8 Years In

Q: If the richest country in the world invades the poorest country in the world, who will win?

A: Whoever can stay the longest.

This week marked the 8th anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan. In 8 years' time, this war has shifted from "the war" to "to other war" to "the forgotten war" to "the good war" to "the endless war". And there it will stay.

On September 12, 2001, the United States possessed the clear moral authority to employ violence against al Qaeda. That moment was the most morally unambiguous moment for Americans in 60 years; we wanted to kill, and we knew we were justified in our bloodlust.

I have a hard time owning those words, as they make me seem innately violent; I am nearly as far from that as is possible, but I am not a pacifist. And there are moments where violence is not only necessary, but also morally right. When someone rapes your mother. When someone flies a plan full of people into a building full of people.

That being said, our war in Afghanistan no longer remotely resembles its original manifestation. Our aim was to exterminate the people who planned and supported the 9/11 massacre. So we went to the country where their headquarters were. That made sense. But we fundamentally misunderstood the nature of this enemy from day one.

9/11 was not plotted in Afghanistan. It was plotted mostly in Germany. Yet we didn't invade Germany after 9/11. (Technically, we didn't have to invade Germany, since we're still occupying it from the last time we invaded, but I digress).

The Taliban government of Afghanistan was not sponsoring al Qaeda; al Qaeda was sponsoring the Taliban government. Usually, governments sponsor terrorist groups. But in Afghanistan, the poorest country in the world, the situation was reversed; the terrorist group was richer than the state, so the terror group sponsored the government rather than the usual arrangement. We fundamentally missed this from day one.

What this means is that the Taliban government was not the blood enemy of the United States. Are they medieval cretins? Yes. But they are not worth investing the wealth and blood and prestige of this nation to destroy. We can co-exist with the Taliban.

"Taliban" means "student" in Pashtu. So aiming to destroy the "Taliban" is like trying to eradicate "the intellectuals" or "the jocks" or "the conservatives"; it is a fundamentally impossible task, a contradiction in logic unless you're Hitler or Ghengis Khan.

The good news is that the huge majority of the people who planned, paid for, and carried out 9/11 are dead. The bad news is that we don't yet realize this and we are doubling down on a war that became irrelevant to our security about 6 years ago.

This war is turning into a Vietnam parable. Vietnam never had the intimate foundational context that 9/11 provides for us re Afghanistan, but the mentality and the strategy in these two war are distressingly similar. We stay and fight because the people who live there won't surrender to our self-evident superiority. Put simply, we kill the locals because they refuse to like us.

That never works. The fundamental problem is that every President we've had since World War II, including Barack Obama to some extent, insists on manifesting the delusional doctrine of American Exceptionalism. The idea that History does not apply to US.

"Every empire that has ever invaded Afghanistan has reaped only ashes? Well, Mr. Egghead, that's really interesting, but you seem to forget that we're AMERICANS." There is not a member of our national government that would contradict this theology.

History does apply to us, of course, and in our short history we have witnessed or committed every major sin and error of mankind. Ethnic cleansing. Slavery. Civil War. Legal discrimination. Domestic terrorism. Assassination. Stolen Elections. Imperialism. We've been there. We've done that. We just refuse to learn from it.

We're not Americans. We're Human.