AfghanExit

President Biden’s decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan by September 11 is overflowing with symbolic significance, but is getting mixed reaction. To start with, critics say the announcement of an exit date puts a target on the back of each and every American servicemember still there. I think that rather than shooting at us, the Taliban will be too busy waving goodbye. But whichever it is, the time has come.

It was only a few months after 9/11 that American forces believed they had the opportunity to take out Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in Afghanistan, but the trigger wasn’t pulled. It took us another 10 years to get that done, and it wasn’t even in Afghanistan, but Pakistan.

But that still wasn’t a logical end point. We’ve been trying to defeat the Taliban, or negotiate an end to the conflict there. It does appear to many that we are abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban.

We may have failed to learn a lesson from the Vietnam War. No matter our efforts to prop up a weak government that we try to preserve in our democratic image, it is usually no match for a genuine movement of zealots devoted to an individual, a system, or a religion, however wrong-headed it may be. The change has to come from within.

There is also the legitimate issue of whether we are dismissing the sacrifices of our troops who were injured or lost their lives during this 20-year war. I don’t think their effort was wasted at all. But Afghanistan has been the military graveyard of not only us, but the Russians and the British before us. Another lesson we learned the hard way.

That said, we cannot say “never” when it comes to foreign wars. There are some that will involve us, either by the need to protect ourselves, by the fulfillment of a treaty, or for by a humanitarian cause, or all of the above. We HAD to be involved in World War II. I personally wish we had been involved in Syria, but we chose not to. In the end, we just have to pick our battles, and we haven’t always been good at that.

I do agree that we cannot be the “policeman of the world,” as the saying goes. But I do think the world needs a police force. I guess that’s a whole ‘nother discussion.