This Was Always the Ending
How Could It Possibly Be Different?
I wrote these words last year when we were on the cusp of war in Syria:
“As someone in that Young X-er/Old Millennial split, I have vivid memories of 9/11 and its aftermath. Terrorism is simply an intangible part of life, but I live in a place where it only has an impact on me sporadically. The specter of it lingers on the edges of life. One memory, in particular, stands out in the post-9/11 world, and that is October 7, 2001. The U.S. government launched Operation Enduring Freedom on that day; it happened to be my 22nd birthday. I remember feeling desperately conflicted about this conflict: on the one hand, Patriotism! On the other, why was it happening there? What was our justification for this? Fewer than two years later, we launched another operation in Iraq that seemed even more muddled and hazy. We’ve been there ever since. It is the elephant in the corner of so many of our lives; it is always present and yet ignored as much as possible”.
When I wrote those words, I felt trepidation from yet another conflict. It did not come to pass, but it always feels like we are poised and ready for another fight. But it’s not the “living room war” of old; it passes by as a blur on our social media feeds. It’s relegated to cable news. We just don’t see it.
And now it has come to an end. The end has been messy and horrifying to watch. Photos and videos of chaos at the Kabul airport have flooded our feeds. We are all of a sudden outraged and angry; how could we have let this happen? What were we even doing there all these years? What about the women and children? Oh, take them in as refugees? No, we can’t possibly!
The machine has churned to life to tell President Biden everything he is doing wrong. If he had only done this…or if he’d just waited…etc. It is the same song, different verse over and over again. The Greek Chorus chimes in with its tragic tale, but it’s a tale as old as humans themselves: war is terrible, but we humans will keep doing it over and over again.
I have mentioned before that I am not an expert on the Middle East. I have also never served in the military. It seems everyone is conflicted as to what was the right move. The one area I know a lot about is human behavior, and I can say with certainty that there was only one way for this story to end. Conflicts that have to do with culture have a predictable ending. Culture is a variable in any conflict, whether it plays a central role or influences it subtly and gently. If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was just about geographical differences, it could probably be solved pretty easily. But it’s not. It’s much more complex than that. A conflict like this one is also about acknowledgement, representation, and legitimization of different identities and ways of living, being, and making meaning.
That is exactly what happened in Afghanistan and what followed in Iraq. Our cultural differences bubbled up to the surface. We created an “us” after 9/11 that inevitably led to a “them”. And “they” all looked the same; they were a monolith to “us” that needed to pay for what “they” had done. We were like a hurt child that lashed out at anyone who looked like our abuser; by the time we figured out Osama Bin-Laden was in another country, it was too far gone. We had gotten into a war that was built to fail.
George W. Bush assured us that we were not in the “nation-building” business, but that’s exactly what happened. So often, we get involved in cultural conflicts like this one because our hegemonic, ethnocentric side takes over; nations should be like us! Let’s just use our model, and everything should go fine. We’ve done this over and over again, and the story always has the same ending: a nation has to create its own identity. When we try to manufacture one, it fails.
Since October 2001, we have spend hundreds of billions of dollars to nation-build. We have propped up bad leaders that think like we do (or so we thought). We have trained security forces to just work like our military works. We worked so hard for so many years to bring our version of democracy and capitalism to a society that simply wasn’t built for that. While some strides were made for human rights, it was built on a foundation of sand. It could never survive the way we built it.
We keep doing this over and over again: Iraq. Syria. Yemen. Haiti. We expect that we can sweep in, train for a bit, and then we will just sweep out. It’s in the plot of so many adventure movies: the gifted hero just trains the villagers in the art of warfare, and they can defend themselves and find peace. The reality is much messier. That simply doesn’t happen. Conflict and culture are pervasive social forces; when they combine, they become even more powerful. The forces that fight those villagers will keep coming back; that’s the part of the story we never see in our fairy tales.
And, so, our trials in Afghanistan end exactly as they began: the Taliban is in charge. We act surprised that this happened as if it wasn’t the ending all along. The armchair quarterbacks that say we should have stayed longer aren’t considering one crucial element here: differences in culture. The Afghani government was in no way close to being able to stand on its own, even after 20 years of our “nation-building”. It dissipated in days. A tribal nation cannot simply take on a blueprint and have it be a success. There are too many cultural forces pushing against it. It is heartbreaking to watch, and there are so many people that will need help after this.
Will we learn from this lesson or will we just keep doing the same things? Time will tell, but I can assure you this: the ending will always be the same.
