Afghanistan is a land of violence. The natives have feuded with each other and massacred opposing tribesmen for centuries. These fierce villagers gave the British a good pranging in 1842. The Soviets had their own Vietnam there, with a shove from us, in the 1980s. We’ve been there forever, or at least it seems like it. The bottom line, like many peoples all over the world, is that the Afghans just love to fight.

So it’s no great discovery that one of their teenage girls is their version of Annie Oakley. Last week a 16-year old Afghan girl, Qamar Gul, shouldered an AK-47 and took out two Taliban terrorists who murdered her parents and her little sister.

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According to various news sources, the weapon belonged to her father, a pro-government village chief. She definitely knew how to use it. But hell, it’s an AK, the most durable and reliable light rifle in the world. It would have been hard to get it wrong. Even so, the young woman showed remarkable courage in the showdown.

Fox News and Agence France-Press: “The incident involving Qamar Gul, who is around 15 years old, happened last week in Ghor province, according to the AFP. A local police chief told the news agency that the Taliban was after her father – a village chief and supporter of the Afghan government – and ended up dragging him and his wife outside of Gul’s home before killing them. Qamar Gul, who was inside the house, took an AK-47 gun the family had and first shot dead the two Taliban fighters who killed her parents, and then injured a few others. The fighters, after fleeing the area, later returned to attack Gul’s house a second time, according to the news agency. Yet other villagers and pro-government militiamen were able to disperse them following a gunfight. Gul and her younger brother reportedly have been escorted by Afghan security forces to a different and safer location.”

A basic misunderstanding in American geopolitical policy over the last half century is that we can do other people’s fighting better than they can. Thank the gods on high Mount Kissinger that President Donald Trump does not share that illusion.

Our “make the world safe for democracy” fetish assumed our little buddies around the globe would fight for their own land as long as we fought alongside them. That too many times proved false. Just like a multigenerational dependence on welfare can cripple the work ethic, the same concept, this time geared to American takeover of foreign civil wars, robbed those who had real stakes in the game —the nation’s inhabitants— of the sense of urgency and gravitas needed to fight their own wars. Which brings us back to our teenage heroine.

Like an American  frontierswoman, this young lady has more than proven her mettle against the desperadoes who killed her family. She and her kinsman and their kinsman are a match and then some for the bushwhackers who would take their land and their lives. Bravo for her and for brave people like her in Afghanistan who can take care of themselves.