It's frustrating. It's maddening. The speed at which this started collapsing makes it very hard. It's faster than our ability to process our experiences over the last 20 years. I've been texting with an Afghan senior officer in hiding right now.
His family is in hiding. There's a real life crisis going on. For veterans, this isn't about us right now. Our friends are in real danger today. It's not over yet. This is not the time to feel sorry for ourselves. I am an idealist who joined the Army because I wanted to do good. When we got to Afghanistan, it was a lesson in empathy, working in foreign cultures, seeing a beautiful country with a rich history. Was it worth it? Was my role worth it?
At the time I thought I'd done some good - but now I need time to reflect. We created a military for a country that did not yet exist, a colleague of mine once said. The Afghan army felt no loyalty to a government that they saw as corrupt and illegitimate. I don't know if more US troops would have stopped the inevitable.
I don't know that anybody who worked on the ground there is particularly shocked at the outcome. The tragedy is that there are people in Afghanistan that just want their kids to grow up and be safe.
For some, they had a taste of what that's like when we were there, and now darkness has returned. Kyle Hanson served in the US Army from to I'm feeling a lot of different emotions. I feel sadness for so much of my fellow comrades' youth spent and lost for this cause.
However, I certainly do not feel shock - it has long been known the ineffectiveness of the Afghan state and military. This was known to be what would happen when we left.
American politicians passed it back and forth for 20 years, but the war stopped being worth it shortly after it began. I'm not surprised by how quickly the Afghan army fell - the Taliban had been given plenty of time to prepare, and given nearly exact dates to work with.
Biden may be that the chaotic exit provides fodder for a broader Republican argument that he is not up to the job and has left the United States humiliated on the world stage. This is the worst, not in loss of life, but in deep damage to soul.
In fact, the causality is backwards. As Spencer Ackerman writes , it was precisely two decades of war nationalism and the state of exception they produced that eroded American democracy. Those conditions also set the stage for a racist demagogue whose primary criticism of American wars was that they were incompetently managed because feckless American elites were insufficiently murderous.
And yet not even the war-crime enthusiast Trump could slaughter his way to victory in Afghanistan—another national humiliation Trump rushed to ameliorate with an exit toward the end of his term. I feel guilty about it because I should be feeling pain and horror and anger about the recent events. Real American values had been revived by the War on Terror.
Although the country remained closely divided—George W. To express skepticism about this national mission—not even opposition, but merely skepticism—was to side with the terrorists, to be the kind of person who would not lift a finger to save their own child. It was to abandon America, and Americans. As a national mission, this crusade was far less successful than the New Deal, or even the Cold War. The New Deal expanded the American welfare state and empowered workers against their bosses.
The Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union. The roots of its failure are not simply conceptual but lie in the zeal that could not suffer scrutiny or recognize error. Al-Qaeda had not only murdered thousands of people here at home, but questioned American resolve and American strength. American leaders sought to purge the fear and humiliation many felt with violence, by turning Afghanistan into a utopia where groups like al-Qaeda could not exist. A cting on that impulse , the Bush administration was not satisfied with simply defeating the Taliban in Although the most crucial mistakes were likely made during the Bush administration , devastating errors were made across four administrations, both Democratic and Republican.
Tom Nichols: Afghanistan is your fault. Reconstruction projects were unused, abandoned, or destroyed. Everything the U.
On many fronts, the Taliban are rolling over Afghan security forces that U. This swift advance sets up a last stand in Kabul, where most Afghans live. Biden quickly corrected himself, evoking the victories of the first few years of the war.
America expended the most lives, and dollars, on the most inconclusive years of the war. The repeated deployments contributed to disability rates in those veterans that are more than double that of Vietnam veterans, says Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. Bilmes calculates the U. Because the U. In all, 2, American troops, 1, service members from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47, Afghan civilians and at least 66, Afghan military and police died, according to the Pentagon and to the Costs of War project.
All the while, a succession of U. In Helmand province, which proved the turning point for Bee in , hundreds of U. Taliban fighters recaptured the province on Friday.
Ask the same question in Afghanistan, though, and you get different answers. The Associated Press is using her first name only, given fears of Taliban retribution against women who violate their strict codes.
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