Reflections on the war in Afghanistan

 

Reflections on the War in Afghanistan

September 1, 2021

 

On October 7, 2001, on orders from US president George W. Bush, the United States military invaded the Asian country of Afghanistan. We started that war less than one month after the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda had carried out its spectacular and horrific attack on the symbols of American economic, military, and political power. (The attack planned on either the Capitol building or the White House, symbols of American political power, failed only because of the heroic actions of the passengers on one of the planes the terrorists had hijacked.) Our country’s stated purpose for the invasion was to take out al-Qaeda and its leader Osama bin Laden. It at least seems to be true that bin Laden and his murderous cohorts had planned the attack in Afghanistan with at least the tacit consent of the Taliban, the Afghani Muslim fundamentalist group that had de facto control of the country at the time. American and allied forces had some success in forcing the Taliban to retreat from the country’s population centers and to give up their control of the nation. They did not, however, capture or kill Osama bin Laden. He survived until May 2, 2011, when US special forces, acting on orders from President Obama, killed him not in Afghanistan but in Pakistan. US military involvement in Afghanistan lasted from October 7, 2001, to August 30, 2021, a period of just under twenty years. It was the longest war in American history.

Was the US invasion a success? In making that judgment please consider these facts that I took from abcnews.com and are current through April, 2021:

 

US service personnel killed:	2,448
US contractors killed:	3, 846
Afghan national military and police killed:	66,000
Other allied service personnel killed:	1, 144
Afghan civilians killed:	47,245
Aid workers killed:	444
Journalists killed:	72
Total non-oppositional deaths:	121,199

 

Now add these additional deaths:

 

Taliban and other opposition fighters killed:	51,191
Total deaths:	172,390

 

Now consider these financial costs of the war taken from the same website. Some of the figures are estimates only:

 

US financial cost of the war itself:	$2,000,000,000,000
Interest on debt incurred:	$925,000,000 and growing
Disability, burial, and other costs:	$1,600,000,000,000
Estimated total cost:	$4,425, 000,000,000 and growing

 

For those of you like me who are not used to seeing such big numbers, that’s four trillion four hundred twenty-five  billion dollars. The Afghan war has been immensely expensive monetarily and extremely costly in human lives lost.

Did all of that death and expenditure achieve the result the US desired? No, it did not. We never found Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. Had we not invaded Afghanistan the Taliban would have been in charge of the country. As we leave, the Taliban is in charge of the country. Al-Qaeda may or may not still be active in Afghanistan, but in any even other terrorist groups including one called ISIS-K are present and killing people. So no. By any reasonable measure the US failed to achieve its objectives for its invasion of Afghanistan.

There are lessons to be learned from that failure. The first is perhaps the point of the old adage “never fight a land war in Asia.” That’s a lesson we should have learned in Vietnam but did not. More specifically, any clear-sighted review of the history of Afghanistan would have revealed that it is essentially impossible for any foreign power to conquer and control it. I’ll cite just the most recent example of that truth before the US invasion, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

At the time of the Soviet invasion the USSR had the world’s second most powerful military. It had a long land border with Afghanistan.[1] It was therefore significantly easier for the USSR to insert military forces into Afghanistan that it was for the US just over twenty-two years later. The Soviets invaded to support a friendly Afghan government that was fighting a civil war against various groups of rebels known collectively as the Mujahideen. At least most of those fighting the government in Kabul were Islamic extremists. Nonetheless, the US and other foreign powers supplied weapons and other equipment to them because they were fighting a regime friendly toward the USSR. The Soviets conducted military operations from December, 1979 to February, 1989. They lost. Russians, and I suppose other formerly Soviet people, call the war in Afghanistan the USSR’s Vietnam. It is true that the US supplied the Mujahideen with weapons, but the USSR was a massive and massively powerful country on Afghanistan’s northern border. Afghan resistance forces defeated them and drove them out or at least forced the Soviet leadership to withdraw its forces from Afghanistan. Let those with ears to hear listen. We didn’t listen. We should have learned from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan that we could not win there. We didn’t.

Will we now learn the lesson we should have learned from Vietnam? That lesson is that it is not possible for us to create a country whose government we like through military force.[2] We cannot overcome the will of the people of a country by military force. It just won’t work. We Americans tend to think that we’re so right and so righteous that the people of any country will welcome us with open arms, but they won’t and they don’t. To the people of countries like Vietnam and Afghanistan we are a foreign imperialist power using military might to pursue our aims not theirs. For the most part they’re right about that. That is what we are and what we do when we invade another country. We can destroy countries like we did in Iraq. We can prop up corrupt leaders like we did in Vietnam. In most of the countries of the world we cannot create anything like a stable democracy through military force. We just can’t.

Have we learned our lesson? Perhaps some of us have. President Biden showed a true understanding of the futility of us trying to remake Afghanistan through our military. He seems to be aware of the horror of war and of its devastating effects on the people who fight in one. Yet when he does the right thing in Afghanistan he’s met with condemnation and demands for even more military action there. Perhaps the light of wisdom gained through painful experience is starting to shine among us, but if so it is still very dim. Let us all do whatever we can to make it shine brightly throughout our land.

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[1] Russia, the largest and most powerful of the former Soviet republics, does not have a border with Afghanistan. The Soviet-Afghan border ran along the edge of the former Soviet republics of Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all now independent nations.

[2] Germany and Japan after World War II are a sort of exception to this rule, but both of those countries had had at least some experience with western-style governments before the war. Neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan did. A great many of the world’s countries do not.