8.18 | wow, that long war came to a stupid end
Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.
– Ernest Hemingway
✉️ letter #4
After 20 long years, America finally made the decision to pull out of Afghanistan, and almost immediately, it went to the "enemy" we'd been fighting all along.
A lot has been written on this war, which America has been fighting my entire adult life; way more than I can even begin summarizing, or would even think I should begin summarizing since I, like most Americans, didn't really pay attention to what was going on there all this time.
Because for me, like most Americans, Afghanistan was a largely invisible presence.
As muddy as the reasoning behind invading Vietnam was, it quickly became even more opaque for our continued presence in Afghanistan. The Taliban are bad news for sure. But we refused to fight them - and their numerous offshoots - with anything but incredibly expensive blunt tools directed just about anywhere some shadowy conglomerate of military interests thought would be fun. It seemed we were just as likely to explode a wedding party or pine nut farmers as we were to actually stop a terrorist attack.
And as we made more of a mess of things, we just collectively as a nation stopped talking about it. And we could, because barely any of us were in it.
During the Vietnam War, roughly 2.7 million American soldiers set foot in Vietnam out of over 9 million military personnel who were on active duty. We've got 60% more people now, but only 1.4 million folks in the entire armed forces. It's entirely likely that very few of us know anyone who's gone to Afghanistan to fight.
I'm trying to recall when I had seen Afghanistan in the headlines in the last decade, and all I can remember are a smattering of depressing NPR articles reconfirming that things weren't going well and a brief, weird, semi-cringey celebration when Osama Bin Laden was "got."
Now that we've withdrawn, there's been an explosion of even more depressing articles reconfirming that things had more or less never went well. And I've spent the last couple of days reading over them and sighing and wishing I was surprised by any of them.
Here are the ones who seem to encapsulate what just happened (and what will happen) the best out of all the takes I've been reading:
Americans like to think of ourselves as having valiantly tried to bring democracy to Afghanistan. Afghans, so the narrative goes, just weren’t ready for it, or didn’t care enough about democracy to bother defending it. Or we’ll repeat the cliche that Afghans have always rejected foreign intervention; we’re just the latest in a long line.
I was there. Afghans did not reject us. They looked to us as exemplars of democracy and the rule of law. They thought that’s what we stood for.
And what did we stand for? What flourished on our watch? Cronyism, rampant corruption, a Ponzi scheme disguised as a banking system, designed by U.S. finance specialists during the very years that other U.S. finance specialists were incubating the crash of 2008. A government system where billionaires get to write the rules.
And now, finally, we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening. The Taliban is surging in and taking it all back. They were always going to do this, because they have a thing you cannot buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them.
I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban. It’s Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever.
Like any empire in terminal decay, no one will be held accountable for the debacle or for the other debacles in Iraq, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen or anywhere else. Not the generals. Not the politicians. Not the CIA and intelligence agencies. Not the diplomats. Not the obsequious courtiers in the press who serve as cheerleaders for war. Not the compliant academics and area specialists. Not the defense industry. Empires at the end are collective suicide machines. The military becomes in late empire unmanageable, unaccountable, and endlessly self-perpetuating, no matter how many fiascos, blunders and defeats it visits upon the carcass of the nation, or how much money it plunders, impoverishing the citizenry and leaving governing institutions and the physical infrastructure decayed.
The human tragedy — at least 801,000 people have been killed by direct war violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Pakistan and 37 million have been displaced in and from Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, the Philippines, Libya, and Syria according to The Watson Institute at Brown University — is reduced to a neglected footnote.
And, of course, we are the worst at helping the people who helped us.
Well. My gut says that as much as this is over, it isn't really over. But this is the end of one particularly horrible chapter and it's hard to be even slightly optimistic that those who have the power to learn from it and stop it from happening again... will.
So here's the rest of this edition of the newsletter, I guess.
🌱 the ethical ideas newsreel
Pieces I've found from around the internets with interesting ideas for sustainability, human health, and diversity (both bio- & people).
- In an instance where humanity DID manage to do something good for itself that's paying dividends, it looks like our efforts to repair the ozone layer are also helping us lower the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
- I've gotten a bunch of houseplants recently but I've got to admit I've got kind of a black thumb. I'm not sure if having houseplants really has anything to do with environmental friendliness, but it does make me feel more "green" overall... especially if they stay alive. This article's supposed to help with that.
- Is there a better way to think about "the clock"? This feature in Noema magazine argues that the way we measure time is political.
- Mark Manson (of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck fame) asked people 37 & older about what their life lessons for the 30s were. As someone about to hit that line, it was interesting to read through and see what applied to me. A lot, it turns out.
🎵 song of my week
One of my favorite young rap acts released his latest album very recently. Eponymously titled Vince Staples, it's short, sweet, poignant with beats. I love it.
✨enjoying: one final piece of pop culture fun
I don't know if this counts as fun. It seems sad to end a newsletter that started on a bummer note with a podcast that will finish this with a bummer note but... Adam McKay's Death at the Wing is really really good, you guys. And it's only seven episodes, all of which I binged over a day recently.
McKay is best known for writing comedies like Stepbrothers and the movie The Big Short. He brings more of the latter's energy to this podcast series:
Death at the Wing examines the shocking number of promising basketball stars who lost their lives in the 80’s and early 90’s. At the dawn of the 1980s, the world was moving faster, the media was growing bigger, and greed was finally good. For the NBA, it was a chance to finally step into the spotlight. But all that wealth and stardom came at a deep cost. This is the story of how basketball reflected a moment when Reagan’s America doubled down on some of its core values: selfishness, violence, and racism — and the players who paid the price.
It reminds me a lot of another sleeper hit of the pandemic, The Last Dance, which is about the 90s Bulls and Michael Jordan, but also about so much more. I'm not a basketball fan but sports are such a fascinating microcosm of the wider popular culture, and putting the human drama in its global context is like candy for my brain.
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