2021 archive

Writing at the Des Moines Register, Afgan war veteran Sophia-Helene Mees de Tricht says that there’s a lesson to be learned, if only we would learn it.

I fought this war for 10 years and I know we could have stayed in Afghanistan another 10 years, another 20, we could have stayed until the stars died and it would change nothing. Our attempts to build western-style statehood in Afghanistan resulted in a Potemkin army, Potemkin security forces, and a Potemkin state. The Taliban takeover was, as a result, inevitable.

But more to the point, this was never a war that could be won. Even as we fought it, we weren’t sure what the goal was. I grew up a lot the day I realized that we were there because we as a nation lashed out in anger and pain, and we’ve been stuck ever since. Ending this cycle of violence, a direct result of our tenuous occupation of that country, is the right thing to do.

In the great majority of the bloviating about the chaos accompanying the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, I see a failure to acknowledge that this occupation was doomed from the git-go. Delaying the withdrawal would have served only to delay the chaos, not to prevent it.

Nor do I see much acknowledgement from those well-paid talking heads that President George W. Bush created this mess by choosing to stage a long term occupation, as opposed to simply rooting out Osama bin Laden (who was a Saudi hiding in Afghanistan, not an Afghani) and then going home. Nor do I see sufficient acknowledgement of the previous Federal Executive’s role in setting the stage for what’s happening now.

I fear that too much of our punditry views war in much they same way as they view politics: as a game for their amusement and their ratings, as grist for their talking points.

War is not a game. War is unpredictability and death and suffering and capriciousness and chaos.

I find it galling when well-paid stuffed suits sit safely in their luxurious abodes thousands of miles away from danger and say to others, “Suffer more so that we are not embarrassed.”

This does not mean that I have any sympathy for the Taliban, nor does it mean that I have no concern for the threat they pose to their own people. They are Afghanistan’s religious right (perhaps more inimical than our own religious right, but not by much), but we have seen that we cannot magically make them go away through force of arms. Twenty years of futile death have proved that.

President Biden is not responsible for our failure in Afghanistan. Rather, he is to be commended for having the courage to bring it to an end.