This was an interesting article about the war in Afghanistan. It is a war that Americans got involved in late in 2001, in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, and it is not really fully over yet. We still have troops there, although they are at their lowest number in a very long time.
In fact, it has the distinction of being the longest war that the United States has ever been involved in. Later this year, it will officially reach the 20 year mark.
While I definitely believe that the war in Afghanistan was far more justifiable than the ill-fated war in Iraq that the Bush administration foolishly and selfishly pursued not much later, there eventually reached a point where the war became a stalemate. Afghanistan, historically, has been the graveyard of empires. The British fought a long and miserable war there. The Soviets invaded there, and it seriously hastened the end of their empire, such as it was. Now Americans seem to have endured a serious and, frankly, an obvious decline in the years since our involvement in Afghanistan. When it began, we were the unquestioned leading superpower of the world. Our status in terms of both power and reputation the world over has seriously diminished. September 11th showed that we could be more vulnerable than previously thought, while the foolish pursuit of the Iraq invasion by the Bush administration showed a certain arrogance in terms of our callous disregard towards morality, truth, and the rest of the world, frankly. Then came the drone killings and stunning surveillance under Obama, which again, hurt our world reputation. Finally, Donald Trump's rise, which marked a stunning new level of political polarization, and when longtime allies (particularly in Europe) announced within mere hours of meeting Trump that they no longer felt that the United States could be regarded as a reliable partner. The world also saw a botched response to the coronavirus crisis, with Trump's White House specifically seemingly bouncing from taking the whole thing seriously, to mocking and undermining the seriousness of it at every turn. As if all of that were not enough, the attempted storming of the Capitol building by a minority group that nonetheless has always managed to remain louder and more vocal than their numbers would suggest to begin this year showed just how fragile our own democracy is.
No longer is anyone famously boasting about how the United States is the "shining city on a hill," as a glowing example of what the rest of the world should strive for. Who would want this kind of division and, frankly, stupidity, anyway?
The nation is now filled with problems, more than we have ever seen before in our lifetimes. Our national debt is at an astonishing level, as is the budget deficit. Leaders keep boasting of strong economic numbers, yet millions of Americans are unemployed and/or uninsured, and many more are working low paying jobs and struggling on a day-to-day basis. The gap between the wealthy minority and the rest of us has never been wider. We are more divided than ever before. In other words, we have lost the stability that we as a nation once seemed to take for granted.
And now, with the 20th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan looming on the horizon, we might need to reflect on not just what happened, but how and why it happened, or how and why we allowed it to happen.
Andrew Bacevich has one of the most impressive and piercing opinions out there. He discusses many of the very things that I just mentioned, and much of what he writes continues to make a lot of sense. I still remember one of his books suggesting that the big mistake regarding the American military is the popular perception, fostered during the Reagan years, that they were an invincible force. It is that kind of arrogance and presumptuousness that would inevitably lead to unnecessary, damaging wars. The most flagrant such war recently was Iraq, but we can also learn from our own mistakes in Afghanistan, as well.
Please take a look at this recent article by Bacevich from last month.
After 20 Years, The Establishment Is Still In Denial About Afghanistan by Andrew Bacevich, February 10, 2021:
The Afghanistan Study Group has a new report out and its recommendation remains ever the same: more troops.
No comments:
Post a Comment