"We must fight the terrorists over there so that we don't
have to fight them over here." ~George W. Bush [not in Afghanistan]

20 years later [video of Afghanistan]

Why were we there? What did we accomplish in those twenty years?
What did it all mean?

Rudyard Kipling had it right. And to think the British were
twice as stupid, having done it more than once.

Afghanistan: "No more pretending it meant anything. It didn't -
It didn't mean a fucking thing"

from a post by: Laura Jedeed

Boy howdy am I having a lot of feelings about Afghanistan today

I deployed there twice--once in 2008 and once in 2009-10

It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very
instant we left

And here we are today
I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little
boys. I know what they're going to do to the interpreters and the
people who cooperated with us, it's awful, it's bad, but we are
leaving, and all I feel is grim relief Afghanistan is a dusty beige
nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking
want us there

We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were,
braver and stronger and smarter I remember going through the phones
of the people we detained and finding clip after clip of Bollywood
musicals, women singing in fields of flowers

Rarely did I find anything incriminating

I remember finding propaganda footage cut together from the Soviet
invasion and our own Operation Enduring Whatever

And laughing about how stupid the Afghans were to not know we aren't
the Russians

And then eventually realizing I was the stupid one I remember how
every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium
fields

You could let them alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers
down and use the money to buy weapons Or you could carpet bomb the
fields and then the farmers would join the Taliban Or you could give
the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium
poppy, and the farmers would sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who
used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million dollar
MRAP and maim everyone inside

I remember we weren't allowed to throw batteries away because people
who worked on base would go through the trash and collect hundreds of
dead batteries, wire them together so they had just enough juice for
one charge, and use that charge to detonate an IED

I remember the look on my roommate's face after she got back from
cutting the dead bodies of two soldiers out of an HMMWV that got blown
up by an IED that I have always imagined was made with fertilizer from
an opium farmer and detonated with a hundred thrown-out batteries

I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we
called Cowboy, always wore this cowboy hat and an "I'm with stupid"
t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school
age Cowboy was a good student and he wanted to go to college in
America, but there weren't colleges that took Afghans, the education
system was too shit. No program to help kids like him. I looked

I wonder if he's dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of
something different

But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy
is dead it's our fault for going there in the first place, giving his
family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy
people on the planet

We use people up and throw them away like it's nothing

And now we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening, the
Taliban is surging in and taking it all back

They have what you can't buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them

I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed
out to me today, has always been Team Taliban

It's Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever, there is no third team
So I'm sitting here reading these sad fucking tweets about the
suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban
and how awful it is that this is happening but I can't stop feeling
this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have
to see it too No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos
on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more
hypocrisy

No more pretending it meant anything. It didn't

It didn't mean a fucking thing

--This message fully endorsed by Lee

--
We! Reject! The president-nonelect!

--- MesNews/1.08.05.00-gb
* Origin: news://eljaco.se (2:203/2)