Last month I wrote about the need to resist being a snowflake. That’s especially hard in today’s culture, where a greater value is often placed on victimhood rather than traditional values like honor and dignity.

A couple of sociologists wrote about this in a book called The Rise of Victimhood Culture. The book examines emerging concepts of “microaggressions” and what the authors believe to be a culture victimhood in our society.  In particular, they observe that the concept of microaggressions reflects a trend in our society to value victimhood over the traditional value of having thick skin, a feature of an American culture that has traditionally revolved around individual dignity.  The very idea of microaggressions, the authors say, “violate[s] many long-standing social norms, such as those encouraging people to have thick skin, brush off slights, and charitably interpret the intentions of others”…

It’s hard to describe the situation in Afghanistan as anything less than an unmitigated disaster. After 20 years of war, trillions of dollars, and more than 20,000 American casualties, things are more or less as they stood in summer 2001. It took only weeks for the Taliban to sweep through the entirety of Afghanistan, enter Kabul, and force the flight of Afghan President Ashraf Ghani.

The Taliban is less a political movement than a large terrorist group back to brutalizing the Afghan people in the absence of American power. But the reaction in the U.S. seems to fall mainly into three categories: pity for the Afghan people, embarrassment at the failed mission, and good, old-fashioned finger-pointing.

There are far more important reasons why Americans should care about what is going on in Afghanistan.

First and foremost, ungoverned and misgoverned lands are incubators for terrorism…