Over the weekend, watching as the Taliban retook city after city, has filled me with a myriad of emotions I don’t think I can accurately describe.
After 9/11, American children were indoctrinated into believing in the American military war machine. Those of us who came of age post-9/11 thought that when we sold our souls to Uncle Sam, we would have an opportunity to do good, not only within our own communities, but on the world stage as well.
I, myself, enlisted when I was eighteen. I was sent to Kandahar in 2010, and I saw firsthand the plight of the Afghan people in that city. The children would run up to our convoys, hands held out for food we could not give them, for water we could not give them. The wrappers to the candy we had in our pockets could be used to create IEDs, the water bottles could house said IEDs.
The rational side of your brain thinks, “these are fucking children! They just want some candy! What the fuck?”
But we had been trained, from the word ‘go,’ that this is a country that had been at war for far longer than half the battalion had been alive. And these people wanted us gone. If that meant they would Macguyver an IED out of the random shit in your pockets, they would do it. They had the capability to do it.
We were told that we were wanted there, that we were improving the lives of people who had been oppressed by the Taliban for years. And, in some cases, that were true. But the staggering amount of white flags with words written in a language I could neither speak nor read told me so much more.
The Taliban hadn’t been beaten. They had just gone underground. They had centuries of invading forces coming in and trying to impose their way of living on the people of Afghanistan, only to pull out when everything got to be too much, as their example.
The British tried in the 1800s. The Afghan people outlasted them.
The Russians tried between 1977-1988. The Afghan people outlasted them.
We came in, screaming “America, Fuck Yeah” at the top of our lungs in 2001, intending on Freedom and Democracy-ing the Afghan people. The Afghan people outlasted us; the Taliban outlasted us.
We have essentially shot ourselves in the foot by leaving all what we did behind, like Afghanistan was just some big dumpster. Vehicles, tools, weapons. The Russians left behind approximately 30 MILLION land mines.
Every time I see that another city was taken, the government has fallen, or that the Taliban has taken Afghanistan, I have to ask myself, “why the fuck were we there?” All of the ‘good’ we supposedly did has gone the way of the dodo. Twenty years of change were undone in the span of a few weeks.
I try to keep politics out of my social media posts, as I had very much (and still) disliked Donald Trump. But I am very disappointed in Joe Biden this morning, for believing that the Taliban wouldn’t immediately be back on their bullshit the minute they reclaimed power. One must always assume that, when making a deal with the Taliban as a Westerner, it is always Opposite Day.
Seeing these people fleeing their country, the country we were supposed to have helped, kills me on the inside, and I wish there was something I could do. The Afghan people I met during my time in country were the kindest people I had ever met.
“But what about other first world nations? Why can’t they send in the cavalry?”
That’s because they did. ISAF was a joint coalition force, and some of the finest people I had ever had the pleasure of serving with. But ISAF disbanded when they thought the job was done, leaving us to hold the bag (not that I blame them—we got ourselves into this mess, we gotta get ourselves out of it).
Wars are expensive, and the money set aside in our government’s budget doesn’t go to paying our proud folks in blue (or green, or tan), or even to funding decent equipment so we don’t get dead (half of my 782 gear smelled like it had been manufactured long before my dad met my mom at a bar outside Homestead AFB). I don’t know where it goes, but it doesn’t go to helping the people we have forcibly Freedom and Democracied, nor does it go into helping our vets deal with the trauma we’ve dealt with in fighting another man’s war.
Revisiting trauma when you thought you were okay honestly feels like you’re Sisyphus, climbing that mountain every day, pushing that big ass boulder up, up, up to the tippy-top, only to have the ground give way beneath you and your boulder comes tumbling down to rest at the base of the mountain.
My proudest accomplishment in life has been a lie, and that pride was nothing more than a puff of smoke that was blown away in the slightest breeze. The humanitarian work I did while a Seabee has gone to benefit the enemy—100%.
All that’s left is a bitter, angry husk of a woman whose heart aches with fear for the women and children of Afghanistan who had hope within their grasp, and had it snatched it away.
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