But it was darker than this, wasn’t it? We all wanted to hold on to this imperial dream, because the loss of the empire meant we might someday be the ones who were ruled. It meant we would not be the strongest, it meant we would not chart our own course, it meant all the freedoms we believed ourselves divinely ordained for, all the power to “be whatever you want to be”—everything that made up the meaning of our American lives—would be gone. We couldn’t stand it. We couldn’t stand a world in which we might one day be the Afghans. We could not imagine it and so, from Kabul, we never left.
