pvnisher wrote: ↑Fri Sep 10, 2021 3:57 pm
I was a cadet entering my senior year, at PT that Tuesday morning. After the second plane I knew that my projected career just took a sideways turn, and that many of my classmates, both current and recently graduated, would be involved. And yes, we were.
No one dreamed it would go on for as long as it did. The tactical aims were achievable. The strategic aims were dubious, even at the outset, and became more dubious as time went on.
After three tours through Afghanistan, including Kabul, Jalalabad, Khowst, and Herat, I've seen the good, bad, and ugly of that country and our own response and impact to the populace. I grew disillusioned with our progress, as evidenced by the fact that I couldn't travel the street in front of the Embassy without being in an armored vehicle with body armor and weapons. If we couldn't get even that strip of land to be relatively safe...
As for American interventionalism and the Pax Americana being a cause of 9/11 (and other conflicts), there's some valid points there. No one bombs Canada. But what are the alternatives? In case you haven't been around much, most of the world is a brutish, violent, poor place, ruled at the end of a spear. Should we let atrocities occur without doing anything other than offering thoughts and prayers? I ask rhetorically. Because I don't know.
Sometimes the spear is held by Americans such as myself and others on this site, compelling others to our National will. It isn't always pretty. But I believe that the spear is better held by those whose intentions and methods aim to the greater good and least bad. Many, many innocent Afghans have been killed by Americans in the last 20 years. More than Americans were killed, both on 9/11 and in the following years. Focused violence which only affects those targeted has improved much since the carpet bombing days of Dresden, but the nature of warfare has, and will always, place a larger burden on innocents than on active, interested participants. We all know that many of those Afghans, even those shooting at us, wouldn't care a bit about Americans if we weren't there in person.
It is sometimes an unpopular discussion to have, but those of us in my and similar professions, would likely be resistance fighters (aka terrorists depending on the side of the battle you're on) if the accident of birth had placed us in Afghanistan. If foreign fighters were in my province, seeking to overturn my way of life, and killing thousands of my countrymen, you'd better believe I would have been the guy out rigging IEDs. Yes, these are some of the discussions we have over there. We aren't immune to the absurd realities of the situations in which we find ourselves.
But I would like to think that if I were in that position I wouldn't intentionally target civilians. Indiscriminate mortar attacks, blowing up school buses, planes into buildings, driving trucks into crowded markets, those things are never ok. Perhaps it doesn't matter to the innocent person killed if they were intentionally targeted by a suicide vest, or if they were blown up by shrapnel from a drone strike. But it matters to me.
For those of you too young to remember, or too far removed due to the politicization of the war(s) during the last 20 years and the dramatic withdrawal of the last few weeks, hopefully you'll at least look back at those videos and remember what happened and why we got involved. It didn't turn out the way anyone wanted. The thing came off the rails years ago. But at that time, in those days, our intentions were good and we did what we thought was best. As someone who is often on the pointy end of the Pax Americana, I wish that our politicians in general would be a little less cavalier with the lives of our best citizens. But after watching a few "Have You Forgotten" videos on YouTube, I believe that, regardless of the outcome, we started nobly.