The US presence in Afghanistan belongs to the media now—to books and documentaries and op eds—but what was it? An undeclared war, a country, a defeat? I think we’ll be collecting shards of our hollowed out and broken national values for a long time to come as dozens of answers are considered.
Afghanistan became the focus of retaliation for the attack of 9/11 twenty years ago, but it had already been a major staging ground for the US-USSR proxy wars. In fact, ironically, the CIA took credit for defeating the USSR in the Cold War by making it too impossibly costly in blood, treasure, and reputation to keep Soviet forces in Afghanistan.
This is not about the time before the US invaded, but about what happened afterward. At this point, consensus is that Washington took its attention on to Iraq and put Afghanistan on the back burner, and that’s where it stayed for the next twenty years. No one protested Afghanistan or marched against it or wrote protest songs about it. Still, how could we forget? Was it like parts of underserved cities in America where so many struggle to live and survive while the others continue in relative comfort and security? And yet American service people were fighting and dying there, approximately 2,300 over 20 years, and over 47,000 Afghan civilians.
The war wasn’t entirely invisible. It made great dramatic back-stories for TV characters like some doctors on “Grey’s Anatomy” and “The Resident.” A number of movies featured manly men doing manly things in camouflage or shirtlessly, usually undisturbed by local civilians unless they were being killed by snipers and drones. Afghanistan made for great seminars on how PTSD works, but it rarely showed up in news stories or presidential State-of-the-Union addresses. When the war was cited, it was always getting better, turning a corner, getting a new military boss. Congress people got their pictures taken there but never said much later at home—oh, but the Afghan women who folded away their burqas were always used to prove that what the US was doing there was great.
One aspect of the US role in Afghanistan cannot be overlooked: the oft-cited notion of nation building. Most people who brought it up sadly decried the possibility of success with various excuses about how the country was not ready for democracy, or it was too tribal. Occasionally, a more honest reason was given: the endemic corruption of a kleptocracy that grew more rooted every year as the US paid off, or tried to ignore, or winked at Afghan government behavior. If you’re unclear how that works, think of the schools that the US gave money to Afghan officials to build who gave some of it to contractors and pocketed the rest. Then the contractors pocketed their share, and so on down the line. By the way, that’s what so-called Afghan tribalism is about: the people you share your dollars out to. Anyone who wants more stories can go to the online reports of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) that warned clearly and repeatedly for years how ineffectively progress was being made and analyzed why.
Did none of the senators, congress people, generals, or whoever was supposed to be overseeing US work in Afghanistan ever read the quarterly SIGAR reports? Isn’t that their job? Twenty years and no one noticed how badly things were going? It wasn’t that mysterious, not really.
Of course the US public has some responsibility but we did think the people in charge were doing their jobs. Especially someone like the current president who got his job on the grounds that he had lots of experience. Wasn’t he in government the entire two decades? Still, as US troops left and the country was taken over by the Taliban, he barely had time to wail, “But we spent trillions of dollars.” Maybe he can get some of the money back from the US companies who were paid to train the Afghan defense forces.
Or maybe the US government wasn’t that surprised. Maybe now that we have had twenty years to gain battle-tested forces and state-of-the art new weaponry, we don’t need a country to practice in. And we still have troops in over 100 countries. What was it Biden said about “over-the-horizon” capabilities making it unnecessary to stay in Afghanistan? I wager we won’t hear much more about that, especially after learning that the drone strike that was supposed to kill a terrorist in Kabul actually killed a family with children. The public has already been trained not to worry about what US drones and special forces do out there; our in-country dramas are far too distracting. Maybe the government has been doing its job and lots of us just don’t exactly know what that job is.
Gemstone: Aquamarine
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