McDonald: For many, war not worth fighting

The Afghanistan pullout may be the most nonpartisan issue in years.

Not that it’s without its partisan pundits and politicians.

When it comes to America’s failure to win this war, it seems that Trump is blaming Biden, Biden blames Trump, and the talking heads are blaming whoever is in their crosshairs already. Such is the circus of our body politick.

But for two-thirds of Americans, according to at least one poll, it’s no longer a war worth fighting.

Every president since we entered Afghanistan deserves at least a piece of the blame for this messy pullout and long lost war. We may have gone in with good intentions — to root out Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden and to save Afghanistan’s girls and women from brutal oppression in the hands of the Taliban.

George W. Bush took us in, Obama and Trump kept us in, and Biden is getting us out in a manner so messy that it’s drawing comparisons to our exit from Vietnam in 1975.

In many ways, Afghanistan turned out to be another Vietnam. We went in with overwhelming force but couldn’t defeat the enemy. At best, we sent them into hiding, but they were never really defeated, and now that we’re leaving the country has quickly fallen into the hands of our longstanding enemy.

We did, however, accomplish a few things while there.

We finally got rid of bin Laden, even though he was in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, at the time of his death. And we did manage to keep the terrorists busy over there instead of here (and grew our own terrorists for the home front).

Perhaps our greatest accomplishment, however, was that we liberated Afghan girls and women from a brutal oppressor — although that may unravel as we withdraw our forces. When the Taliban were last in control, girls weren’t even allowed to go to school, but now there’s an entire generation of girls who are educated. What’s going to happen to them after we’re gone?

One of our failures was in building a government and military that worked for the Afghan people. Corruption permeates the landscape, and loyalty in the ranks disappeared when the Taliban started to advance.

If we’re going to be honest with ourselves, we should recognize that few of us really care about the mess we helped create over there. It’s not like Vietnam in that there’s been no draft, so only a volunteer force had to fight in Afghanistan. That leaves the rest of us with the luxury of not really caring.

Clearly, those who have fought in this war see it from a very different perspective. Many of them care deeply about the Afghan people, so they hate to see such a messy withdrawal. But I doubt their objections will make much of a difference politically for Biden.

Tom McDonald is editor of the New Mexico Community News Exchange. Contact him at:

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