After decades of ravage, Afghanistan is noticed
Getting to the point of an awkward exit has been quietly agonizing
A walk among the ruins, Afghanistan, 2009
I’m chagrined at our inefficiency getting Americans and friends of Americans out of Afghanistan. But despite their peril, I find it distracts from a more important issue.
The similarity of the visuals to the fall of Saigon is not all that’s reminiscent of the American experience in Vietnam. There’s the failure of our efforts at military supremacy and nation-building, and that’s not all, either.
The biggest similarity is that we have fouled up yet another country for absolutely no reason.
Since World War II, we have killed huge numbers of people who might have done wonderful things in the world. One of those things is to remain alive.
We were supposed to be in Afghanistan to go after Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda. It took us 10 years to get Bin Laden (in Pakistan, where he probably was holed up most of the time). Al-Qaeda is still operating in Afghanistan.
Along the way, neither mission seemed to be at the center of our activities as war went on and on. Mostly, we were just trying to subdue the Taliban, and we were doing it the way we always do -- maybe the only way possible.
We tried to kill all of them.
This is not what we should be about as a people. If you believe in the afterlife, maybe what has been done in our names should condemn us all to Hell.
We’ve done it in Afghanistan and Iraq, Cambodia, Vietnam and Korea. I don’t know where we get the idea that it’s all right to do this, and I’m mystified at why we keep it up.
The basic immorality of our bellicosity aside, what we’ve been doing can’t possibly work.
Afghanistan is a good example as any. The country has long been known as “a graveyard for foreign armies.” A dozen years before our misadventure began, it had been a morass for the Soviet Union.
Afghanistan had been a horrible experience for the 19th century British Empire, too. One of its wars there is known to history as “The Disaster in Afghanistan.”
Rudyard Kipling wrote about it at the end of his sardonic poem of instruction to “The Young British Soldier.”
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Just as the British did, we sent soldiers to do a dangerous, disheartening job, in a loosely-joined nation of wary, disparate ethnicities. While they had the hard duty of trying to fight while winning hearts and minds, the people in Afghanistan, and Iraq as well, made an impression on our guys, too. And as a result, many seriously question the mission which was at the center of their lives, as they leave without it even close to being done.
Now, some Americans say they should have been ordered to fight their way out to make it safer and easier for those trying to flee.
What in the world do we think of young people who signed up to risk everything for us? Theirs is but to do or die and that’s the beginning and ending of it?
Last year, we negotiated with the Taliban on a deal facilitating our withdrawal. We didn’t invite the Afghan leadership, the representatives of the country involved.
It’s like a game. It doesn’t matter where you play it.
But it does to the people of Afghanistan. They used to have a nice place to live. That’s hard to believe now.
The American Civil War was fought to end slavery. The war in Afghanistan was not fought to ensure anybody's rights or freedom, including women’s.
If the war had been won by the U.S., those rights might have thrived, of course. But what would be the cost in American blood, time and treasure to wipe out an army that doesn’t even fear us enough to wear helmets? They could stand up to us forever.
Has it really taken us 20 years to figure that out?
Since 1991, we have prosecuted three big wars of questionable provenance. The long, publicly-ignored one in Afghanistan, a response to the 9/11 attacks, may be the most maddening of a mad lot.
None of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Afghanistan. Fifteen were from Saudi Arabia. Yet the Saudis are still free to oppress women and kill journalists, because we have a big economic stake in their country.
The Taliban is largely a Pakistan-supported entity, but we don’t mess with them, either. There’s an economic relationship with that country, too. And it has nukes, an army of 560,000 and an air force with about 600 aircraft, including F-16s from General Dynamics.
It’s about time we stop picking fights we think we can win. Or any fights, for that matter.
Give me liberty or give me death. Hold the death.
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