USA TODAY International Edition
Afghanistan
Taliban representatives in Oman, negotiations that by this year had built to once- secret meetings at Camp David. But on Sept. 9, in response to a Taliban attack that killed a U. S. soldier and 11 others, Trump called that dialogue “dead.”
The violence has since escalated. On Sept. 16, two Taliban suicide bombers killed 48 people in attacks aimed at disrupting Afghanistan’s Sept. 28 presidential elections in which President Ashraf Ghani was seeking a second fiveyear term. On election day, dozens of attacks flared, killing five. In early counting, Ghani and his challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, both claim they are in the lead, and results are not expected for weeks.
Roughly 14,000 U. S. troops remain in Afghanistan. About 2,400 U. S. soldiers have died in the war.
“In scholarship circles, there are roughly two camps on this war: one crowd that says, ‘ This never would have worked, and we should have seen that,’ and the other that says, ‘ It could have, but we’ve done it all badly,’ ” says Aaron O’Connell, an associate professor of history at the University of Texas, Austin who is a colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve and was special assistant to Gen. David Petraeus in Afghanistan.
O’Connell says some of the mistakes made include the withdrawal of troops and aid when the U. S. decided to invade Iraq in 2003, which led Aghanistan’s then- President Hamid Karzai to “strike corrupt bargains with strongmen that delegitimized his government.”
But perhaps the biggest problem was simply establishing a presence as “military occupiers” that fundamentally undermined nation- building, he says.
The cold geopolitical reality
Seth Jones of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D. C., says launching the war probably was a mistake from the beginning.
“Sticking kids over there without the right training for the job at hand wasn’t right,” says Jones, director of the center’s Transnational Threats Project and author of “In the Graveyard of Empires: America’s War in Afghanistan.” “It was a mistake to think we could use conventional forces for this mission.”
For those who risked their lives while tasked with improving the quality of life in Afghanistan, questions about wrapping up the war have become more intense as the Trump administration has debated officially ending the conflict.
“It’d be great if Afghanistan were now like Switzerland, a beautiful mountainous place that’s free and peaceful with no Taliban, but it’s not,” says Erik Haass, 43, a management consultant from Chicago and veteran of two Afghan tours as part of the Army’s Chosen Company, which repelled a storied 2008 Taliban attack in the Battle of Wanat.
“I’m glad we got in and I’m proud of what we did. But I can also understand that after almost two decades of open conflict, it’s a lot to ask of our military and the American people.”
A Pew Research Center poll suggests that both the general public and U. S. veterans agree things were not handled well. In a survey last spring, 59% of the public and 58% of veterans said that when considering cost versus benefit, the Afghanistan war was “not worth fighting.”
“History will indict us to some degree,” says Paul Toolan, a Green Beret who was in Afghanistan half a dozen times between 2003 and 2012 and is now deputy commander at the 1st Special Warfare Training Group in Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
“Our motto while there was ‘ You can’t want it more than they do,’ ” Toolan says. “Our biggest problem is we were never able to step far enough back to allow the Afghan infrastructure to stand on its own two feet. But for our national security interests to be assured, the Afghans had to govern themselves. So we got heavily invested.”
For some veterans, the death of 9/ 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden should have spelled the end of operations in Afghanistan. When President George W. Bush initiated Operation Enduring Freedom on Oct. 7, 2001, the stated aim was killing bin Laden. On May 2, 2011, that mission finally was accomplished in a nighttime raid on bid Laden’s redoubt in neighboring Pakistan.
Kyle Bibby, 33, of Jersey City, New Jersey, was a Marine stationed in Afghanistan on the day bin Laden died. “Right after that, my first thought was, what ... are we still doing here?” says Bibby, now a lead organizer with Common Defense, a New York- based nonprofit with a mission to draw veterans to progressive causes. “When we didn’t leave, it seemed like we were suddenly OK with an endless war.”
Bibby says he is lucky because he came back “with all my digits and body parts, but a lot of guys died, and you have survivor’s guilt. You wonder if their sacrifice was in vain.”
Other Afghanistan war veterans say they grapple with the same doubt. Ian Eads, 37, another Chosen Company veteran who did two tours in Afghanistan a decade back, says he would “never trade the experience for anything, and I’d never want to do it again.”
Eads, now a police officer in Newport, Kentucky, saw his service as a job, one that sometimes meant killing people and other times meant befriending them. “I remember one Afghan that had a little shop at our base,” he says. “I’d trust him with my kids.”
But when he returned home, his survivor’s guilt sometimes had him contemplating suicide, Eads says. He has battled to find purpose and meaning.
“So many people were lost, it was so big a price to pay,” he says quietly.
“If it’s going to end, I feel like that’s good. But is it that we’re just giving up, or did we fix it?”
Why are we there?
For many vets, another frustration stems from wondering if they’re the only ones thinking about the war in Afghanistan. Unlike the Vietnam War – which ended in 1975 after 20 years and claimed 57,000 American servicemen – the Afghanistan war is being fought with a volunteer force.
“Because we don’t have a draft, the average American person isn’t impacted by these conflicts, but we need to look at how something like this 18- year war impacts families who are involved,” says Brooklynne Mosley, 35, of Lawrence, Kansas, a Democratic political operative in her state. She flew 190 combat sorties mostly over Afghanistan helping refuel Air Force jets from tankers.
“The people in Afghanistan don’t know why we’re there, and most Americans don’t know why we’re there,” says Mosley, whose little brother was 9 months old on 9/ 11 and now is entering college. “We’re going to have a hard time recruiting for more forever wars. We need to get out of there. We should be focusing our resources here on America and our crumbling infrastructure.”
James, the infantryman turned would- be politician, hopes there will be more national dialogue over what happens next in Afghanistan:
“At this point, we’re not going to bomb or shoot our way out of Afghanistan. We can only talk our way out.”