No better time than the present to tell the truth about American military might: We aren't the Avengers (or maybe we are, just not in the way you think)
Wanting to end America's longest war isn't the same as indifference towards the vulnerable elsewhere
The Biden administration probably made mistakes when coming up with its Afghanistan withdrawal plan. No. It likely made mistakes, many of them, including some that will cost some people their lives. I can’t specify which mistakes because I don’t have that expertise. But I don’t have any trouble believing some of the foreign policy experts and foreign policy-focused journalists who are criticizing President Biden on that front. That’s why I would love to see serious Congressional inquiries into what happened and why, and for the investigations to be bipartisan and non-political - at least as much as Congress is capable of doing.
But these investigations must also focus on deeper, more important questions that will remain with us even after (or if) we get out the up to 60,000 Afghans and American citizens that need to get out of that country. The biggest question of all: What role should the U.S. military play in world events going forward? That would mean establishing clearer guidelines about when and how and for what reasons we would invade another country, send in special forces, or use drone technology. Technically, we’ve already done that. But it is clear that we have not yet figured out how best to use the world’s fiercest fighting force. And I think I know why. Because we’ve been fed the lie that our military is akin to the Avengers.
We’ve convinced ourselves that we are that good and that powerful and not only have the capability, but a responsibility to shape and reshape world events. The truth is, our military is kind of like the Avengers, given that it isn’t hyperbole to say that it is the greatest fighting force on Earth AND that even when it does really good things, it leaves a lot of carnage in its wake. The Avengers always win in the end - but not before a hell of a lot of innocent people are killed, either by the bad guys and/or the Avengers, and all sorts of buildings and even entire cities are leveled. And just like in those Marvel movies, the carnage is mourned every now and again but mostly we chalk it up to the price of doing business, the price for fighting off so much evil. Besides, like the Avengers, if we cause the harm, it isn’t the same as the enemy causing the harm. Because we are the good guys. Because we are a force for good. Full stop.
Seriously, no one should be surprised that Captain America is launching a program talking about war whose lineup is staked with war hawks. Marvel didn’t even have to write that script. It’s just so damn American. The script writes itself:
The problem with Chris Evans’s war-hawk Middle East show
And as The Atlantic writer Caitlin Flanagan wrote today:
“The reason—aside from honor, and quagmires, and the tender mercies of Dick Cheney—that we stayed in Afghanistan so long and at such great expense with nothing to show for it except the safety of that “small sliver” of women and girls is that, for all of America’s sins, our default position is freedom. For all of our sins, we are a great country. That’s easy to forget.”
It’s a sentiment many Americans share, that for all our sins, we are a great country whose default position is freedom. It’s also why conservatives years ago spent so much time talking and writing about a fictional character named Jack Bauer. He was the main character on one of my favorite shows “24”. He did whatever it took to defeat the bad guys and make America safe. His tactics included murder and torture sessions of all kinds. And he, too, like the Avengers, always won in the end - while leaving oceans of carnage in his wake. He’s a fictional character on a fictional show, and yet he is firmly in line with the American psyche, that our military might is a force for good, and if we are doing it, it must be good - even if it means greater suffering for vulnerable people throughout the world, because we are great. Because we are good. Full stop. I mean, what’s a little torture between friends. Or torture among allies. Or a few accidental deaths that we decided to not do much about. But hey, the Taliban is worse - because it kills civilians on purpose.
That level of fantastical thinking shows up in other ways as well. Though we launched this war 20 years ago - with bipartisan and majority public support - to avenge the 9/11 attacks and to bust up a terrorist safe haven, those who have argued in favor of extending it indefinitely evoke things like women’s rights because we default to freedom.
Flanagan again, this time evoking the image of a brave young girl who survived a direct attack by the Taliban in 2012, which has retaken Afghanistan, to chastise “the left” for supposedly no longer caring about women’s rights because they aren’t against the U.S. withdrawal in that country:
“How quickly it forgot its love for Malala, the young Pakistani girl who survived a Taliban bullet to the head, her only crime getting an education and trying to help other girls get one too. The White House must have known she’d give Biden a bad news cycle or two, and indeed she appealed to the president to take “a bold step” to stave off disaster. You can understand why she thought he would listen. But she’s not a real problem for Biden. You know why? Because she’s something mere: She’s just a woman. She has no army behind her, no treasure, nothing at all to compel anyone to listen except for her matchless authority on the matter and the fact that morally—if not strategically or politically—she is right.”
Quick detour and fast fact: Malala was shot in Pakistan by the same Taliban that is terrorizing Afghanistan today. The year Malala was shot, there were 68,000 U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan after President Obama surged troops.
Flanagan furthered her case this way:
“But while our soldiers were in that country, America spent nearly $790 million supporting the health, education, and well-being of Afghan women and girls. Female life expectancy rose from 58 years in 2002 to 66 years in 2018. Leave American troops idle long enough, and before you know it, they’re building schools and protecting women.”
It’s what we Americans are expert at doing, lying to ourselves about our capabilities and what we’ve accomplished, as well as what we can prevent. I believe the lies are sincere, and often unintentional. It’s even why some commentators have convinced themselves that because roughly two-thirds of the American public believes the war wasn’t worth it, it must mean we don’t have our priorities straight.
They can’t see what I see, an American public that’s not only war weary but has a clearer understanding of the limits of our power, of even our military might. Some of that came from the lies of Vietnam, but much more from the lies that got us into Iraq - a diversion that made the war in Afghanistan much more difficult. The American public, including the left, wants to help vulnerable people elsewhere. It’s just that we are no longer convinced that using our military is the wisest or most effective way to make that happen. But that’s just on a practical level. There are serious moral concerns as well. Like the Avengers, our military does a hell of a lot of damage to innocent people in sensitive regions around the globe, particularly the Middle East. It’s an under-discussed topic, which is odd given the sudden concern for the vulnerable in Afghanistan.
That our war effort has essentially meant the American taxpayer has been indirectly supplying arms to the Taliban all this time seems to not matter.
That the Afghan army was an army in name only doesn’t seem to register.
Who cares that America’s longest war made clear the limits of our military might:
“It should have been clear even as Bush spoke 20 years ago that the U.S. lacked the capability to eliminate "every terrorist group of global reach," but with most of American society consumed with paranoia and bent on revenge, off we galloped into the abyss. The primary method the U.S. would deploy in the service of eradicating all terrorism from the face of the Earth was military force. The halcyon glow of the Persian Gulf War, a quick and decisive expulsion of the Iraqi military from Kuwait in 1991 that exorcised the demons of the Vietnam quagmire, still burned brightly 10 years later, giving both citizens and policymakers false confidence about what could actually be achieved with bombs and bullets.”
Who cares that the Taliban had retaken much of the country long before the withdrawal and had already rolled back much of the gains women and girls made early in the war?
Why worry about our problematic coverage of Afghan women? We are America, damn it!
Never mind that our soldiers have been telling us for years things weren’t working, that the war was a big-money funneling operation?
Those schools Flanagan wrote about? Does it matter that many of them didn’t even exist?
Like the Avengers, we are a force for good. That doesn’t mean everything we do is good or makes things better. You doubt me? Well, take a look at this:
And this is what life was like in Afghanistan for our frontline soldiers:
“Specialist Robert Soto had been haunted by dread as the soldiers left their base, the Korengal Outpost. His platoon was part of an infantry unit that called itself Viper, the radio call sign for Bravo Company, First Battalion of the 26th Infantry. Viper had occupied the outpost for nine months, a period in which its soldiers were confined to a small stretch of lower valley and impoverished villages clinging to hillsides beneath towering peaks. Second Platoon had started its deployment with three squads but suffered so many casualties that on this day even with replacements it mustered at about two-thirds strength. With attrition came knowledge. Soto knew firsthand that the war did not resemble the carefully considered national project the generals discussed in the news. He had enlisted in the Army from the Bronx less than two years before, motivated by a desire to protect the United States from another terrorist attack. But his idealism had turned swiftly into realism, and the war had become a matter of him and his friends surviving each day as days cohered into a tour. He was doubtful about the rest, from the competence of the war’s organizers down to the merits of this ambush patrol. There’s no way this works, he thought. The valley felt like a network of watchers who set up American platoons, relaying word to those laying traps.
Soto sensed eyes following the patrol. Everybody can see us.”
Twenty years. Two decades. Longest war in American history. Still, some people are arguing that Biden not only was mistaken for the manner of withdrawal, but the withdrawal itself. It’s madness, a madness borne of American myth-making that we can do anything we set our minds to do. They wanted the war extended. And it would not be like leaving troops in South Korea or Germany or Japan for decades. In those places, you have functioning governments who have their own capable armies - and they are not currently in active war zones.
And, of course, we were lied to for two decades by Democratic and Republican administrations about supposed progress in Afghanistan.
These aren’t small things. That’s why I’m convinced that Biden was right, that chaos was going to ensue no matter how well we planned, even if we should have planned better. I’m not against our military, not even against war in general. I’m just in agreement with Rev. Barber, that the price for this war has been way too high. The costs were real. And, no, I’m not convinced that we need troops on the ground wherever a terror outfit might spring up. It’s unrealistic and this isn’t like before 9/11. Our focus on terrorism has changed dramatically, and not always for the better.
I have friends who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, including one who lost a leg. As a reporter, I’ve had to sit down and listen through the tears of parents whose son killed himself shortly after returning home. I’ve been in a kitchen holding the hand of a mom mourning for her son killed in action. And I know that much of the weight carried for this war was thrust on the backs of a tiny portion of the American public. All of this is real. All of this is complex. And the chaos we witnessed this past weekend isn’t solely the result of what Biden did during his first seven months of office, or only because Donald Trump was talking a peace deal with the Taliban.
We all own this. It should be noted again that when we got into Afghanistan, as well as Iraq, much of the media and public were in support of those adventures. Multiple presidents didn’t get us in and keep us there on their own. We all had a hand it. And we need to acknowledge that truth so we can better understand why we keep repeating these deadly mistakes so we can figure out how to avoid them going forward.
I say we must begin by no longer believing in fairy tales. This country is mighty and has the biggest-baddest military on the planet. And we try to do good much of the time. But that doesn’t mean because we have good intentions the results will be good. We need to humble ourselves, acknowledge our limitations. It doesn’t mean we should no longer help vulnerable people elsewhere. Clearly, we should. It just means we must become wiser in how we go about doing good.
No better time than the present to tell the truth about American military might: We aren't the Avengers (or maybe we are, just not in the way you think)
The Afghan was is estimated to have cost $1 trillion. However, there were many soldiers who were wounded horribly and the price tag for their care will pop up as they age. No taxes were raised to cover war cost....so there is debt to pay.
Point is, from what I have read, that the war will have cost around $2 trillion in all as time passes by.....actually, a bit more.