It's official: We will have lost the war in Afghanistan in July.

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We’ve been there for 20 years, and if there was ever a place we didn’t belong, it was Afghanistan.  Whole generations of Afghans have been born who never knew a day that patrols of heavily armed American soldiers didn’t blast down the roads of their towns and villages in camouflaged Humvees and trucks.  Hell, whole generations of Americans have been born who never knew a day that someone from their town or village wasn’t one of the soldiers blasting down those roads in the foothills of the Hindu Kush.  We thought 10 years was a long time to waste in Vietnam fighting a war that never should have been fought.  But a new generation of American “leaders” had a new and better idea:  let’s see if we can’t waste even more time occupying a country that would just as soon go about its business without the good old U.S.A. telling them what to do and how to do it while killing many, many of its people.

It’s the killing that sets apart our occupation of countries like Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.  I was born in a country occupied by American forces, Japan, right after this country had won the war that Japan made the mistake of starting.  As a young boy, I lived in another country, Germany, which we occupied after defeating its army in a war started by its Nazi leadership and fully embraced by the German people.  In neither country while I lived there – one year in Japan, three years in Germany – was our army killing the population whose country we occupied.  That had been taken care of before I came on the scene in either country.

Not so in Afghanistan.  We started killing Afghans in 2001 almost immediately after we determined that those responsible for the terrorist attacks on 9/11 were trained in Afghanistan and given succor by the Taliban, then its government.  We have continued killing Afghans, so far as I know, right up until this day.  The New York Times informs us on its front page today that American drones “and other surveillance aircraft” are being used “to provide key targeting information” to Afghan forces, both ground and air. “To keep tabs on the military situation on the ground, the U.S. military wants to continue using some version of what it calls the Combined Situational Awareness Room, where it coordinates with its Afghan counterparts (often over WhatsApp), funneling information and helping put air support and other forces into place on the battlefield,” the Times tells us.  Don’t you love that mil-speak?  A room where they’re doing something called “combined situational awareness” making oh-so-clever use of WhatsApp!  To me that sounds an awful lot like removing American bodies from the equation while continuing to fight a war using someone else’s bodies – in this case, Afghanistan’s soldiers. 

Here is what is to me the key paragraph in today’s Times story: “The Pentagon has wanted to avoid what officials said could be a nightmare scenario: a combat-related death in Afghanistan after the president had announced that American troops were withdrawing. Such a loss could prompt a public outcry over why American troops were being put at risk for a lost cause, officials said.”

Notice they’re talking about a “combat-related death” while not identifying the nationality of the person who might be killed, although it’s obvious from the context and the sources being quoted – they are from the Pentagon – that they’re talking about an American death.  But no matter who’s doing the dying, the entire construct of what the Pentagon is worried about is utterly misbegotten.  The “cause” of our presence in Afghanistan, whatever it was, was lost from the very beginning.  When I was in Afghanistan in 2004, I asked practically every soldier I came in contact with what we were doing there.  Not one of them had a clue – not sergeants, not majors, not one general I spoke to, the general as it happened who was in command of the entire American effort there.  They hadn’t been told what their mission was.  They had never seen the mission put in words on a piece of paper.  All they had seen, really, were the orders that sent them there, which essentially said, load up your stuff and report to a location in the United States where you will be transported to an army unit in Afghanistan. 

That’s what’s truly incredible when you think about it.  Along with Vietnam and Iraq, Afghanistan was yet another war the United States got itself into without having any idea why.  Oh, they had excuses all right.  “WMD” was the big one for Iraq, and “combating terrorism” was the big one for Afghanistan, and both wars, it was said, were being fought “over there so we don’t have to fight over here.”  Remember that jewel?  We’ve got to send hundreds of thousands of soldiers 10,000 miles away and spend the lives of about 7,000 of them so we can prevent another attack on our soil like the one in 2001 that took slightly less than 3,000 lives. Quite a return on investment, wouldn’t you say?

That doesn’t even include the trillions of dollars that just disappeared into the ether.  According to the Congressional Budget Office, we have spent between two and three trillion dollars combined on the two wars.  But according to the Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs at Brown University, which has kept an authoritative count of the monies we wasted, we have spent in excess of $6.4 trillion since the wars began in 2001.

For what?  I couldn’t tell you.  Neither could any so-called political leaders I’ve ever seen quoted on the subject, other than to indicate rather vaguely that whoever has been “in charge” over these two decades didn’t want to be the one who “lost” either war.

Well, we lost, and we lost a long time ago.  I have told this story before, but it’s worth telling again because it captures so perfectly the folly of both wars.  One day when I was in Iraq in 2003 during the early months of that particular misbegotten war, I ran into General David Petraeus at his headquarters in Mosul.  He was the commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division at the time, with about 30,000 young American men and women under his command.  The 101st at that moment in late November of 2003 had lost about 90 soldiers in the nine months they had been in Iraq. 

With those losses in mind, I asked General Petraeus what his orders had been when he was told to take his division from Baghdad to Mosul.  He gave me a blank look.  So I rephrased the question:  were your orders, “Take Mosul!” as in, attack and seize the city of Mosul from whatever dregs of Saddam’s army might still be in the area?  Still, a blank look.  Well then, I ventured, were your orders simply, “Go to Mosul?”  He didn’t exactly nod his assent, but I could tell by the look on his face that I had touched on what he had actually been told by his superiors a few months before. 

I tell this story to give you an idea of how unfocused the military “mission” was in Iraq, and I am convinced, in Afghanistan as well.  Petraeus was told, in effect, to move 30,000 soldiers and countless quantities of war-fighting machinery such as Blackhawk helicopters and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and tanks and Humvees and 105 mm Howitzers and 81 mm mortars and 6.2 inch mortars and who knows how much ammunition and fuel and food and all the rest of the stuff it takes to put an infantry division in the field at war 250 miles to Mosul and he wasn’t told much of anything about what to do when he got there.  So the lives of 90 young Americans had been lost in pursuit of what, exactly?

Well, I got a pretty good idea of what our purpose in Iraq was a few days later when I went out on a patrol through downtown Mosul with about 14 or 15 soldiers.  They loaded their weapons and put on their armored vests and helmets, and I put on my armored vest and helmet, and we set out from the Mosul Social Security office that been had seized and used as that company’s headquarters, and we wandered through the city of Mosul for a couple of hours.  I asked the sergeant commanding the patrol what we were doing, what was the purpose of the patrol.  He gave me a grin and said, “Why, sir, we’re on a presence patrol.”  I told him I had never heard of a presence patrol, that we had never trained for presence patrols when I was in the Army, and I had never been taught about them at West Point.  What is a presence patrol? I asked him.  “Well, sir, we call them target patrols.  We go out and walk around, and we’re the target.”

Those kinds of “patrols” were also routine in Afghanistan.  Well, I guess if you go to war and there doesn’t appear to be anybody around, the way you wage it is, you send some soldiers out and see if anyone takes a shot at them.

Which pretty much sums up the 20 years we’ve spent in Afghanistan, not to mention the years we spent in Iraq.  We didn’t know what the hell we were doing there, so we did stuff to piss off the locals until they shot at us and then we shot back.  Having accomplished years and years and years of rather aimless, mindless, meaningless shooting and killing and getting shot at and dying, we’re leaving.

Even if Joe Biden decides to go upstairs in the White House and lie down and take a nap for the next three years, he will have accomplished something truly extraordinary, something no other American president has been able to do.  He will have gotten us the hell out of Afghanistan. Good on him.