It’s no small thing when grotesque mistakes and lies about them cost 2,300 lives and a trillion dollars, but that’s what we got from U.S. officials who have kept us at war in Afghanistan for 18 years. A chief culprit is the Pentagon, but also presidents, Congress and the State Department. And the overall picture is powerfully sustained by a Washington Post expose that comes at us at a time when so much else in our republic is a mess.
After all, we right now have House Democrats atrociously abusing their power in an impeachment effort doing more to toss principles out the window than a legitimately elected if fault-filled president who will be saved by the Senate.
And on top of that we once-proud Americans are learning how the military went askew in Afghanistan after an initial attack following the 9/11 tragedy at the hands of al-Qaida. We needed to strike back if we were going to prevent future terrorism on our shores, and we asked the Taliban, then pretty much in charge of Afghanistan, to let us punish the al-Qaida conspirators in the neighborhood. The Taliban said no, and we invaded, pushed the Taliban aside and shredded al-Qaida as its terror-struck terrorists fled into Pakistan. We should have then said goodbye with a promise to visit again if necessary.
Instead, our military hung around with no idea of what our mission was or what strategies would work in a land where we understood nothing about the culture. We weren’t going to try nation building, but we did, leading to confusion and unspeakable corruption. We were going to stop the opium trade, but saw it blossom. We were going to train the Afghan army, but it’s still untrained. We were going to crush al-Qaida, but what was left was gone. We were going to sink the Taliban but it was big and entrenched and we should have negotiated instead of just watching it rise again. We were going to protect civilians but saw thousands killed.
