Read time: 15 minutes
Saturday marks 20 years since the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks. Many have reflected on what has unfolded since then: what’s been learned, and what remains to be learned. In this series, I’ve pieced together news reports and passages from key opinion columns that tell the impossible story of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan.
It’s mostly big blocks of quotes from articles by people who are much more knowledgeable than I am, with my own interspersed commentary stringing them together for narrative cohesion. I hope this can be a starting point for anyone trying to understand this 20-year tragedy. Thank you for your time and attention.
It was a strange atmosphere right after September 11, 2001. Traumatizing, nightmare imagery played over and over on television until it began infecting your mind. People could hardly talk about anything else. The following Sunday, church parking lots overflowed. For months, ground zero smoldered. Comics stopped telling jokes. Planes stopped flying, and when they eventually resumed it was nerve-wracking to see one above you. Life felt precarious.
Soon after a brutal bombing campaign was underway in Afghanistan, the Taliban made an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden to a neutral country. The Bush administration, having put non-negotiable demands on them, rejected their offer.
From The New York Times:
In his speech to Congress, the president said the Taliban government could avoid destruction by meeting five conditions: delivering to the United States all leaders of Al Qaeda; releasing all foreign nationals, including American citizens; protecting foreign journalists, diplomats and aid workers; closing every terrorist training camp in Afghanistan and handing over every terrorist and every person in the terrorists' support structure; and giving the United States full access to terrorist training camps.
It’s hard to imagine the logistics of “handing over every terrorist and every person in the terrorists’ support structure.” As if he was fully aware of how unrealistic this demand was, Bush seemed to like it that way and postured accordingly:
''All they've got to do is turn him over, and his colleagues, and the thugs he hides,'' Mr. Bush said. He added: ''And not only turn him over, turn the Al Qaeda organization over, destroy all the terrorist camps -- actually, we're doing a pretty good job of that right now -- and release the hostages they hold. That's all they've got to do. But there is no negotiation, period.''
With sarcasm reminiscent of trash talk in sport, Bush, who was often ridiculed as a walking gaffe machine, now channeled a new swell of national swagger and bravado: "They must have not heard,” he boasted. “There's no negotiations."
From The Washington Post:
Drawing a line in colloquial terms, Bush added: "There's no need to discuss innocence or guilt. We know he's guilty. Turn him over. If they want us to stop our military operations, they just gotta meet my conditions, and when I said no negotiations, I meant no negotiations."
While showers of bombs rained down on destitute villages and Afghans were indiscriminately arrested and detained, officials went on the Sunday public affairs shows to further stoke the anxieties of Americans by cautioning that terrorist ‘sleeper cells’ lurked among them. As I said, it was a strange atmosphere.
As time passed, the cheering section for war, so loud so early, began to thin out, mirroring the waning coverage of mainstream news until only deafening silence remained late into the war’s second decade. Jim Lobe reports in an article for Responsible Statecraft:
Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andrew Tyndall, editor of the authoritative Tyndall Report, which has monitored and coded the networks’ nightly news each weekday since 1988.
Those five minutes, which covered the February 2020 Doha agreement between the United States and the Taliban, marked a 19-year low for Afghanistan coverage on the three networks’ newscasts. They compared to a high of 940 minutes the networks devoted to Afghanistan in 2001, all of it following 9/11 and the subsequent U.S. intervention, as shown below.
Then, one day, the end was near.
With 170,000 lives already snuffed out, probably at least that many permanently disfigured, millions consumed by endless grief, $2,000,000,000,000 squandered - $300 million a day for 20 years - and $6,500,000,000,000 anticipated in estimated interest costs by 2050, the old cheering section returned - along with that old, familiar swagger and bravado - as if waking from a 20-year nap.
Ross Douthat sums them up in a column for The New York Times:
All these arguments are connected to a set of moods that flourished after 9/11: a mix of cable-news-encouraged overconfidence in American military capacities, naïve World War II nostalgia and crusading humanitarianism in its liberal and neoconservative forms. Like most Americans, I shared in those moods once; after so many years of failure, I cannot imagine indulging in them now. But it’s clear from the past few weeks that they retain an intense subterranean appeal in the American elite, waiting only for the right circumstances to resurface.
Thus you have generals and grand strategists who presided over quagmire, folly and defeat fanning out across the television networks and opinion pages to champion another 20 years in Afghanistan. You have the return of the media’s liberal hawks and centrist Pentagon stenographers, unchastened by their own credulous contributions to the retreat of American power over the past 20 years. And you have Republicans who postured as cold-eyed realists in the Trump presidency suddenly turning back into eager crusaders, excited to own the Biden Democrats and relive the brief post-9/11 period when the mainstream media treated their party with deference rather than contempt.
Many of those eager crusaders made moral appeals for a so-called low-grade presence on the grounds that, without us there, the Taliban will impose Sharia law on the population and ruin the progress that has been made on so many fronts, most notably the increased freedom and autonomy of Afghan women.
While it is true that some changes in Afghanistan since our invasion have been welcomed by many for good reason, it is also true that other changes have not been so welcomed - and also for good reason. As is often the barrier in these conversations, we tend to look at only one side of the ledger.
Afghans, however, even after looking at both sides of the ledger, have no good choices in front of them. In his article for The American Conservative, Richard Hanania complicates the simple story of identifiable heroes and villains in the graveyard of empires:
While the West rightly criticizes the Taliban for its human rights abuses, the Afghan government also has blood on its hands. Secret units have carried out summary executions on flimsy grounds, including against children. And while the Taliban has been suspected of being behind an ongoing assassination campaign against civil society figures, recently credible reports have emerged that the Afghan government is secretly killing individuals advocating for reconciliation and the end of war.
The practice of bacha bazi, an Afghan custom in which a young boy dances for and is sexually abused by older men, made a comeback in Afghanistan during the war. It was the Taliban that originally made the practice illegal for being inconsistent with Sharia law. In 2015, it was apparently common practice among Afghan military and police, and American soldiers were told to ignore it. The Afghan government did not move to ban the custom until 2017. Revulsion over the practice was reported to be key to Mullah Omar’s rise to power, with locals in the south of the country objecting to warlords raping their young boys and throwing their support behind the Taliban and its effective, if harsh, form of justice.
Boys running across a bridge in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Image credit: IASF Public Affairs Office CC BY 2.0.
It may surprise you that the Taliban actually began as a protest movement against this practice. To local acclaim, they publicly hung warlord child rapists from tank barrels.
Now imagine being an American soldier witnessing child sexual abuse - right on your own military base, by the very people you trained up to fight the Taliban - and being told by your superiors to stand down and look the other way.
From his 2015 article for The New York Times, Joseph Goldstein:
Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.
The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.
“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”
President Biden’s address to the nation on August 31, 2021, paints a sobering picture that people like Dan Quinn know all too well:
A lot of our veterans and their families have gone through hell. Deployment after deployment, months and years away from their families, missed birthdays, anniversaries, empty chairs at holidays, financial struggles, divorces, loss of limbs, traumatic brain injury, post-traumatic stress.
We see it in the struggles many have when they come home. We see it in the strain on their families and caregivers. We see it in the strain of their families when they’re not there. We see it in the grief borne by their survivors. The cost of war, they will carry with them their whole lives.
Most tragically, we see it in the shocking and stunning statistic that should give pause to anyone who thinks war can ever be low grade, low risk or low cost: Eighteen veterans, on average, who die by suicide every single day in America. Not in a far-off place, but right here in America.
How did this spiral so far out of control? There are so many places to start looking for something like answers to that question. In the next part of this series, let’s see what we can find.