It was a brisk morning on Nov. 9, 2007. I was stationed at Bella, a U.S. Army outpost in eastern Afghanistan. Two of our squads were returning from patrol, less than a mile away. The Taliban ambushed them. As other soldiers and I fended off the Taliban’s assault on our base, we heard our ambushed brothers shouting over our radios. We were ordered to stay, to protect the base. Strategy, we were told. I listened to the Taliban murder my friends.
We held a memorial service a few days later. Immediately after: Move on, we were told, we’ve got patrol. We buried our fallen that day; we put our humanity into the ground too.
Even as teenagers and 20-somethings, we understood. This war was unwinnable. I questioned then as I question now: Did my friends die for nothing? Is our blood that cheap?
Our foes in Afghanistan clarified why it was unwinnable. Intercepted radio chatter confirmed we fought Afghanis, Pakistanis, and Chechens. We got the impression the Chechens fought us to train against the Russians. And, aside from Afghanistan’s immense rare earth metal deposits, China is likely going to officially recognize the Taliban as a legitimate government because Chinese leaders will want to avoid a proxy war on their border. Smart.
Afghanistan remains a proxy war battleground. The graveyard of empires.
Invisible in Afghanistan
I returned to Los Angeles on midtour leave in 2008. Surprised acquaintances would ask: We’re still in Afghanistan? I should tell them about my unit, I thought. No running water. Choking down expired food. Killing and eating mountainside animals. Burning our waste. All while defense firms charged us for meals in inaccessible kitchens. Yes. We were still there, but we had become invisible.
America’s civil-military divide enables us to comfortably ignore our wars. This is easily proven: Ask an American how many countries we are bombing. Few know. Or look to the lack of national response when the Washington Post reported that the Pentagon had long manipulated information to justify continuing our war in Afghanistan. The blood of our wars is cheap. This devaluation of life is a creature of privilege – and it is lethal.
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Our civil-military divide is simple. The military is a family affair. Less than 1% of Americans serve in the military, many of them have family who served. Of that 1%, about 10% have seen combat, perhaps only once. We ask the few to execute the foreign policy of the many, call them heroes, and then ignore them – like during COVID-19's outbreak. This strategy made a 20-year war politically affordable and financially profitable.
Winners and losers
Since Sept. 11, 2001, America’s top five defense firms’ stock values have soared, an analysis by The Intercept found. Boeing’s stock value has increased 974.97%. Lockheed Martin’s? 1,235.6%. The defense stocks outperformed the stock market by 58% since 2001. America’s defense industry won our tax dollars, some taxpayers felt we avenged 9/11, others settled for detachment, but the Taliban won Afghanistan. Is this the outcome America asked my friends to die for?
If the current discourse offers any indication, many will say “yes.” They view the military as corporate stooges, victims, or colonizers. Others will say “no, our servicemembers are heroes.” A similar cultural schism is seen with our police. Except that here, reinforcing this divide does more than swamp efforts to fix America’s policing problems, it makes endless war politically affordable by absolving commentators from doing more than parroting their political ideology. Whether our armed forces are sinners or saints, they are othered, made expendable – this attitude enabled the defense industry to capture America’s once mighty budget surplus.
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This state of affairs cheapens servicemembers’ lives to make war politically affordable. This privileged spiral extends from the decision against killing Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora in December 2001, to my acquaintances being surprised we were still in Afghanistan in 2008, to Afghans now falling from planes. Everyone needs America’s wars to become politically expensive.
How do we increase war’s political cost? Humanize the people who serve us. Trade hero worship for empathy, at all levels. Stop drawing political divides around the lives you have a say in spending. Do more than comment. Organize. Vote. Audit the Pentagon.
The morality we spent tolerating the war in Afghanistan was perhaps our nation’s greatest casualty. Without accepting this, we will fail to protect our morality the next time war threatens it. If we fail, we will author another chapter in an American legacy embodied by Vietnam and Afghanistan. We cannot afford another loss.
Steven Kerns is a Harvard Law School graduate practicing environmental law in California. He is a former 173rd Airborne paratrooper whose Army company, the Chosen Few, fought some of the bloodiest battles of the Afghanistan War from 2007-08. Kerns is on the board of advisers for Team Afghan Power, a nonprofit that enables community development in Afghanistan’s rural villages.
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