congressional leaders who initially blamed Trump for the insurrection and rebuked him before doing a 180 in a New York minute and reaffirming their support for Donald Trump, Cheney has stuck with the truth about the election and Trump’s actions.

Now for her heresy the dominant Taliban faction in the party is purging Liz Cheney from the leadership. The extremists will show just how firmly they are in control of the GOP. The Taliban Republicans could not abide Cheney’s vote for Trump’s impeachment and her refusal to parrot the Big Lie.

Republicans are demonstrating how Taliban they have gone not just by exiling Liz Cheney but in a more outrageous and sad way. They have finally found a group that is small and powerless enough that they can continue to push around with impunity: transexual teenagers. In their last election, their traditional prey—Blacks, immigrants, Latinos, Asians, and Native Americans, among others—exhibited a disturbing ability to bite back. So, the GOP needed a new scapegoat. They found one, and they are exploiting it to the max.

What an unconscionable strategy to use children as a political football in a vicious culture war. I am not surprised; they did a similar thing when they kidnapped thousands of immigrant children at the border. But I am shocked. Targeting trans teenagers, who are already bullied and attacked enough, is a new low even for GOP culture warriors.

But the Republicans keep going lower and lower for a reason. When you govern for the one percent, you must increase the temperature, create moral panics, and carry out witch hunts to distract attention from the real Big Steal and redirect anger from the powerful to the vulnerable.

The Republican Party may be in the early stages of disintegration, and that would be a good thing for the country and the world. The GOP has degenerated into an extreme right-wing party, a virtually all-white party that looks more like the Afrikaner parliament in apartheid South Africa than today’s multi-hued America. It is a party policed by its leadership to punish any revolt against Trump and Trumpism, a party in which someone as right-wing as Liz Cheney does not fit only because she retains an old-fashioned respect for the Constitution and the rule of law. Imagine that! It is a party of plutocrats, by plutocrats, and for plutocrats. A party that has a big constituency of racists and reactionaries. RIP GOP?

Meanwhile, as a new Democratic administration tries to wrestle with the domestic wreckage left by the last administration, it also must deal with the foreign policy disasters of successive administrations of both parties, especially the forever wars. Afghanistan has become the symbol of the forever wars as it is the longest in a string of endless wars, all lost, each immensely costly in blood and money in proportion to anything gained: Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Vietnam is an enduring national trauma that lives on in the veterans that never got over the post-traumatic stress and those here and in Vietnam who suffered other wounds. The tons of Agent Orange and other deadly defoliants dropped in the war affect American veterans’ health to this day and the health of some of their offspring; the harm inflicted on the Vietnamese and their land was much more intense and extensive as they were the intended target. But neighboring Laos, which the North Vietnamese used to get into South Vietnam, was also bombed with tons of defoliants and suffered the consequences without receiving any compensation or treatment, unlike the Americans and the Vietnamese.

Afghanistan was meant to wipe out Al Qaeda, which perpetrated 9-11, but turned into a 20-year unsuccessful nation-building mission. Now the U.S. is leaving and the Taliban, the extremist group the American invasion overthrew, are increasingly strong and aggressive and may end up taking over the country.

The Iraq War, an all-around disaster and still ongoing, was based on a big lie about non-existent weapons of mass destruction. It capitalized Americans’ fear and anger about 9-11 and achieved the overthrow and execution of the tyrant Saddam Hussein, but was an illegal war under international law and earned the U.S. world-wide repudiation while utterly failing to establish a stable democracy in Iraq that would serve as a model for the rest of the Middle East. Instead, the ultimate result has been Iran’s virtual domination of Iraq.

As we extricate ourselves from old wars, let us make sure we don’t get into any new ones. But we need more than that. We need a reckoning on the home front and the foreign one, and not just a racial reckoning. We need a reckoning with injustice—racial, economic, political, sexist, and homophobic injustice—and our habit of sliding into interminable, unwinnable conflicts.

The Biden administration seems surprisingly amenable to such a reckoning. Let us hope, that along with the clarity, it has the strength to withstand the desperate attacks the Republicans are already carrying out to derail any kind of reckoning. Compromise always has been Biden’s default. Let us hope this time the president has learned the lesson the GOP taught Barack Obama. You do not compromise with incorrigible bullies. They will eat your lunch. Let’s instead concentrate on beating them and eating theirs.