America Will Have to Reckon With Its Cynicism About Afghanistan
I was deployed in Afghanistan, and by the end, I thought the situation was hopeless. But my cynicism eventually melted away, as I suppose America’s will.
Very few Americans are allowing themselves to feel anything about Afghanistan anymore. A triple bombing in Kabul left 80 people, many of them schoolgirls, dead last week. In photographs, you see the physical devastation of the bombing—a crater, twisted metal, gouged walls—but the more visceral devastation is in the faces of family members, the contorted, grief-stricken expressions of mothers and fathers at the gates of the school as they search for their daughters. In one image, a little boy holds his missing sister’s backpack. What you see is pure loss. The media covered the bombing, but I didn’t discern any outrage among people in the United States.
