Twenty years of war, and for what?

I had a magazine assignment back in 2004 to go to Afghanistan and see how the hunt for Osama bin Laden was going.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  Bin Laden was the man behind the terrorist organization known as al Qaeda that was responsible for the attack on this country that was carried out in September of 2001 when 19 radical Muslim terrorists succeeded in flying airplanes into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington D.C. killing nearly 3000 American citizens.  He was the very definition of a bad guy.  We had to find him and bring him to justice.  We had to defend our country from another attack by Osama bin Laden or someone like him. 

We had even invaded another country, Iraq, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  We had, at the time I went to Afghanistan in 2004, more than 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and more than 140,000 in Iraq.  We had tens of billions in materiel and weapons of war in both countries.  That’s how serious we were about A) tracking down Osama bin Laden and getting our revenge, and B) defending the homeland from another attack.  Come to think of it, we had even generated an entirely new department in our government with the word “homeland” in it, the Department of Homeland Security, which had the purpose of helping to defend us right here in the so-called “homeland.”

It was in this atmosphere that I took a series of long flights that eventually landed me in Afghanistan to begin my story about the military’s search for Osama bin Laden.  The idea was that I would “embed” with an Army unit in Afghanistan tasked with searching for bin Laden and fighting the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban.  I reported to the Army’s headquarters in Kabul and was given press credentials and told I would have to wait for a flight down to Kandahar where the search for bin Laden was apparently very hot. 

A week or so later, I took a cab out to the American base at Bagram and got on a C-130 bound for Kandahar.  When I got down there, I found a heavily defended basecamp and airport similar to several I had been on in Iraq.  Thousands of troops.  Hundreds of yards of military vehicles lined up ready to go.  Dozens of helicopters at the airfield.  Gigantic dirt berms topped with razor wire defended by hundreds of soldiers against attack.  Being on a base camp like that one in either Afghanistan or Iraq was like being on a little piece of America.  Nearly everyone you saw was American – soldiers, civilian “contractors,” workers at KBR-run “D-facs,” or dining facilities.  Oh, there were a few Afghan translators around, but you had to look hard to find them they were so few in number.  It was the same way in Iraq.  Thousands of Americans crammed together on these heavily defended basecamps surrounded by hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Iraqis or Afghans.  But very, very few of the local citizens present on the bases themselves.

I was shown to a tent on the base in Kandahar where I was told to wait to be embedded with the Army unit I was there to write about.  The first day I was there, I walked over to a KBR “D-fac” to eat lunch.  I went through the mess line and got my tray of food and sat down to eat.  A soldier in combat BDU’s sat down next to me.  I introduced myself and asked him who he was and what he did in the Afghanistan war.  With a kind of sheepish look on his face, he answered that he wasn’t in the Army, he was in the Navy, and he was a pilot who flew a Lockheed P-3 Orion surveillance plane along the Pakistan border gathering intelligence on al Qaeda and Taliban movements.  I said something to him like, “So you’re involved in the search for bin Laden, huh?”  He lowered his voice and said he was probably not supposed to be telling me this, but yeah, that’s what he was doing, flying his Lockheed P-3 Orion, which the Navy ordinarily used for aerial surveillance of enemy ships and especially submarines on the high seas. 

That’s how serious they were about finding Osama bin Laden.  I’m sitting there, and I’m thinking, just look at the forces America is bringing to bear in this fight!  They had fucking four-engine Navy airplanes flying around at night looking for him, looking for his al Qaeda fighters, searching for the nasty Taliban insurgents who were giving the Army fits out there along the border.  They had hundreds of helicopters, dozens of tanks, dozens of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, hundreds of Humvees, and thousands of soldiers out there fighting the war in Afghanistan against bin Laden and his terrorists and the Taliban fighters who were supporting him.  I thought, something has to come of this expenditure of billions of dollars, not to mention – at that time, anyway – hundreds of American lives.

It’s a much longer story for another time how I ended up pissing off the Army enough that they yanked my press credentials and put me on a C-130 back to Kabul a few days later without my having spent even a second off that basecamp outside Kandahar doing what I was supposed to be doing, which was covering the Army’s search for Osama bin Laden.  Well, okay, I’ll tell you briefly what happened.  I was presented with an Air Force major “minder” who accompanied me everywhere I went other than the latrine, and told I was required to submit written questions to the Army’s public affairs (read:  PR) office before I would be allowed to interview even one soldier.  I told them I wasn’t going to do that.  Okay, that’s not exactly what I said.  I told the Army’s chief “public affairs officer” if he thought I was going to write down my questions for him to go fuck himself.  So they cancelled me.

Back in Kabul, I decided I might still be able to squeeze some kind of story out of the situation by getting a translator and a driver and going out to the Pakistan border by myself to check out what was going on. So I did.  I rounded up a translator and a driver and a little Suzuki four wheel drive SUV and headed for the border.  On the drive over there, we got stuck in a massive traffic jam along a very dangerous mountain road through what was known as the Kabul River Gorge, and it was in the process of getting us through that traffic jam, in the middle of the night, that I came upon two busloads of Taliban fighters armed with AK-47 rifles.  I was told by my driver that he had learned they had driven in from across the Pakistan border. They had bought tickets in Peshawar, regular old commercial bus tickets, and they were taking a regularly scheduled bus from Peshawar to Kabul, and when they got there, they planned to shoot up the place.

I understood by that time that I was the only American there, probably the only American within 50 to 100 miles.  I was standing down there at the bottom of the gorge trying to figure out how I was going to get around these busloads of Taliban fighters – there were about 30 on each bus – when it occurred to me that somewhere above me was that Navy pilot in his Lockheed P-3 Orion flying around looking for al Qaeda and Taliban fighters.  Standing there looking at the two busloads of Taliban fighters, I knew there was no way he could see them.  There were no American soldiers around, either.  No combat patrols out there looking for these Taliban guys.  No CIA officers hiding in the rocks along the sides of the gorge surveilling the road looking for them, either. 

In fact, the only American anywhere near these Taliban terrorists was me.  Because I had gotten stuck in the same traffic jam they were in, I had found them. 

That’s when I knew we were fucked.  We had already been in Afghanistan for three years, and I could tell by the American military headquarters in Kabul, and the big base at Bagram, and the even bigger basecamp in Kandahar, and the other basecamps I knew were scattered around the country, that we were going to stay in Afghanistan for years and years.  I knew if we couldn’t find Taliban fighters riding on commercial busses from Pakistan to carry out an attack in Kabul, (which they did the next night, I would discover when I got back to Kabul several days later), I knew the whole fucking “war” in Afghanistan was complete folly.

It’s almost 16 years later.  I have no idea how many billions of dollars we spent over there in Afghanistan between that night in the Kabul River Gorge and this night, and I’m sick and tired of looking up the casualty figures to see how many lives of American soldiers we’ve wasted.  I’m sick and tired of drawing the obvious analogy to Vietnam, and the billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives we wasted there.  I know if I get into the trillions we wasted in Iraq and the thousands of lives we lost that I won’t be telling you anything you don’t already know.

I am happy that President Biden announced today that he has decided to finally pull us out of Afghanistan. But really: twenty years of war, and for what?