The War We Forgot

It’s hard to believe, but the war in Afghanistan is in its ninth year, with no end in sight. Dexter Filkins wrote a great article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, about Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s efforts to reshape the battle in what is considered some of the world’s most brutal terrain. It’s worth a read, particularly as President Obama considers whether to send another 40,000 troops to the country to push back the Taliban.

Perhaps most disturbing about the article is how clear it is that the military brass is only now beginning to try to see the war’s impact from the perspective of the civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan. Only now are they starting to come to recognize that collateral damage creates future enemies, future terrorists. Only now do they seem to recognize the importance of providing security for people once their government is toppled. Even if that government was inhumane and dis-functional, you can’t simply tell 25 million people to run free and embrace democracy and expect there to be no problems.

These seem like very elementary ideas, precisely the kind of ideas I assumed would be a major part of a plan to send hundreds of thousands of young men and women to war and cost hundreds of billions of dollars. It’s appalling that we wasted so much time, and so many lives, before the people running the show came to the same conclusion.

I fear we may not know the full cost of that mistake for decades, when some young boy who lost a mother as collateral damage, then watched the United States leave the country in worse shape than it began, takes out his anger on American civilians.

Read “Stanley McChrystal‘s Long War”