A sad and humiliating ending
Three days left until the last Western troops leave Afghanistan — unless U.S. President Joe Biden changes his mind at the last minute.
Afghanistan has been the U.S.’s longest war. Twenty years, give or take a couple of months. Longer even than Viet Nam -- and with a strikingly similar ending.
Who will forget the pictures of America leaving Saigon. Helicopters lifting Americans to safety. Desperate people clinging to wheels and handles.
It was an ignominious and humiliating ending.
Likewise, who will forget footage of desperate people running along a runway beside a troop carrier the size of a freight train, hoping to hitch-hike a lift out of their country? Who will forget people clinging to the plane’s undercarriage, its doors, its fuselage, as the plane lifts off into the skies?
Distance spared us hearing those stowaways’ screams as they fell thousands of feet to death.
I wonder if the people inside could hear their screams.
Will it haunt them for the rest of their lives? Or did they smugly congratulate themselves that, in the old cliché, they made it into the lifeboats before the ladders were pulled up?
The war cost America over $2 trillion. About 2,500 American soldiers died, along with about 100,000 Afghan soldiers and police and an estimated 50,000 Afghan civilians (I expect the true figure to be much higher).
That’s not counting losses by other countries in the “Allied” front. Joining the fight in Afghanistan cost Canada about $18 billion. And 148 lives.
And the result of that 20 years of war? Zero.
The country is back exactly where it was, 20 years ago, with a rigidly anti-western cohort of Islamic males in control.
Russia did not help the Taliban against the occupation armies. It didn’t need to. After its own disastrous ten-year war in Afghanistan, I suspect the Kremlin sat back and smirked at the American delusion that they could succeed where no other invader ever had.
The U.S. did originally have a reason for invading Afghanistan — to capture and punish Osama Bin Laden, the presumed mastermind behind the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. Even if, as now seems likely, he was in Pakistan all along.
But why would they keep going for 20 years, after U.S. Intelligence knew he wasn’t there?
As a writer, I see the words people choose to use being crucial.
Whenever America, collectively, decides to act against a perceived threat, they call it a war. War on Poverty. War on Drugs. Even a Peace Corps.
War may be a valid metaphor for mobilizing forces around a common cause. To my mind, though, it entrenches the conviction that the way to change things is to go to war.
Thinking, speaking, and acting are inseparably woven together. As an example, consider gender- or race-based language. If you consistently speak of women as broads or bitches, if you think of indigenous peoples as lazy, undependable, or dishonest, you will not treat them with respect.
Your words reveal how you think. Your thoughts influence what you do.
But, you may object, thoughts are involuntary — “I can’t control how I think!”
Yes, you can. If, just before you blurt out a sexist comment or a racist joke, you have a momentary twinge and realize, “I can’t say that,” you have learned to control your words. And in the process, you will start reforming your thinking patterns.
It’s a circular pattern. Thoughts affect speech, apeech affects actions, actions affect thoughts.
Also the other way around — physical actions set up thought patterns, which influence words.
Neuro-Linguistic Programming, popular a few decades ago, asserted that by deliberately altering your body language, you could alter your reactions to external events.
Suppose you expect a confrontation. You’d probably go into it braced for either fight or flight. In other words, tense.
NLP would suggest recalling some moment when you felt supremely confident, capable, in control. Immediately, your posture will change. And with it, your attitude and your behaviour.
All this is a way of saying that as long as Americans in general, and American leaders in particular, keep thinking in “war” metaphors, the U.S. will inevitably find itself embroiled in Afghanistans around the world.
It will see its goal as victory — think of G.W. Bush landing in 2003 on an aircraft carrier proclaiming “Mission Accomplished.” Success meant defeating an enemy, not building a friend.
We need to be more conscious of the implications of the words we choose to use. They may have consequences we didn’t anticipate. Like a futile 20-year war.