Leaving Afghanistan Behind

The longest war in American history is now over. As these six eyewitness perspectives attest—a commanding general, a sniper, an interpreter and others—although the fighting is done, the battle over its memory is just beginning.

- Matt Gallagher

Few wars get clean ends. Some here in America may want that small grace for Afghanistan as surely as some there deserve it, but in this way, war’s like life. Being deserving just makes you a target.

It began clean enough. The US invaded in the weeks after 9/11, at George W Bush’s behest, to dismantle and destroy Al Qaeda who’d attacked us. We sought something between justice and vengeance. Once the terrorist group and its Taliban enablers had been defeated, we stayed. Once Osama bin Laden was killed, in neighbouring Pakistan, we stayed. We stayed and we stayed and we stayed.

We stayed for democracy at one point, human rights at another. To nation-build, if you believed in counterinsurgency, or to ‘mow the grass’—a euphemism for killing terrorists that admits doing so will produce more—if you favoured counterterrorism.

Somewhere along the way, the war lost public interest and support. Those matter in a republic, though one could be forgiven for getting lulled into thinking otherwise the past 20 years. The war’s justification became the war’s existence itself, and that’s a twisted reason to keep killing people in the name of country, as well as risking the lives of our own.

A ghoul of a question hovered over the rapid Taliban advancement in the summer of 2021: How? How had two decades of blood and treasure left a porous apparatus either unwilling or unable to defend itself? US personnel had tried to build the Afghan security forces in our own image, with a national army and special operations and a core belief that the military can and should do more than engage the enemy on battlefields.