I was never proud of my service to my country in Vietnam in the 1960s. When people thank me for my service, I think about what I did in Vietnam and I want to tell them to go see a priest.
But I have always taken a perverse pleasure in participating in the longest and stupidest war in this country. Kind of like being a Boston Red Sox fan before 2004 or a Cleveland Browns fan after Jim Brown.
Sadly, even that little pleasure was taken away from me when the American War in Afghanistan finally eclipsed the longevity and stupidity of the American War in Vietnam a few years ago.
The Vietnamese were tough as nails and disliked foreigners, having repeatedly given the ass to the Chinese and the Mongols, not to mention the Siamese, the French and the Americans.
Afghanistan is not called “the graveyard of empires” for nothing. Now you can also ask the Americans, because after twenty years we are finally throwing in the towel. Replenish. Or come back to our senses.
But Afghanistan is not called “the graveyard of empires” for nothing. Ask those pesky Mongols. Or the British. Or the Russians. And now you can ask the Americans too, because after twenty years we are finally throwing in the towel. Replenish. Or come back to our senses.
With of course the usual diplomatic mumbo jumbo: we are not giving up, we have not lost, we will always support the Afghan government. It reminds me of Otto in A fish called Wanda: “We have not lost Vietnam! It was a tie!
So what have we accomplished after two decades? According to the Associated Press and the Watson Institute for International & Public Affairs at Brown University, as of April 30e, we have caused between 66,000 and 69,000 civilian deaths in Afghanistan, as well as 47,245 Afghan military deaths. American losses were 2,442 killed in action and 20,666 wounded in action.
Over 3,800 American “private security contractors” were also killed, but frankly I don’t feel too bad for this group, who are actually mercenaries trained with our taxes in Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Delta Forces and other elite branches before leaving the ship for higher pay and fewer restrictions on the exercise of violence.
Meanwhile, the cost to us obedient American taxpayers is $ 2,260,000,000,000. That includes $ 815,700,000,000 for the actual costs of the war: bombs, bullets, MRE and all that good stuff.
Another $ 88,000,000,000 to train the Afghan army and police (who, even as I type this, throw down their guns and turn around in the face of a Taliban offensive).
An additional $ 36,000,000,000 for reconstruction, infrastructure and education (although roads, bridges, dams and canals remain in noticeable disrepair while new hospitals and schools are empty).
And an additional $ 9,000,000,000 for reducing heroin production (although opium exports hit record highs as 47% of Afghans live in poverty).
Meanwhile, we taxpayers have spent $ 530,000,000,000 in interest payments to pay off our war debt, while the ongoing costs of caring for our veterans have cost an additional $ 296,000,000,000, and these two costs won’t go away anytime soon they will just keep growing.
All of those zeros could be replaced with the word “billion” (except for the first digit, which would be “2.26 trillion”), but I’m using the zeros because it’s worth seeing. That’s a lot of zeros. Through two Republican administrations and now in the second Democratic administration (although in fairness, Uncle Joe seems to finally realize what was obvious almost from the start: no one is going to put Afghanistan back in shape).
Afghanistan is not even a country, except in the imagination of some cartographers. Just a collection of tribes, chieftains, and warlords. On a good day, the President of Afghanistan has about as much power as the Mayor of Kabul. I bet you can’t even name the president of Afghanistan.
It doesn’t matter anyway because he and all his buddies are siphoning all that American aid money and putting it in Swiss bank accounts, and there’s nothing you or I can do about it. (How do you think Nguyen Van Thieu managed to buy a lavish estate in England after beating it out of Saigon in 1975 and living the rest of his life in elegant seclusion?)
I’m sorry for all those Afghan women and girls who are going to go back to what one counterterrorism expert calls “the Middle Ages,” but I wonder why he and all these other people wringing their hands over the plight of Afghan women and girls have no problem with Saudi Arabia, which never left the Middle Ages.
But I am also sorry for all those American women and girls who live in poverty in our own country; all those American women and girls who are once again slowly but surely losing the right to control their own bodies; all those American men and women who are regularly stripped of their right to vote; All those American women and girls and men and boys who are murdered day after day in a country that has more guns and gun violence, I’d bet even Afghanistan.
I’m glad the United States is finally withdrawing from the Cemetery of Empires, but I cannot shake the conviction that I myself live in an Empire Cemetery.
WD Ehrhart
