America failed Afghanistan
America failed Afghanistan
And that is a direct result of our dysfunctional political system
Author’s note: I worked in Afghanistan as a government contractor training the national police force from 2011-2012. I dedicate these words and this essay to the memory of my friend Iqbal and to all the Afghans who have suffered for the egos of American and Afghan politicians.
Above are a few photos from my time in Afghanistan. The bottom two photos have been modified in case either of the translators I worked with is still alive. The reality is that they have probably been murdered by now. Even at the height of the occupation by NATO/America, brave Afghans who worked with foreigners were targeted. My program, national police training, had a pool of about 20 translators. They commuted to work through the busy streets of Kabul six days a week.
One morning, one of them, named Iqbal, was missing. When we asked where Iqbal was, the others told us that he had been surrounded by a gang on his way to work and, stabbed to death with screwdrivers, then left lying in a gutter.
We stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years. Long enough to have a generation of young Afghans who had never experienced the barbarity of Taliban rule.
A confidential trove of government documents obtained by The Washington Post reveals that 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.1
Twenty years was never going to be enough to make Afghanistan functional, and every senior leader involved in Afghanistan knew that. A century of occupation might have been enough, but American politics are too dysfunctional ever to sustain a 100-year occupation. So instead, we abandoned an entire generation of English-speaking, Western-thinking young Afghans to a cruel fate: living under a fundamentalist Islamic hardline regime.
Both parties were in control at various times, and they both lied about how things were going.
Since 2001, more than 775,000 U.S. troops have deployed to Afghanistan, many repeatedly. Of those, 2,300 died there and 20,589 were wounded in action, according to Defense Department figures.2
As a nation, we flushed 2,300 Americans down the toilet. At least a quarter million locals were killed by our occupation.3 There are other ripples in the fabric of time and space. There are 2.6 million Afghan refugees in the world. There are 23 million Afghans who don't know where the next meal is coming from and 9 million malnourished children.4 This isn't the fault of one American political party or the other. Blame is shared between both of them.
Before we abandoned the country, half of Afghanistan’s population was in acute psychological distress. In a country of 40 million people, 20 million of whom need mental health help due to trauma; there were 300 mental health professionals. That was before the Taliban retook the entire country. I suspect that in 2022 zero mental health professionals are operating in Afghanistan. The brand of Islam practiced by hardliners in charge of the country does not believe in mental health problems, science, or modern medical care.
We were never going to win in Afghanistan because we aren’t a reliable partner. Our nation is bipolar, split down the middle between people who want to move forward and a cult of millions hell-bent on social regression, whites first, and thoughts and prayers.
When we broke all our promises and fled, I received many desperate calls and emails from allies and friends I’d made. All of them were trying to get out of Afghanistan before they were murdered for wanting their country to move forward. It made me sick to my stomach, and it could happen here. We are on the cusp.
This failure will ripple for generations and across many nations.
The USA does not need MAGA. The USA needs a reckoning and a reboot. Eat the rich and punish the capitalist oligarchs. Stop the two-party duopoly. It’s toxic. It is time to demand better from ourselves and our nation, and the human domain in general.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/investigations/afghanistan-papers/afghanistan-war-confidential-documents/
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/costs/human/civilians/afghan
https://www.unrefugees.org/emergencies/afghanistan/
ProPublica published a story yesterday about an Afghan family, fortunate enough to flee Afghanistan. The refuge organizations, decimated under Trump and unable to regroup for a sudden influx in refugees, relocated the family to a rural part of a very red state vs states with active Afghan populations, which could have drastically assisted with assimilation. The teenage son, who faced discrimination and isolation, committed suicide. Yes, our oligarchal system, and ragged democratic institutions has failed most of us, but the apathy and indifference of Americans plays a role as well.
You have written wisely. I agree with you on every point you made. Thanks for publishing this.
What upsets me even more than all the suffering and loss of life is our childish, naive hubris. We think we can just invade a region (it's only a "nation" because some Europeans carved it up a few years ago - just like Iraq) and just because we have big weapons, the folks who live there are going to give up centuries of culture and tradition and emulate our very young funky semi-functional democracy. What are we thinking?
The Taliban and every other cult that is embedded in the history of such nations respond to strong man politics. It's no different than the Mafia. Only the residents of Afghanistan can change that.
And then there is the American Taliban...we are so hypocritical as to be mind blowing.