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I cheered the Afghanistan invasion. I was wrong.
[The Week] It is a cliché to say that certain eras "end not with a bang, but a whimper," but the old trope is true in Afghanistan. U.S. and Taliban officials signed an agreement over the weekend that should lead to the withdrawal of American troops from that country — a development mostly overshadowed by the spread of coronavirus and developments in domestic presidential politics.That shouldn't be the case. Attention must be paid. Along with the war in Iraq, the Afghan experience defines the U.S. interactions in the world in the 21st century — a righteous display of might that ultimately devolved into an unending, unsolvable, exhausting slog. The war began on 9/11, when hijackers flew passenger planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon — another plane crashed in the Pennsylvania countryside — killing 2,977 victims and 19 hijackers. More than 2,300 American servicemembers have died in Afghanistan over the last generation, while estimates say that 157,000 people died there during the war — including more than 43,000 civilians. Everything about the war has been a tragedy. The invasion of Afghanistan is the only U.S. military offensive that I have wholeheartedly rooted for during my adult life. A few weeks after 9/11, I drove from my home in Kansas to New York — via the Flight 93 crash site in Pennsylvania — to witness history for myself. Smoke was still wafting from the bowels of the Twin Towers. Like Americans everywhere, I wanted revenge. I didn't believe for one second that the Al Qaeda terrorists hated us "for our freedom," the easy explanation offered Americans during the early days of "why do they hate us?" questioning after the attack. But thousands of civilians had been killed — in the first days after 9/11, it was widely believed that tens of thousands of civilians had been killed — and in the heat of the moment, it seemed that such massive violence must be met with equally massive violence. When Vice President Dick Cheney went on TV the next weekend to hint at the likelihood of torture in the coming conflict — promising U.S. personnel would work on "the dark side, if you will" — even that seemed to make sense to a nominal pacifist like myself. I was wrong. We — all of us who cheered the invasion and occupation of Afghanistan — were wrong. We were wrong because we ignored world history. There was a reason that Afghanistan — occupied over the years by the British, then by the Soviets — was already known as "the graveyard of empires." For cultural and geographic reasons, no would-be conqueror of the country has ever fully subdued its people. Responding to the 9/11 attack was not necessarily America's big mistake. Staying and trying to recreate Afghanistan in something like our own image was the crucial error, both hubristic and well-intentioned — we thought we could be the conquerors who left the country better than we found it. We are not. Article re-posted using proper font. Feel free to add in-line comments that may have been deleted. Thank you for your post. Posted by: Herb McCoy 2020-03-04 |
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