I spent several days last week giving guest lectures about the Afghanistan War to freshmen and seniors at Anderson High School in Austin, Texas. It's no secret that I loathe this brutal, futile war that's not making us safer. So, when I talk to kids about it, I state my biases up-front, and I do my best to represent my opponents' views fairly. In the process of playing devil's advocate during these talks, I usually ask people if they remember how they felt on 9/11. I do this because I think it's a good way to get into the mindset of decision-makers who led us down this road back in 2001. But this year, something startling happened: When I asked the students this question, they laughed at me.
"Dude, that was a long time ago," they giggled. "We were, like, in 3rd grade or something." In other words, no, Mr. Old Guy, we don't remember. We weren't even 10 years old when that happened.
Year 10. That's where we are, starting today. We are now in the Afghanistan War's 10th year. Of course most of those kids don't remember what they felt like when the towers fell. It was almost a decade ago, more than half of their lives ago.
It's startling to be reminded how long ago 9/11 was because our public figures keep talking about the Afghanistan War like it started last year. General Petraeus let us know back in February in a Meet the Press interview that we were just then getting "the inputs about right," and were now "starting to see some of the outputs." Nine years into this war, and Petraeus lets us know they're just getting warmed up. Good God.
U.S. foreign policy luminaries have this habit of talking about Afghanistan like it's some sort of laboratory experiment, some controlled environment where we can just start over if Counterinsurgency Hypothesis A doesn't pan out. We talk about it like it's therapy, where "making progress" is good enough. But Afghanistan isn't a controlled environment where we can safely discard old models and just roll up our sleeves and start over; it's the Graveyard of Empires (tm), and it's full of people who die when we wipe their slates clean. And as far as progress goes, please fire any public servant who utters those words to cover their inability to produce results.
Dana Perino said we're making progress... remember her? She was the last president's spokesperson. You remember, that president so terrible we don't even like talking about him in polite company. And he said we were making progress, along with the last two commanding officers of the Afghanistan mission we kicked to the curb for various forms of stupidity.
We've been making progress for nine-plus years now, progress into the deadliest year for U.S. troops since the war began, progress into record levels of suicide terrorism directed at Americans, progress into war debt so high we'll probably never be able to pay it off. No more progress in Afghanistan, please. I want these poor high school kids, who don't remember how they felt back in the Paleolithic Era when the war began, to be left with something resembling the country in which I was lucky enough to grow up.
The war in Afghanistan isn't making us safer. According to Robert Pape's research, since the Afghanistan and Iraq wars began, suicide attacks around the world increased by a factor of six, and 90 percent of all suicide attacks are now anti-American. According to Homeland Security back in May:
"The number and pace of attempted attacks against the United States over the past nine months have surpassed the number of attempts during any other previous one-year period."
This has also been the deadliest year for U.S. troops in Afghanistan already with several months left to go. We are not safer. We are less safe.
The war in Afghanistan isn't worth the cost. War costs have already exceeded $1 trillion and will go much higher once the cost of caring for the veterans kicks in. It costs us $1 million per troop, per year to occupy that country. And civilian deaths in Afghanistan are up more than 30 percent so far this year; I strain to imagine a goal that would make that level of death "worth it."
We are 10 years into this godforsaken catastrophe of a war with virtually no chance of a turnaround brought about by military force. We are not about to turn a corner. We are not about to turn the tide. Despite Petraeus' "dark before the dawn" rhetoric, the spike in violence we're seeing now is consistent with a well-established pattern of ever-increasing violence as the insurgency metastasizes across the country. Here's a chart to illustrate from the Afghan NGO Safety Office, showing the level of insurgent-initiated violence:
Year 10 has to be the last year of this war. The president doesn't need to wait until next July to start pulling out troops. He should start withdrawals today, this afternoon, before dinner. He should drag generals by the four-starred shirt to the radios to give the signal if that's what it takes. He should admit that our national interest isn't served by throwing a 100,000-plus-troop war machine at a dirt-poor country to catch fewer than 100 nutcases. We should be in the White House's face, in the Pentagon's face, every day, telling them that we won't tolerate mealy-mouthed dithering on "conditions" while our sons and daughters and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers get ground into record numbers of amputees and coffin-filler.
And we should make damn sure they know we won't sit around and watch while they drag kids too young to really remember how they felt on September 11, 2001, into a war that we're too proud to admit is a failure.
It's not working. It's not going to work. It's over. Shut it down. Bring them home.
If you want to help us make sure this war's 10th year is its last year, join us at Rethink Afghanistan.