Recalling his service in Afghanistan, former Marine captain Timothy Kudo tries to come to terms with his service there and whether it had any meaning. “But what if the answer is no?” he asks himself.
I remember I once asked a village elder whether he knew why I was there. He responded that we’d always been there. Confused, I asked him about the attacks on America. He said, “But you are Russians, no?” After 30 years of war, it didn’t matter to him who was fighting but only that there was still fighting.
Afghan children dream about the fighting. It’s all they have ever known.
President Joe Biden on Wednesday pledged to “end the forever war” and have U.S. troops out of Afghanistan by Sept. 11 this year, the 20th anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks. It remains to be seen whether he will accomplish that goal. If he does, he will simply have conceded the inevitable.
Afghanistan has been the “graveyard of empires” since Alexander the Great — for so long that the phrase’s origins are unclear. Foreign correspondent Rod Nordland wrote in the New York Times in August 2017:
In truth, no great empires perished solely because of Afghanistan. Perhaps a better way to put it is that Afghanistan is the battleground of empires. Even without easily accessible resources, the country has still been blessed — or cursed, more likely — with a geopolitical position that has repeatedly put it in someone or other’s way.
In the 19th century there was the Great Game, when the British and Russian empires faced off across its forbidding deserts and mountain ranges. At the end of the 20th century it was the Cold War, when the Soviet and American rivalry played out here in a bitter guerrilla conflict. And in this century, it is the War on Terror and a constantly shifting Taliban insurgency, with President Trump promising a renewed military commitment.
Trump eventually cut a deal with Taliban forces (he excluded the Afghan government; he wanted a “win”) for the U.S. to exit Afghanistan by May 1 this year. That is not going to happen. The are NATO and European forces there as well. But if the U.S. pulls out as Biden proposes, they will as well.
The Taliban agreed under Trump not to kill Americans as they exit and they haven’t, Dexter Filkins (“The Forever War“) told Terry Gross of “Fresh Air” in March. Instead, they are assassinating Afghans:
So the Taliban – the leaders are sitting at the table, and they’re negotiating with the Afghan government right now about some kind of peace deal, you know, cease-fire or some kind of interim government, the thing that’s supposed to end the war. But at the same time they’re doing that, they’ve launched this very aggressive assassination campaign, which is basically targeting the elites and the educated classes, the people and the women – the people who have benefited most and the people who have really stepped to the fore since 9/11. It’s the 9/11 generation, the post-2001 generation, which, basically, the United States has enabled. And so it’s educated people. It’s women. It’s women’s rights activists. It’s people with master’s degrees and Ph.D.s. And they’re targeting them – judges, lawyers, journalists, aid workers – one after the other. So I think we’re at pretty close to 500 assassinations since the peace agreement was signed.
All those responsible for 9/11 are dead. Gone. There is no external solution for what remains. The Taliban want a medieval society, an “Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan,” and they have time on their side.
As a video in today’s New York Times explains, “Democracy Doesn’t Come in a Box.” Nor out of a gun barrel.
From the video transcript:
Retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Daniel L. Davis: I consider myself a conservative, a Republican. In 2011, I had read that things were on the way to getting better. But when I was deployed to Afghanistan, I can tell you, I saw violence was going up, the civilians were getting killed, the Afghan military were not being effectively trained. Our leadership had been lying to us. You cannot accomplish with military power a political outcome….
There’s this line of thinking that if we withdraw from Afghanistan, there will be a new civil war that’s going to start. O.K., there is a civil war going on in Afghanistan right now. The Afghans were having a civil war in 2001 when we first went in there. They had been fighting for years. And our presence there does not stop it.
Retired U.S. Army Maj. Danny Sjursen: Whether we leave tomorrow or whether we leave 10 years from now, the outcome is the same, which is a brutal civil war and half the country is going to fall under Taliban rule again and women are going to live in a medieval situation until the Afghan people as a whole come up with an Afghan solution to an Afghan problem.
The question now in this period of intensifying xenophobia in the U.S. is who will we abandon there to die when we leave as Trump did with allies in Syria?
Based on the comment thread for the tweet above, some “Americans” (it’s Twitter) are ready to do to allies in Afghanistan what Trump did to Syrian Kurds. And with no pangs of conscience about it.