It’s over. The digital dream of a modernized, fiber-linked Afghanistan didn’t just fail; it curdled. For two decades, we treated the country like a blank hard drive, convinced that if we just uploaded enough democracy and high-speed broadband, the whole system would boot up. It didn’t. Now, looking at the wreckage of what was once hyped as "Silicon Valley in the Hindu Kush," policy nerds and tech contractors are sifting through the debris, desperately trying to find a silver lining. They’re looking for "positives" in a campaign that went south the moment we realized you can't install a civic soul via a USB stick.

Let’s talk about the hardware first. We left behind more than just Humvees and rifles. We left a massive, functioning biometric infrastructure. Devices like the HIIDE (Handheld Interagency Identity Detection Equipment) were supposed to be the bedrock of a new, transparent state. We spent billions—roughly $88 billion on security alone, with a significant chunk devoted to "digitizing" the population—tracking iris scans, fingerprints, and facial data. The goal? To make sure every soldier got paid and every voter counted.

The reality? We handed the keys to a digital hit list. The Taliban didn’t have to do much legwork to find out who worked for the previous regime; they just had to power on the scanners we conveniently left in the chargers. It’s the ultimate trade-off. We built a system to prevent fraud, and it became a tool for targeted purging. If there’s a "positive" here, it’s a grim one: the tech actually works. It’s just that the user interface is now being operated by the very people it was designed to exclude.

Then there’s the connectivity. For years, the U.S. and its allies poured hundreds of millions into a national fiber-optic backbone. It was supposed to be the "Information Silk Road." We wanted every village to have access to the global marketplace. We wanted girls in Herat to learn Python. And for a minute, it looked like it might happen. Internet penetration shot up. Smart phones became ubiquitous. Even now, the Taliban isn't pulling the plug. They’re too busy using it.

This is the strange, cynical positive that observers are pointing to: the infrastructure is durable. The Taliban didn't retreat into the 7th century; they migrated to Twitter. They’re influencers now. They run PR campaigns on WhatsApp. The "positive" is that the country remains plugged into the global grid, even if the content being streamed is a far cry from the liberal-democratic ideals we tried to export. We wanted to give them the internet to set them free; they’re using it to solidify their grip.

It’s a classic case of tech hubris. We assumed the medium was the message. We thought that by giving people the tools of the modern world, they would inevitably adopt the values of the modern West. We forgot that a smartphone is just as good at spreading propaganda as it is at teaching coding.

And what about the people? The "digital natives" we spent twenty years cultivating? They’re the ones finding the real positives, if you can call them that. They’re the ones using VPNs to bypass state censors and crypto to move money that isn't controlled by a central bank. They are the unintended consequence of our failed experiment. We didn’t build a stable digital state, but we did accidentally train a generation of people how to survive in a digital dark age. They’re tech-savvy out of necessity. They know how to scrub their digital footprints better than any privacy advocate in San Francisco ever will.

But let’s be real. Calling these "positives" feels like finding a working lightbulb in a house that’s already burned to the ground. We spent twenty years and trillions of dollars on a campaign that was fundamentally flawed from the first line of code. We treated a complex, multi-layered society like a hardware problem. We thought we could fix the bugs with more bandwidth and better databases.

Now, the "Information Silk Road" belongs to the guys in the mountains. The biometric data is a weapon. The connectivity is a leash.

If there’s a lesson in this $2 trillion post-mortem, it’s one that Silicon Valley usually ignores until it’s too late. Tech isn't neutral. It takes the shape of the hands that hold it. We left the tools behind, and now we’re acting surprised that they’re being used for something other than what was written in the slide deck.

Does it matter that the fiber cables are still in the ground if they’re only carrying the signal of a new kind of surveillance state?