Victory Through Apathy

 We worked for twenty years, and we finally achieved something in Afghanistan: This generation's Vietnam. When I say "we worked," I mean that it took a tremendous amount of apathy to generate such a horrible outcome. Replacing the images of refugees climbing the gates of the United States Embassy in Saigon are those of Afghans clinging to the side of a United States transport plane as it moves down the runway. And the bodies falling from that plane as it leaves the ground. 

For two decades, we threw more than two trillion dollars at the war in Afghanistan. We were there just after September 11, 2001 with the intent of rooting out those responsible for the attacks on American soil and making sure that Al Qaeda would and could not operate from their hideouts in the hills there. Then we figured out that many of those responsible for the terrorist attack in New York and Washington DC were from Saudi Arabia. And once we caught up with Osama bin Laden, he was not in a cave in Afghanistan, but in a nice neighborhood in Pakistan. 

Which did not keep us from pursuing objectives in the country we invaded. Thousands of American soldiers died in defense of whatever those operations were, and thousands more civilian contractors who made the trip to support the "war effort." Tens of thousands of Afghan police and military personnel died, and tens of thousands more Afghan civilians. Somewhere in the midst of all that carnage, there was a goal of returning Afghanistan back to "the good guys." Just exactly who those "good guys" were was what kept us in the fight for so very long. The Russians spent nine years fighting in Afghanistan before tucking their superpower tail between its legs and departing, leaving a mess that helped generate the conditions into which the United States fell at the beginning of this century. 

I was one of those who insisted that he "supported the troops, but not the war." This was a very popular sentiment back in 2001. It rationalized the space between the war and those on the ground suffering through it. Looking back, I wonder if we could have found ourselves out of the swamp more quickly or decisively if we had all been more committal. I'm all for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I don't know exactly where I stand on bread. Twenty year old, blood soaked bread. 

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it. And to eat those awful sandwiches.