Hi,
So here is what I’ve been thinking about, today.
So It Turns Out This Is What Defeat Feels Like
It’s late 2000 or early 2001, and I’m killing time in the hallway of one of the local all-girls’ schools1, waiting to go onstage for rehearsal for the play I’ve been cast in. I’m reading a curious flyer on the wall, encouraging students to protest the horrific treatment of women in a place I couldn’t really then place on a map, Afghanistan, by an obscure group called the Taliban.
It’s fall 2001, and I’m gathered with all the other students in my school watching footage of towers collapsing on TV. That night, I begin reading these new things called web blogs in earnest, trying to understand what just happened and what will happen next.
It’s spring 2003, and I’m sitting in front of another TV, in another school’s lunchroom waiting for a high school debate event, idiotically cheering on the clock running out on George W. Bush’s ultimatum for Saddam, waiting for the Iraq War to start.
It’s 2004, it’s 2005, it’s 2006 and I’m studying at Yale, and trying to make things I’m learning in poli sci classes about civil war and insurgency fit my beliefs, and slowly realizing it doesn’t.
It’s 2007, and I’m categorizing data about the Afghan Civil War of the ‘90s for a professor. His thesis has to do with ethnic fault lines in war, and it’s hard to code Afghanistan since everyone switches sides so many times. He doesn’t seem to think that’s a problem.
It’s 2008, and I’m living in a cramped sublet in suburban DC, interning unpaid at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank during the day, bartending at night to just barely pay my bills. Over the course of three months, I sprint frantically to write the first draft of a book-length report that explains what it would take to possibly have a real chance to win in Afghanistan. I hope that the report might demonstrate that I have value in This Town, and lead to employment opportunities. I ultimately get a job, but not because of the report. No one listens to the report.
I cede the copyright to my work — I’m an intern and there’s no money in a report anyways — in CSIS’s standard contract, in exchange for my name being added third to the authorship credits, and 10 printed copies of the report. (Months later, they only give me five copies, and the think tank fellow’s RA takes the other five for himself, and tells me not to complain.)
It’s the early 2010s, and I’m talking to a US military officer, who’s pushing back against some change or another for the military, angrily exclaiming over beers, “I don’t understand why they want to do [whatever the minuscule change was that the Obama administration wanted], we just won two wars!”2 I’ll repeat this conversation a dozen more times over the years before I learn how to predict which kinds of national security folks say that as a Fully Generalizable Counter-Argument, and how to avoid triggering it.
It’s 2021, and I’m watching Kabul fall, Afghanistan fall, the hopes of millions of young people fall, the Taliban rise with their vile perversion of the worship of G-d to justify amputation as a penalty for theft, rape as a reward for conquest, and murder as the consequence for daring to draw their attention.
This isn’t about us, though
It is, however about the fact we’ve failed, and we deserve our dishonor
We deserve all the shame of this moment. As a resident of the capital of the superpower responsible for this disaster, I should feel ashamed for the fact that we’re about to let tens of thousands of people who helped us suffer and die because we were too scared to give them visas to America. (After all, those people who risked their lives for us fighting extremists might actually be extremists, or something.)
That’s our greatest shame. It’s a terrible, unforced error. We should put them all on planes, now. And in the hours and days to come, I’m going to be looking for ways to help charities for Afghan internally displaced persons and refugees. (Here is one helping IDPs in Kabul recommended by a friend whose judgment I trust.)
Their fear, suffering, and deaths are our greatest shame, a dishonor to the United States. But our second-greatest shame should be that, after twenty years of war, we had no ability to, at scale, train our forces to speak Dari and Pashto in the midst of a counterinsurgency. After twenty years of war, we were wholly dependent on putting Afghan citizens and other contractors at risk to translate for us, and maybe sending a few people a year to the Defense Language School. We had to rely on putting others at risk, because we’re not even fucking competent enough to run a goddamn language immersion program ourselves.3
Of course, I suppose it doesn’t matter that much. Our leaders knew enough to know they were losing, and lied to us anyways.
So now it’s White Christmas Day in Saigon 1975, all over again. But with even less planning, this time.
I don’t have any clear suggestions on what should have happened, instead. It’s entirely possible that if we had done everything “right,” we’d still be exactly here.
But we sure did do a lot wrong. And every expert should be looking themselves in the mirror to understand why.
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, or my cat.
My all-boys’ school loaned them Guys, they loaned us Dolls.
Yes, he really meant Iraq and Afghanistan.
We also, weirdly, refused to let lots of young folks in the US who spoke Dari or Pashto serve in our armed forces and national security establishment, because they still had family in Afghanistan and could be coerced into being security threats. Unlike, y’know, interpreters who lived in Afghanistan with their families and could be coerced into being security threats.
Wait, let’s go over that again. I missed something.