President Joseph Biden has finally closed the endless war in Afghanistan. America is at peace, ending two decades of death and destruction. Republicans, as always, flood the public sphere with disingenuous complaints or phantom quibbles to distract us from his success. It’s worked, too. Somehow, we missed that President Biden finished what the earlier administrations promised and failed to do: Biden ended the war.
I find it odd how President Biden had to explain the most widely known fact: America had no winnable mission in Afghanistan. We couldn’t even express what we wanted in more than vague generalities. Americans knew this already, but we pretended not to see. No, there wasn’t an Afghan nation to build. And America has failed every earlier attempt at nation-building. Are we truly surprised now, or just pretending? We all knew the mission was doomed the moment President George W. Bush shifted from counterterrorism to counterinsurgency. We’d lost their hearts and minds when we became just another occupying force.
As expected, the Republican Party immediately savaged Biden for completing the terrible peace agreement that former President Donald Trump so carefully negotiated. And, as usual, most media sources repeated the false Republican narrative without context or self-awareness. That doesn’t surprise me. What does startle is that I still haven’t seen any substantive discussions of this new peace?
Peace was the only viable answer. That we’ve lost is obvious. We didn’t even know what “victory” meant. In twenty years, America had never clearly defined the mission. What did we want in Afghanistan? Why did we think our military was the right tool to achieve it? We had no goal, and every military leader knew this. Every President knew this, too. Instead of acting for our benefit, though, they punted the problem to the future, alienating our allies and weakening America’s standing in the world. We made American Exceptionalism into a bad joke.
The Afghan war has been a dark time in America. That war, like the larger War on Terror, has not drawn our better angels. Rather than using our power to lift people, we reveled in revenge and infantile posturing. Instead of acting from principles, we abandoned any pretense of moral standing. We puffed ourselves up, talking about “kicking butt” or “doing whatever it takes” like the vengeful children we emulated. We bragged – bragged! – about torturing our captives. Our leaders – charged with protecting our country – deliberately ruined our international standing.
I know this peace did not come quickly or cheaply. How could it? Each prior administration – Bush, Obama, Trump – allowed the mindless quagmire to fester. But it’s worth looking at how – and, more importantly, why – our leaders could not lead us well. President Biden has shown us bravery that no earlier President managed. They all knew the war was doomed. Why couldn’t those earlier leaders act faithfully?
We paid a terrible price for an unwinnable war, but it’s over. The U.S. will never recover the blood and treasure we lost. That’s the past. Now it’s over, and we’re finally at peace. I know it’s hard to see what’s just happened when every media source is screaming “Failure!” Even now, an entire political party is happy to bellow their lies and deliberately destabilizing our society in exchange for a few more political donations.
Peace. America is finally at peace for the first time in twenty years. No more American soldiers need to die there. We can stop the moral outrage of Afghanistan deaths, too, if we choose. We can stop bleeding our resources to feed that machine. Imagine what good things we can do with 300,000,000 dollars a week that we’re not losing to that hypermasculine addiction.
