Those who served
As cities in Afghanistan fell to the Taliban like so many dominoes, many military veterans in Illinois and beyond who served in that war-torn country called up their compatriots. They were looking for help in processing their evolving feelings about their mission.
On social media, many veterans of the conflict described their state of mind as various shades of complicated. Some expressed fury at the rout of the corrupt, weak, U.S.-backed Afghan government, wondering why their friends were among the 2,000 members of the U.S. military who died in that country as part of an attempt to build a Western-style democracy there. Many parents of fallen servicemen and women felt the same way.
In a Saturday statement, President Joe Biden justified his decision to pull forces out of the country by blaming the failure of the Afghan military: “One more year, or five more years, of U.S. military presence would not have made a difference if the Afghan military cannot or will not hold its own country,” he said. “And an endless American presence in the middle of another country’s civil conflict was not acceptable to me.”
Some historians and political analysts saw the cataclysmic weekend as evidence of the folly of nation building in areas long misunderstood by the U.S. and its allies and the rise of the Taliban as both relentless and inevitable. Others argued that the human price likely to be paid now by the Afghan people, especially women and girls, especially those who had aided the U.S. and its allies in the conflict with the demonstrably brutal Taliban, was far too great to justify so brutally and rapidly calamitous an abandonment.
Biden and his sympathizers blamed prior presidents from Donald J. Trump to Barack Obama to George W. Bush. Biden’s opponents argued that history will judge this past weekend as a signature failure of his young administration with severe implications for what will be possible in the future.
All of that is grist for the mill of argument, analysis, recrimination and learning.
But the first thoughts of this page are with those of our fellow Illinoisans who gave their time, their energy, their hearts and in some cases their lives for the multiyear U.S. mission in Afghanistan.
Military service is demanding even when the outcome is victorious. But when the mission ends in a finger-pointing muddle, veterans looking back on sacrifices in a theater of engagement are understandably filled with complicated memories.
So not only do the pictures from Afghanistan not diminish those who served and lost their lives there, they should remind us of just how much they are owed by those of us who remained at home, safely out of this impossibly difficult mission.