A little more than two years ago, The Washington Post published a deeply-reported series on the mass fraud perpetrated against the American people by the government and military in the prosecution of the Afghanistan War. As the introduction puts it, “senior U.S. officials failed to tell the truth about the war in Afghanistan throughout the 18-year campaign, making rosy pronouncements they knew to be false and hiding unmistakable evidence the war had become unwinnable.” This failure continued through both Republican and Democratic administrations, and was abetted by a Congress that collectively refused to act on its responsibilities to end a failed war. As one U.S. three-star Army general said, “We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing.”
The Post’s report, based on an in-depth government inquiry into the conduct of the war, and utterly damning as to the winnability or purpose of the presence of American forces in Afghanistan, appeared to have zero impact on either the public or the political world.
Yet with President Biden’s announcement earlier this month that he will withdraw all U.S. troops from Afghanistan before September 11 of this year, the U.S. government has at last tacitly acknowledged the folly of this two-decades-long war and its own internal findings. It is also an acknowledgment that the American public does not support the war.
But I can’t say I feel much relief that it’s over so much as sorrow that it went on so long. Twenty years of war have also been 20 years of propaganda’s victory over truth, 20 years of failed democracy and accountability, 20 years of a nation valorizing the sacrifice of troops while failing to question the pointlessness of the war they were sent to fight. From the start, the 9/11 terrorist attacks were themselves weaponized into political terror weapons by the Bush White House and Republicans, who used them not only to start our self-defeating wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, but to structure debate so that any refusal to support such self-defeating wars meant setting the United States up for further attacks and even siding with the terrorists. And so it was claimed necessary to invade an entire country, and collaterally inflict thousands upon thousands of civilian deaths, in response to a small terrorist group that itself had targeted civilians. The willingness to accept mass Afghani death in order to theoretically save American lives stateside was an immoral and racist tradeoff, one for which history will surely condemn us.
Pentagon and governmental disinformation, combined with the false narrative that a retreat from Afghanistan would mean Islamist terrorism in America, worked to keep many Americans complacent over the war, the 2,300 American dead and 20,000+ wounded the sacrifice we were willing to outsource to American military families to maintain the myth that we were defending ourselves from further attacks by occupying a distant nation. The nation generally, and progressives in particular, were ground down by the apparent implacability of the American war machine, so that stopping it seemed futile; goosed by the refusal of the government and military to tell the citizenry the truth about the war’s progress, the American military presence in Afghanistan became a self-contained perpetual motion machine.
Yes, it is a restoration of some measure of sanity to hear Joe Biden say that 20 years of war is enough; but 10 years was enough, five years was enough, one year was enough of a war that any rational nation never would have waged to begin with.