Afghan war left Americans conflicted but mostly indifferent

During 20 years of warfare against Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, Waco Tribune-Herald colleagues and I struggled to keep up with an ever-changing mission. It was launched to drive out fundamentalist combatants who aided the 2001 terrorist attacks on our centers of commerce and military might that left nearly 3,000 dead on the American homefront. Then it shifted to a dubious nation-building mission to transform Afghanistan from a tribal confederation into an outpost of democracy worthy of 21st century civilization.

But under the Obama, Trump and now Biden administrations, the mission morphed into finding some way of quitting and just getting out – no surprise, given these missions never fully engaged Americans beyond buying a lot of “Support Our Troops” bumper stickers, even considering the astounding loss of American lives incurred by a Taliban regime hosting Osama bin Laden, terrorist mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. Maybe this is a sign of Americans’ latter-day shallowness, decadence and short attention span. To a degree, such qualities have contributed to our accelerated exit from the country, punctuated by Thursday’s bloodshed near Hamid Karzai International Airport, the apparent work, once again, of terrorists.

President George W. Bush certainly didn’t help matters by invading Iraq in 2003, a year and a half after beginning war with Afghanistan. The decision to wage two wars using an all-volunteer military distracted from the fight for Afghanistan in resources, manpower and focus. Nor was all this aided by his foolishly pursuing a second round of tax cuts adding to the national debt. We put both wars (including massive medical expenses) on the nation’s credit card. Citizens were told to go shopping. Such defined our 21st century patriotism and national sacrifice.

Tribune-Herald staffers may not have been on Afghan battlefields, but our attendance at President Bush’s press conferences at the Western White House near Crawford; our proximity to Fort Hood; and our coverage of local veterans returning home gave us a certain fractured insight into what was going on. I say “fractured” because Bush put a positive spin on our nation’s work in Afghanistan; the troops and others on leave or between deployments were often far more nuanced and frank.

One local, Jeff Aguirre, then 34, conveyed to us in 2007 the promise he felt in his mission as a contractor training Afghan security. He wanted to “go over there and see the world and be there as a part of that country was being built up and coming online with the rest of the world.” Now working as a McLennan County sheriff’s deputy, Aguirre in a Trib interview this month discreetly avoided volatile policy opinions but suggested our withdrawal would extinguish hope among the Afghan people.

Army Spc. David Kaye, then 22, a Baylor University journalism student (and now BU assistant athletic director for communications), echoed Aguirre’s sentiments in 2006: “The best way to end terrorism is to end this way of life, give these people a better way of life, to give them better opportunities." But another Army soldier, 27, spoke to us of the resentment he felt in 2013: “Throughout the whole deployment, I never felt welcome. We were there to help, but at no point did I feel the locals were thankful. We were intruders.”

I pressed Congressman Chet Edwards in February 2009 about President Obama’s vow to withdraw from Iraq. “He has shown a willingness to look at conditions on the ground before deciding how soon the troops should come out,” he said of Obama “That's wise. He outlined his goals during the campaign, but that goal shouldn't be a straitjacket, particularly when American lives are at risk. It's important to maximize (our presence) to ensure Iraq is stable in the long term. Same goes for Afghanistan.

“But we must be very careful how long and how deep we're mired in the Afghanistan conflict,” Edwards stressed. “It is more tribal and far more complex than even Iraq, as difficult as that has been. Even Defense Secretary Robert Gates indicated we need to be very realistic about what our goals and expectations are in Afghanistan. Before long, I want to see our exit strategy from Afghanistan. I don't want 50,000 to 100,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next 10 years.”

Sacrificing at the mall

When President Obama traveled to Fort Hood in November 2009 for memorial services after 39-year-old Army psychiatrist Nidal Hasan’s shooting spree on post left 13 dead and many more wounded, grief clearly mixed with misgivings. Joseph Fowlkes, 32, of Killeen, who had retired from the military that October after deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, stressed to us the dilemma: "I was tired of getting deployed. I was tired of my friends getting deployed. But we can't pull out entirely because then everything we've done over there will be for nothing."

As Trib colleague Michael Shapiro reported in 2011, Osama bin Laden’s death drew restrained comment from Fort Hood soldiers who expressed doubt this long-sought development would lead to major change in the war in Afghanistan. Killeen resident Theresa Kurts expressed hope it might make for fewer or at least shorten future Mideast troop deployments, noting that her best friend’s husband was set to go on another tour to Afghanistan in June: “He’s supposed to be gone for 18 months, so maybe with this he won’t have to be gone so long.”

By contrast, I found spirits high all over Waco in the wake of the brilliantly executed operation of a Navy SEAL team, U.S. intelligence and the Obama administration in dispatching bin Laden. For instance, at Dubl-R Burgers in North Waco, customer Dennis Frymark, 47, a former Marine, told how his boss, Mark Money, a former Navy man, teased him at work: “He offered me condolences that the Marines couldn’t handle it, so they called in the Navy to do the job.”

Sentiments turned dark amid news of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales’ 2012 slaughter of 16 Afghan civilians, including nine children, some as young as 2. We received letters to the editor blaming such rage on endless deployments of an exhausted, often unappreciated military to hostile stretches of the Mideast. “I was a Marine during the Vietnam War and I was proud to serve my country,” a local veteran wrote. “I was also glad to know that when I was deployed to Vietnam that I would only have to serve a 13-month tour and not be forced to go back. It is shameful to ask our military men and women to endure never-ending combat. I do believe we should have gone into Afghanistan seeking Osama bin Laden and his ilk. But it’s 10 years later and 1,700 American lives have been lost. It’s time to get out now!”

I remember in 2013 publishing a guest column by then former first lady Laura Bush in which she urged fellow citizens to stick with the mission, especially given the brutal treatment of women by the Taliban if the latter returned to power. “We know from our own history — from the Civil War to women’s suffrage and civil rights — how hard and long the path to freedom is,” she wrote. “As the people of Afghanistan continue on their own hard path to freedom, they must know that we are with them.”

Antioch Community Church members and Baylor graduates Heather Mercer, 24, and Dayna Curry, 29 ensured that Waco figures in the footnotes of any comprehensive historical chronicling of the Afghan war. Arrested by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan more than a month before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the Christian foreign aid workers faced a possible death sentence for spreading the gospel. Yet a decade later, Mercer radiated Christian resilience, tolerance and charity: “I think for all of us involved in that experience in Afghanistan, that was the irony of the situation. The experience solidified the sense of calling to serve Muslims in hard places.”

“Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry decided to go to help people who needed help,” President Bush said in welcoming them to the White House on Nov. 26, 2001, after rescue from Taliban captors, and mere days after U.S. and allied forces drove the Taliban into retreat. “Their faith led them to Afghanistan. One woman who knows them best put it this way: They had a calling to serve the poorest of the poor, and Afghanistan is where that calling took them. And Heather and Dayna's faith in God sustained them throughout their ordeal. It's a wonderful story about prayer, about a faith that can sustain people in good times and in bad times. Their faith was a source of hope that kept them from becoming discouraged.”

Bush said Curry and Mercer’s ordeal was also “a story about people in our country who rallied for them. People prayed all around the country. I was particularly struck by the fact that Heather's dad offered to take her place in prison. I was struck by the fact that a country preacher out of Central Texas flew to Afghanistan to lend his presence in any way that would help. I know there are a lot of people right outside of Crawford that were praying for these girls' release. And when they were, people all across Baylor University cheered. Something besides football became more important in their lives – life itself."

But an interview that Trib opinion page colleague Sandra Sanchez conducted in 2012 with Army Lt. Col. Jack Usrey of Fort Hood nailed the real problem. He spoke of the road mines, soldiers with limbs blown off, fear from locals and isolation from his wife and three children. But what struck him worse and was harder for him to accept was the apathy and lack of concern from citizens back home about what he and other military personnel were doing in Afghanistan.

“These folks are just oblivious. They have no idea,” Usrey, then 46, told Sanchez in Temple beside his wife of 20 years during a Christmas holiday visit — his first trip home since deploying on a year-long mission in May. “During World War II, the entire country activated and everyone was at war. Well, we’ve been at war for a decade now but no one knows. It’s almost like we (soldiers) are at war and America’s at the mall.”

Pandemonium guaranteed

Because leaving Afghanistan promptly was one thing on which President Trump and President Biden agreed, we should have expected more in how the withdrawal was actually conducted: Biden stupidly allowed himself to be boxed in by what amounted to the U.S. surrender terms that Trump negotiated with the Taliban. Instead of expanding his options to transport to safety U.S. citizens and Afghans who assisted the United States at great peril, Biden contributed to the chaos and panic that were, admittedly, always inevitable.

In recent days, Republicans have scrambled to duck blame in all this by rewriting history, “1984”-style. For instance, hours after the Taliban seized Kabul and the Afghan government collapsed, the Republican National Committee quietly removed from its website the claim "Biden has had a history of pushing for endless wars" while "Trump has continued to take the lead in peace talks as he signed a historic peace agreement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, which would end America’s longest running war.”

For Trump apologists to suddenly express dismay at a withdrawal their idol sealed with a pact signed in February 2020 (specifically negotiated by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo) suggests they’re disingenuous, which renders them untrustworthy, or in denial, which amounts to the same. Yes, it’s possible a Trump pullout might have been more orderly, but plenty of evidence suggests otherwise, including the bumbling and incoherence of the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis raging across the United States in 2020, packing hospitals and filling morgues – stunning incompetence that arguably cost thousands of American lives. And it goes without saying that Trump and his administration couldn’t even secure the U.S. Capitol from his own supporters during the Jan. 6 insurrection that halted congressional duties related to the 2020 presidential election and caused members of his own party to flee for their lives.

None of this excuses Biden, who must shoulder far more blame. Yes, any evacuation would have spurred pandemonium, especially among Afghans who foresaw neither the disintegration of Afghan security forces nor abandonment of their government with such immediacy. Indeed, even in the United States, chaos often prevails not only anytime a hurricane looms but in how federal and state relief efforts address the aftermath. President Bush proved as much with Hurricane Katrina relief efforts undermined by communication breakdowns, supply failures, indecision, confusion, fraud and political appointees with little disaster experience.

One marvels at how Biden, invoking the Trump pullout pact as an excuse to depart, could nonetheless ignore the logistical preparation that might have ensured such necessities as secured access to the Kabul airport and smart, orderly processing of visas for desperate Afghan allies. The latter has dragged on so long that a class-action lawsuit was filed against the U.S. government during Trump’s tenure challenging "life-threatening delays" in processing special immigrant visas for Afghans who assisted U.S. endeavors. And one reels at the Biden administration decision at one point to amateurishly tie the U.S. departure to a Sept. 11 deadline – a suggestion juvenile in conception, acceptance and execution.

To avoid further humanitarian outrage, Biden must through negotiation with the Taliban and/or through U.S. and NATO armed initiative ensure evacuations are handled methodically and efficiently in Kabul and elsewhere. If this means backtracking in earlier plans and pledges, so be it. History honors recalibrating in a disaster, assuming intelligence, wisdom and humanitarian grounds are factored in. One leverage the United States has to some extent: control of billions of dollars in Afghan capital the Taliban now seek from their central bank and the International Monetary Fund. As for the concern that hasty evacuation of unvetted Afghans may unwittingly import terrorism to America, one solution is quartering refugees in safe, clean, hospitable facilities out of harm’s way while each is vetted as best as possible.

Democracy at home, abroad

Gumming up discussions moving forward is the question too many pundits still want to debate: Should the United States leave Afghanistan? Yet this has been answered resoundingly. Polls show Americans want out. A 2019 Pew Research Center survey showed majorities of U.S. military veterans had concluded the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq weren’t worth fighting. And the 2020 presidential election pitted major candidates who wanted out. With an all-volunteer army, the scramble to cut taxes, the lust by U.S. citizens to vilify one another and our battle at home to hang on to the very democracy we sought to export, the time is right. American indifference to democracy in Afghanistan has preceded our indifference to democracy in America.

Given that the Taliban hastened their conquest in part by negotiating with tribal leaders, one wonders if Afghanistan has changed much beyond Kabul. But America has definitely changed. While we salute our troops with knee-jerk reverence, we care too little about the sometimes impossible missions on which we send them. Our fickleness should outrage them. On the homefront, we show our true colors: Out of political obstinance or fear, we balk at rolling up our sleeves to save even our neighbors, our co-workers, our children. And the Christian goodness symbolized by Heather Mercer and Dayna Curry in 2001 has been significantly supplanted in America by a malignant strain of evangelicalism fueled by the same hostility, discrimination and fundamentalist and apocalyptic theocracy of which we so readily accuse the Taliban.

No one with a heart can fail to be touched by the surprising protests mounted by Afghans against abrupt return of Taliban reign, the desperation we see at the Kabul airport and the laments of Afghans over U.S. departure. Yet the idea of further U.S. commitments in blood and treasure – the cost by now including the lives of some 2,500 U.S. service members and 3,800 contractors as well as an estimated $2.26 trillion to battle the Taliban and prop up Afghan security forces, all amid American sentiments ranging from apathy to disdain – can only arouse cynicism after collapse of those same Afghan security forces and the Afghan government. Thursday’s horrific explosions near Hamid Karzai International Airport killing 13 U.S. service members and scores of Afghans only further stamps the futility of a mission to transform Afghanistan from a fitful tribal enigma into a responsible presence in the Middle East; clearly, even the Taliban who yearn for U.S. departure, and to a strange degree have helped facilitate it, can’t control Kabul given all the sectional rivalries now in violent play. (ISIS-K, no friend of the Taliban which it claims isn’t fundamentalist enough, has claimed credit for this latest burst of terrorism.) A thoughtful friend of mine who served in the Air Force for 20 years and whom I regularly consult for insights into such matters as how to properly employ taut military muscle in an increasingly dangerous world put it soberly enough: "We trained them and gave them equipment for 20 years, and if they won't fight for their own country, we need to get out."