Painful truth: Afghanistan was a mostly useless war

Recently I've seen interviews with veterans of the twenty-year Afghanistan war where the interviewer says at some point, "Thank you for your service; it wasn't in vain."

Not true. It was mostly in vain.

So were the 2,448 deaths of American service members, the 66,000 deaths of Afghan military and police, the 47,245 deaths of Afghan civilians, the 444 deaths of aid workers, and the 44 deaths of journalists.

I realize that it's really tough to admit that a war which cost the United States over 2 trillion dollars and caused so many deaths was a big mistake -- at least after Osama bin Laden had left the country and Al-Qaeda no longer had a viable presence in Afghanistan, which occurred soon after our 2001 invasion.

So virtually all that money and all those deaths went toward nation-building.

Just as in Iraq, the United States is great at winning wars against minimal opposition. We're lousy at nation-building, in large part because we believe that it's possible to remake other countries in our own image. 

Trump wisely decided to pull American forces out of Afghanistan. Biden wisely decided to go along with Trump's decision. Yet supporters of a perpetual war in Afghanistan now are criticizing Biden for doing what most Americans support: getting out.

It doesn't make sense to argue that even though the Afghanistan war was a failure, the contributions of the American military were a success. 

Sure, it's human nature to see a glass as half full rather than half empty. But when a war is almost entirely useless, those who fought that war almost entirely were doing something equally useless. 

Obviously almost all of the Americans who served in Afghanistan did so with bravery and honor. However, so did almost all of the Confederate forces who fought in the Civil War. This doesn't make the Confederate cause anything other than what it was: a failed attempt to secede from the Union.

Undoubtedly some good came out of the Civil War, though I'm unsure what that might me. Some technological advances, probably. Some good also resulted from the Afghanistan war.

However, if Americans had been asked in 2001 if they'd be willing to fight a twenty-year war that resulted in Afghan women and girls having considerably more rights, and Afghanistan getting roads, schools, wells, and other infrastructure built, few of our citizens would have said that'd be worth thousands of American lives and several trillion dollars -- especially if the end result was the Taliban returning to power.

The plain fact is that sometimes a lot of effort goes into a cause that results in failure.

Everybody has experienced this in their own life to a greater or lesser extent. Countries experience this also. Witness the United States and the Vietnam War. Witness Germany/Japan and the Second World War. 

Sacrifices frequently are made for a lost cause. This doesn't take away from the nobility of those who made the sacrifices, because it is impossible to know that a cause is lost until that happens. 

Which is the case in Afghanistan.

Veterans of that war are entitled to look for benefits from their service. But history can't be rewritten to make those veterans feel better. For most of those twenty years, the Afghanistan war was a mistake. Our military and political leaders misled the public about how the war was going, just as happened with the Vietnam War.

Now President Biden is telling the truth to the American people. Good for him. That truth about a mostly useless war has been a long time coming.

I'll end by copying in a series of tweets that do a great job of briefly explaining the Afghanistan war and the current uproar over the American pullout. 

Comments

[E.M.]

Thank you, Blogger Brian, for expressing you thoughts and sharing Mr. Roberts words.

David Roberts's words are blunt. The sentiment is disquieting, The fact remains, U.S. military hubris, even with good intentions, is arrogant and flawed. The British did not win in Afghanistan. The Soviets did not win in Afghanistan. The U.S. did not win in Afghanistan.

Even with the foreign invaders pushed out the tribal conflicts and theological differences will continue. Afghanistan has long been an aggregation is fiefdoms. That will not change in the immediate future.

[W.]

I joined the military in 2008. I was homeless, had no path forward, and was suicidal.

The military provided me opportunity to succeed, a college degree, special perks, job opportunities, and severe physical disabilities which cause me constant never ending pain.

You would look at me on the street, and see a middle age adult. You don’t see the herniated discs, the reconstructed shoulder, the severe arthritis, the reduced lung capacity which requires daily steroid usage, or the relationship destroying toxicity that is PTSD.

Pain which often brought me to tears because I would fight the pain for hours to console my infant in my arms.

Trauma that keeps me from going to kids birthday parties or chucky cheese. screaming children causes the hair on my skin to stand up and for me to dissociate from reality while fighting flashbacks with grounding techniques.

In 2012 I was sitting in a laundry mat washing the comforter for my bed. Obama was on the news and had stated we were going to pull out of the Middle East. I broke down and I wept. The idea that we would stop throwing people like me into positions where we hurt people who are different for money. Where people like me are put under the leadership of sociopaths who gravitate to positions with low oversight and high levels of power.

I wept because for the first time in my life, over 4 years into my time in the service, for the first time I felt true unbridled hop for humanity. For my society and my future.

It took 9 years. 9 fucking years. But it’s done, or will be shortly. I have spent many days lately in sheer rage when I turn on any news source, whether it be NPR or local news. Paid and sponsored content arguing about how terrible it is that we leave a country we had no right to be in. Interviews from veterans talking about how we should still be there. But nothing from the other side. From people like me who see our occupation of these countries as merely another atrocity under the belt of my motherland.

General Smedley Butler said war is a racket. 100 years later it as just as true today. I hope someday we can stop killing people who are different for economic benefit.

[mark h wigg]

The goal of the Afghan war was to spend money on arms and contractors, not to help the people of Afghanistan. The goal was achieved with trillions spent killing and destroying a society.
I asked numerous very conservative friends if we should have been in any wars after WW2. So far, every conservative has agreed that we should not have been in any of the wars. Maybe they won't believe the lies from our government when the media and government try to get us into another war.