Few wars get clean ends. Some here in America may want that small grace for Afghanistan as surely as some there deserve it, but in this way, war’s like life. Being deserving just makes you a target.
It began clean enough. The US invaded in the weeks after 9/11, at George W Bush’s behest, to dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda who’d attacked us. We sought something between justice and vengeance. Once the terrorist group and its Taliban enablers had been defeated, we stayed. Once Osama bin Laden was killed, in neighbouring Pakistan, we stayed. We stayed and we stayed and we stayed.
We stayed for democracy at one point, human rights at another. To nation-build, if you believed in counterinsurgency, or to ‘mow the grass’—a euphemism for killing terrorists that admits doing so will produce more—if you favoured counterterrorism.
Somewhere along the way, the war lost public interest and support. Those matter in a republic, though one could be forgiven for getting lulled into thinking otherwise the past 20 years. The war’s justification became the war’s existence itself, and that’s a twisted reason to keep killing people in the name of country, as well as risking the lives of our own.
A ghoul of a question hovered over the rapid Taliban advancement in the summer of 2021: How? How had two decades of blood and treasure left a porous apparatus either unwilling or unable to defend itself? US personnel had tried to build the Afghan security forces in our own image, with a national army and special operations and a core belief that the military can and should do more than engage the enemy on battlefields.
The hubris of it all. In our own image. Hold up a mirror and you may not like what you see.
Even in this shared defeat, we want—we seem to need—to make it about us. So big-brained pontificators and TV squawkers made grand declarations about the ugly withdrawal marking our late- imperial decline. The tail of the American Century, the death knell of star-spangled exceptionalism. The end of something, certainly, and the end of something demands hysterics.
Sometimes, though, tragedy is just tragedy. Sometimes meaning is only more noise.
A tragedy’s coda: 13 American service members and more than 170 Afghan civilians were killed in the 26 August suicide bombing at Kabul’s airport. It’s the bleakest of ironies that those troops who died did so with a moral purpose not seen in the war for some years. They died trying to shepherd strangers to safety 20-year-old Marines among the final casualties of a war their same age.
The Afghanistan war’s end was brought about by a commander- in-chief who took seriously his pledge to do so. He’s a military father, and that may have made the difference. Joe Biden faced down a lot of entrenched institutional forces to follow through, and future historians should credit him that resolve. America’s broader ‘forever war’ continues, but who knows what the Afghanistan withdrawal augurs. Nothing lasts forever, not even forever wars.
Did it have to end like this, though? With allies braving Taliban checkpoints and desperate mobs for the mere chance to get on an airplane? With US Marines and paratroopers holding the line, gripping cocked rifles in one hand and reaching for Afghan babies with the other, all under the constant threat of another bombing?
It did not. Anyone who says differently has bought a political lie or is selling the same. We have our eyes and basic sense, if we’re willing to use them. One hard truth is that no matter what, some allies would’ve been left behind. Another is that the logistical marvel of evacuating more than 120,000 people in a month’s time does not atone for the lack of planning that necessitated the feat.
The US Air Force
