San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
A two-decade nightmare
I don’t know that Afghanistan was justified. But I know there was a crime committed there. And the blood of that crime is on us all.
During the fall of Saigon in 1975, a photographer famously captured American military members pushing an allied helicopter into the South China Sea. Few of us bother to learn the facts behind this image. I always thought the helicopter was disabled. It wasn’t.
American diplomats and civilians back in Saigon were waiting for U.S. aircraft to evacuate them before the city fell to the North Vietnamese Army. We threw the helicopter into the sea to make space.
I had always thought everyone was already gone. All I knew is was what the rest of us know when we see that picture — America lost the war in Vietnam.
I’m a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, and I’ve probably thought about that image of Saigon as much as most Vietnam vets. I didn’t want us to have a symbol like that burned into our minds. I wanted Afghanistan to be different from Vietnam.
When I joined the war to fight those “responsible” for the worst terror attack in American history, I wanted vindication for the nearly 4,000 killed. I wanted what my uncle never got in Vietnam, a win. Whatever that meant.
But because we went to Afghanistan for revenge, there was never any winning.
None of the people responsible for 911 were from Afghanistan. But the Taliban refused to give up Osama Bin Laden, so they became the enemy. Afghanistan became the place we would attack, the place we would spend the next 20 years, fighting America’s longest war, mostly on the backs of millennials who had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. I certainly didn’t.
I spent the better part of 2003 in the Paktia Province of Afghanistan. Pakistan, where we knew Bin Laden had escaped after the Battle of Tora Bora in 2001, was just a stone’s throw to the east from our little fire base in hell. It took a decade before SEAL Team Six finally assassinated him while he slept.
They stopped baseball games to announce the successful mission. People cheered in the streets like their team had just one the World Series. Frat boy beer-fueled chants of “USAUSA” filled the cable news stations. It was a spectacle of celebration dripping in Jingoist barbarism.
I did three tours in my four-year enlistment, the first in Afghanistan, the second two in Iraq. Like most Americans — and especially veterans — I tried to preserve Afghanistan in my mind as a semi-justifiable war. I tried to hold it separate and away from Iraq. I wanted our time — my time — in Afghanistan to mean something.
Somewhere along the way I became convinced it meant nothing. Nothing good anyway, just death, too much death on both sides for no good reason at all.
I remember the worst of it. The speeding Humvees disintegrating children’s bodies as they ran them over in the streets. A young boy walking to our firebase, seeking medical attention after one of our stray mortar rounds ripped a grapefruit-sized hole in his tiny body. I remember the time we accidentally dumped white phosphorous, an incendiary round that burns at 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit, on our own soldiers. There was the time the Taliban kidnapped our translator in the middle of the night and cut his head off. He died because we didn’t trust him enough to let him sleep in our compound. I remember the pre-pubescent girls offering impromptu sex shows for chocolate chip cookies. I remember my best friend who died there and my three friends who killed themselves upon their return.
As I watched Afghanistan fall back to the Taliban this month, I tried to tuck away my feelings. I thought about how terrible the war was, and how continuing it was no longer worth it and likely never was. I tried telling myself that it was not our responsibility to keep fighting.
To avoid emotional pain, I intellectualized the issue from a historical standpoint. I told myself that the people of Afghanistan have to fight for themselves. That they weren’t invaded by a foreign country that forced their ideology onto the people. The Taliban’s ideology comes from within. And you can’t destroy an ideology on the battlefield. I reiterated in my mind my belief that leaving Afghanistan is something America should have done a long time ago.
But then I turned on the radio. And I heard the interviews. Everyone was from Afghanistan. They called the past 20 years of American occupation “Afghanistan’s Golden Years.” A woman who escaped just weeks ago to join her family in India spoke. She was born in 1984, the same year I was born. She explained that because the American forces displaced the Taliban, she was able to attend Kabul University. Under the Taliban her mother was allowed no schooling past the age of 6. The woman still wore a hijab but called the rest of her wardrobe “predominantly western.” Many of her friends in college enjoyed wearing their hair long and uncovered. She could date who she wanted. She could marry, or perhaps more importantly, not marry who she wanted. She was single and her focus was on her career as a young professional. In tears she spoke of how she wouldn’t have a career 20 years ago. No education. Maybe instead she’d have been sold off as a teenage bride to a Taliban fighter, as her mother explained many of her own friends had been. And the only reason this had all changed, she said, was because U.S. troops kept the Taliban at bay.
The woman and the other interviewees I heard got out before Kabul fell. They were grateful to be among the lucky ones. But as one young man assured the audience, anyone remaining in the country with any affiliation with the West will undoubtedly be executed. These people were terrified for their friends and families. Not just for their immediate danger, but for the future of those who survive.
Then there are the national security questions, which I’ve long blamed as a red herring for more defense spending. Each person interviewed agreed that the Taliban command of Afghanistan won’t just mean violence in their own country.
So where does that put us?
I wish there was an answer. But I know that the solution to the problem in Afghanistan is as complex and convoluted as the reasons we were attacked to begin with.
After 20 years of fighting, it seems our enemies have grown. A war on terror that originated in Afghanistan extended to over a dozen other countries at its height. And many now fear that that number will only grow. When I was in Afghanistan, we said we didn’t want our kids fighting this war in 15 or 18 years. That happened. I don’t have kids. But some of my friends who served had kids who fought in the same war.
We can’t have our grandchildren fighting in Afghanistan. We also can’t abandon the allies we’ve made there. We have a moral obligation to protect them as we would our own U.S. soldiers. These people sacrificed far more than Americans can imagine. Just as the South Vietnamese sacrificed incalculably a generation earlier.
Hemingway once warned: “Never think war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”
I don’t know that Afghanistan was ever necessary or justified. But I know there was a crime committed there. And the blood of that crime is on us all.