San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Assessing incalculable costs of a long war
Here’s what 19-yearold Lance Cpl. William Bee felt flying into southern Afghanistan on Christmas Day 2001: purely lucky. The U.S. was hitting back at the al Qaeda plotters who had brought down the World Trade Center, and Bee found himself among the first Marines on the ground.
“Excitement,” Bee says these days of his teenage thoughts then. “To be the dudes that got to open it up first.”
In the decade that followed, three more deployments in America’s longest war transformed that lucky feeling.
For Bee, it came down to a night in 2008 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. By then a sergeant, he held the hand of an American sniper who had just been shot in the head, as a medic sliced open the man’s throat for an airway.
“After that it was like, you know what — ‘F— these people,’ ” Bee recounted, of what drove him by his fourth, and final, Afghan deployment. “I just want to bring my guys back. That’s all I care about. I want to bring them home.”
As President Biden shuts down the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan this month, Americans and Afghans are questioning whether the war was worth the cost: more than 3,000 American and other NATO lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghans dead and trillions of dollars of
U.S. soldiers patrol west of the capital of Kabul in 2012. The Taliban have seized control of much of Afghanistan as the United States completes its withdrawal from nearly two decades of war.
U.S. debt that generations of Americans will pay for. After a stunning week of fighting, Afghanistan appears in imminent peril of falling back under Taliban rule, just as Americans found it nearly 20 years ago.
For Biden, for Bee and for some of the American principals in the U.S. and NATO war in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it was worth the cost often comes down to parsing.
There were the first years of the war when Americans broke up Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda in Afghanistan
and routed the Taliban government that had hosted it. That succeeded.
The proof is clear, says Douglas Lute, White House czar for the war under the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and a retired lieutenant general: Al Qaeda hasn’t been able to mount a major attack on the West since 2005.
“We have decimated al Qaeda in that region, in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Lute says.
But after that came the grinding second phase of the war. U.S. fears of a
Taliban rebound whenever Americans eventually pulled out meant that service members like Bee kept getting sent back in, racking up more close calls, injuries and dead comrades.
Lute and others argue that what the second half of the war bought was time — a grace period for Afghanistan’s government, security forces and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive on their own.
Quality of life in some ways did improve under the Western occupation, even as the millions of dollars the U.S. poured
into Afghanistan fed corruption. Infant mortality rates fell by half. In 2005, fewer than 1 in 4 Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, nearly all did.
The second half of the war allowed Afghan women opportunities entirely denied them under the fundamentalist Taliban, so that more than 1 in 3 teenage girls — their whole lives spent under the protection of Western forces — today can read and write.
But it’s that longest, second phase of the war that looks on the verge of complete failure now.
The Taliban’s stunning advance in the past week sets up a last stand in the capital, Kabul. It threatens to clamp the country under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of religious law, erasing much of the gains.
“There’s no ‘mission accomplished,’” Biden snapped last month, batting down a question from a reporter.
Biden quickly corrected himself, evoking the wins of the first few years of the war. “The mission was accomplished in that we … got Osama bin Laden, and terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world,” he added.
America expended the most lives, and dollars, on the more inconclusive years of the war.
Annual combat deaths peaked around the time of the war’s midpoint, as Obama tried a final surge of forces to defeat the Taliban. In all, 2,448 American troops, 1,144 service members from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47,000 Afghan civilians and at least 66,000 Afghan military and police died, according to the Pentagon and to the Costs of War project. Was it worth it? “The people whose lives we affected, I personally think we did them better, that they’re better off for it,” answered Bee, who lives in Jacksonville, N.C. “But I also wouldn’t trade a handful of Afghan villages for one Marine.”