Just a couple of months shy of two decades ago, on October 7, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan. I will be thirty-four next month: my bar mitzvah was hardly in the rearview mirror when the fighting began. Those were confusing and heartbreaking and delirious months, when the Towers fell in New York, Islamic fundamentalists murdered thousands, and the blue skies that heralded the cloudless end of history instead augured not one but two Middle Eastern wars. It seems like a lifetime ago that George W. Bush stood with a bullhorn on the rubble downtown and Derek Jeter sent a baseball deep into the night that felt like a satellite on a healing mission.
Most of us have a vague sense of how things have gone in Afghanistan: the Taliban was toppled but bin Laden slipped away, narrowly evading capture in the caves of Tora Bora before settling in to a mansion in Pakistan, where fate and justice in the form of Seal Team 6 would eventually catch up with him years later, just when it seemed the most wanted man in the world had melted away.
As the Taliban and Al Qaeda receded from the American military onslaught, Afghanistan never quite figured out what came next. Corruption was rampant, government fragmented, and the country divided in a chaos of ethnicities, regions, and tribes. As in Iraq and Libya, where the salutary toppling of a monstrous regime was not followed by a successful sequel, early days euphoria curdled into a kind of sour pessimism. Even as 2,312 Americans and something like 40,000 Afghans were killed in the fighting, Afghanistan began disappearing from sight. The American public moved on to other things: the Mesopotamian blunders and tragedies of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008, the Obama years, the Trump circus, a global pandemic.
I once heard someone say about Israel that its domestic policy is always foreign policy: the home is also the home front. Something like the opposite phenomenon happened in America: we turned inward, and even foreign policy began to feel domestic, less a question of the world out there than a consuming passion for our own drama. This was true on the Trumpian neo-isolationist right as it was for the left so attentive to America’s sins that they lost sight of the far greater evils that exist elsewhere.
At long last the never ending story of the U.S. war in Afghanistan is set to end, not as a farce or comedy, but as an absolute tragedy. It is happening under Joe Biden’s watch, but in truth it is one of the few bipartisan points of agreement: from the MAGA right to the woke left, everyone has had it with the country. President Trump ran on withdrawing from Afghanistan, saying “we made a terrible mistake getting involved there in the first place” and “Afghanistan is a total and complete disaster.” In 2012, he tweeted “it is time to get out of Afghanistan. We are building roads and schools for people that hate us. It is not in our national interests.”
Trump said all troops would be home by last Christmas and cut a withdrawal deal with the Taliban. Biden fully leaned into the flight out. This is a mistake. The non-existent perfect in Afghanistan should not be the enemy of the imperfectly better status quo. After defaulting on red lines in Syria and making a mess of Libya while eyeing the exits in Iraq, the U.S. should not abandon the Afghans.
What has happened in the wake of our abandonment of Afghanistan is utter disaster. Capitals and provinces are falling by the day. Kabul is living on borrowed time, and we have asked the Taliban to spare the American Embassy there, bribing them with the prospect of future aid to their medieval reign. Ministers are fleeing on any flight they can get, and borders with Pakistan and Iran are crowded with Afghans trying to run from Scylla to Charybdis. The reality for Afghan women is looking increasingly dire, and you can almost feel their terror and sadness half a world away. As an anonymous female Afghan reporter puts it,
“Last week I was a news journalist. Today I can’t write under my own name or say where I am from or where I am. My whole life has been obliterated in just a few days. I am so scared and I don’t know what will happen to me. Will I ever go home? Will I see my parents again? Where will I go? The highway is blocked in both directions. How will I survive?… Please pray for me.”
All those who care about the causes of female freedom, police brutality, and the rights of minorities should set their sights firmly on what is happening in Kabul and Kandahar. What is about to transpire will be a true return of the bad old days, depredations and violations that will look the American scene look like a progressive paradise. Our self-doubt can never be an excuse to default on the good we can do for others. A cynicism that precludes boldness is its own kind of evil.
There are strategic concerns as well. China and Iran love a vacuum, and all the old chestnuts about Afghanistan being at the nexus of continents and empires are moldy but still viable. There were just 3,000 American troops in the country. To put that in perspective, the U.S. has around 200,000 troops stationed around the world and over a million in active service. There have been no American combat deaths in Afghanistan since February 8, 2020. Sixty-six lives have been lost in the last seven years. Each one is too many, but these are not numbers that point to an unsustainable presence.
There are no glorious outcomes for Afghanistan, no confetti and Liberty Bells in its future. Americans are bored and saddened by what’s happened there, and Afghans have known only war for generations. Nobody wants our brothers and sisters and mothers and sons to spend a day longer away from their homes than they must. John Kerry’s haunting question in relation to another lost war- “how do you ask someone to be the last person to die for a mistake?” is uncomfortably relevant.
But nations, like people, are called to the right thing in an unjust world. And America, for all of its flaws, is still a force for good, an emissary of values larger and brighter than herself. We have been chastened by our wars, and lost an unimaginable amount. But we can’t just tap out, and an obsession with what we can’t do cannot obscure what we can. As Paul Miller writes in The Dispatch, leaving Afghanistan now is like “telling a drowning man to take responsibility for swimming while reeling in the life preserver the man had been clinging to.”
It is unconscionable. Joe Biden is a good man who has known tragedy and loss firsthand. I hope he sees it even in a faraway land, and does not repeat the abdications that will forever tarnish his predecessors’ legacies. If and when Kabul falls, each one of us will be able to stand a little less tall.
A