This is the 19-year-old Lance Cpl.William Bee feels flying south Afghanistan Christmas Day 2001: pure luck. The United States is fighting back against the al-Qaeda planners that destroyed the World Trade Center, and Bee finds himself among the first marines on the ground.
“Excited,” Bee said these days, talking about Bee’s thoughts at the time. “Be the first to open it.”
In the following ten years, three more deployments were made in the longest war in the United States, and this feeling of luck disappeared.
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For Bee, it boils down to a night in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2008. At that time, a sergeant, Bee held the hand of an American sniper who had just been shot in the head, while a military doctor cut the man’s throat for airway surgery.
“After that, do you know–‘F_k these people,” Bee recalled, what drove him to deploy Afghanistan for the fourth and last time. “I just want to bring my people back. This is what I care about. I want to take them home. “
With President Joe Biden ending the U.S. combat role in Afghanistan this month, Americans and Afghans are questioning whether the battle is worth the cost: more than 3,000 Americans and other NATO members have lost their lives, tens of thousands of Afghans have died, and The trillion-dollar US debt will be paid for by generations of Americans, and in a shocking week of battle, Afghanistan seems to be facing an imminent threat of returning to Taliban rule, just as the Americans discovered nearly 20 years ago Like that.
For Biden, Bee, and some American leaders in the war between the United States and NATO in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it is worth the price often comes down to analysis.
In the first few years of the war, the Americans disintegrated Osama bin Laden’s Al-Qaida organization in Afghanistan and defeated the Taliban government that hosted the terrorist network.
That worked.
The White House Czar and retired Lieutenant General Douglas Lut, who was responsible for the war during the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, said the evidence is clear: Al Qaeda has not been able to Launched a major attack on the West.
“We destroyed Al Qaeda in the region in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Lut said.
But after that was the second phase of the war. Whenever the Americans finally withdraw, the United States is worried that the Taliban will rebound, which means that service personnel such as Bee are constantly being sent back, leading to more dangers, injuries and deaths of comrades in arms.
Lut and others argued that the second half of the war bought time—a grace period for the Afghan government, security forces, and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive independently.
The quality of life has indeed improved in some ways, modernized under Western occupation, even though the millions of dollars invested by the United States in Afghanistan have contributed to corruption. The infant mortality rate has dropped by half. In 2005, less than a quarter of Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, almost everyone has done this.
In the second half of the war, especially under the rule of the fundamentalist Taliban, Afghan women were completely deprived of opportunities. As a result, more than one-third of the young girls — who spent their entire lives under the protection of Western forces — can read and writing.
But it now appears that it is the second phase of this war that lasts the longest and is about to fail completely.
The American war kept the Taliban undefeated and failed to obtain a political solution. Last week, Taliban forces had swept over two-thirds of the country and occupied the provincial capital, embarking on the road to victory before the U.S. combat troops had completed the withdrawal. In many ways, the Taliban are overthrowing the Afghan security forces that the United States and NATO forces have spent 20 years building.
This rapid advance established the final position in Kabul, where most Afghans live. It may expose the country to strict interpretations of religious laws by the Taliban, erasing most of the proceeds.
“There is no’task completed’,” Biden snapped when answering a reporter’s question last month.
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Biden quickly corrected himself and evoked the victory of the first few years of the war. “We completed the task because we…found Osama bin Laden, and terrorism does not come from that part of the world,” he added.
Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for Central Asian Affairs for most of the first ten years of the war, stated that the criticism was not primarily directed at the conflict itself, but because the conflict lasted for a long time.
“This is the goal of expanding the war, trying to establish a government that can prevent any future attacks,” Boucher said.
The United States spent the most lives and money in the most fruitless years of the war.
According to “Cost of War” data, more than half of the 2.8 million American soldiers and women deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq have served in two or more Brown University projects.
Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University, said that repeated deployments have caused the disability rate of these veterans to be more than twice that of Vietnamese veterans.
Billmes calculated that the United States will spend more than $2 trillion to care for and support veterans in Afghanistan and Iraq. As they age, the cost will peak in 30 to 40 years.
This is in addition to the $1 trillion spent by the Pentagon and the State Department in Afghanistan since 2001. Because the United States borrowed instead of raising taxes to pay for the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, it is estimated that the interest expenditures of future generations of the United States will be more than trillions of dollars.
The annual number of combat deaths reached a peak around the midpoint of the war, as Obama tried to use his last strength to defeat the Taliban. According to data from the Pentagon and the “cost of war” project, a total of 2,448 US troops, 1,144 military personnel from NATO and other allied countries, more than 47,000 Afghan civilians, and at least 66,000 Afghan soldiers and policemen died.
All along, a series of American commanders have tried new strategies, acronyms and slogans when fighting the Taliban insurgency.
The airstrip in Kandahar, where Bee soon dug a foxhole for himself during Christmas in 2001, later developed into an outpost for tens of thousands of NATO troops, Popeye and Burger King, and a hockey field.
Over the years, combat units such as Bee’s 24th Marine Expeditionary Force entered hot spots to fight the Taliban and establish contact with local leaders, but they often only saw their troops lose their profits when they rotated again. In Helmand Province, this was the turning point for Bee in 2008, when hundreds of American and other NATO troops were killed in the fighting. Taliban fighters recaptured the province on Friday.
Bee’s trip to Afghanistan finally ended in 2010, when an improvised explosive device exploded 4 feet away from him, killing two soldiers standing with him. This was Bee’s third head injury, and for a while he could not walk a block without falling.
Is it worth it?
“Those whose lives are affected by us, I personally think we do better, and they live better because of it,” Bee replied, and he now works for a company that is the Marine Corps of Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Training provides autonomous robots and is a partner. -Write a book about his time in Afghanistan.
“But I would not trade a few Afghan villages for a Marine,” he added.
However, if you ask the same question in Afghanistan, you will get a different answer.
Some Afghans—asked this question before the shocking Taliban sweep last week—replied that it was time for the Americans to let Afghans handle their affairs.
But Shogufa, a 21-year-old woman, said that the 20 years of the US military on the ground meant a lot to her.
The Associated Press only used her name because of fear that the Taliban would retaliate against women who violated its strict rules.
When she was very young, she promised to marry an older cousin in the country to repay the loan. She grew up in a family and society where few women could read or write.
But as she grew up, Shogufa met a Western mountaineering non-profit organization that came to Kabul to promote health and leadership for Afghan girls. It was one of many such development groups that came to Afghanistan during the US-led war.
Shogufa is booming. She tried to climb out of the ice in an Afghan girl on the highest mountain in Afghanistan. This was an unimaginable effort under the leadership of the Taliban, and it is still controversial today. She changed the behavior of her family and married her to her cousin. She got a job and is studying for a bachelor’s degree in business administration.
For Shogufa today, the gratitude she has gained is concealed by her fear of everything that is about to be lost.
When the Americans left and the Taliban approached Kabul, her message to the Americans? “Thank you for everything you did in Afghanistan,” she said in fluent but imperfect English. “The other thing is to ask them to be with us.”
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Nick Meyer reported on the 2001 Afghan Northern Alliance and the US air strikes to defeat the Taliban, and the first few weeks of the US military presence in Kandahar in 2002.
© 2021 Canadian Press
