A full year has passed since the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers during Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Since then, the brother of one of those Marines is suspected to have taken his own life in California near his fallen sibling’s memorial. His mother says in the days leading up to his passing, […]
A full year has passed since the suicide bombing that killed 13 U.S. servicemembers during Biden’s catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan. Since then, the brother of one of those Marines is suspected to have taken his own life in California near his fallen sibling’s memorial. His mother says in the days leading up to his passing, he had been talking more about missing his younger brother and about wanting to be with him. He could often be found sleeping on his brother’s grave.
While I experienced nothing quite so severe, that day also stands out in my mind. My own younger brother was deployed with the U.S. Marine Corps on August 1st, 2021 to provide security at the Hamid Karzai airport in Kabul, the locus for all the tragic events that unfolded in the pullout.
For those already skeptical about the Pentagon’s bloated budget, it may be of import to note that while the Taliban would be able to help themselves to billions of dollars worth of abandoned U.S. weaponry, equipment, vehicles, and aircraft that largely sat unused in the hot desert sun, my brother was deployed with armor and a helmet dating back to the early years of the initial invasion.
My brother had friends already patrolling the area through late July telling him that the job would be relatively easy, even boring despite growing reports of the Taliban fast reclaiming ground on their way to Kabul. One friend facetimed him to ask, “when are you coming to relieve us?” My brother would never arrive. His ship set sail too late to provide backup to those Marines and other U.S. forces in Kabul before it fell.
My brother and many of his friends returned with insider knowledge which made them jaded about what the military had become. I remember hearing about that phenomenon while growing up as a child, when as young as 3rd grade I (now ashamedly) voted for President George W. Bush’s reelection in a mock 3rd grade polling station at school. It always puzzled me. Why did so many patriotic men come back from war angry at the government that sent them?
For many years I chalked it up to stress and PTSD. In these tough situations I believed it was my duty to honor their sacrifices by never questioning their mission even when they did. To do so, I once reasoned, would be akin to siding with Leftists as they burned the American flag and called our returning troops baby killers. Or, so I thought. My love of country had been used against me in setting up a false dichotomy.
So what happened to change my mind so drastically as I grew into adulthood? Well sadly there is no great epiphany moment. Just a slow drip of reading scholarly works on history, diving more into my Catholic faith, and having a brother who saw it all from the inside. Those twin pillars and family connection gave me the foundation I needed to view world events with greater clarity. Here is some of what I learned.
Patrick Deneen, a Professor of Political Science at Notre Dame, in his book Why Liberalism Failed explains how neo-conservatives are just a complementary force to liberal democrats instead of being their foil. While the former seeks to change the world through regime change and foreign interventionism, the latter seeks to do the same through international governmental bodies.
The fact that the Bush and Cheney dynasties have both been toppled by Republican voters in recent primary elections only to be welcomed with open arms by the very same democrats who once reviled them, without either substantially changing their world-views, only confirms Deneen’s thesis.
Understanding that paradigm explains why calls to nation building in Afghanistan, as just one of many examples, are doomed to failure. Such arguments are not based in reality. Novelist L.P. Hartley once wrote in 1953, “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there”. Not only is the past a foreign country, but foreign countries are foreign countries.
What American liberals, right or left, fail to understand when they view humanity as being composed of individuals liberated from any unchosen bonds is that mankind is actually rooted in time, place, family, and culture. What President Bush might deem “liberation”, with classes offered on modern art in Kabul featuring images of a urinal to murals in the city streets that would later include a depiction of George Floyd, many traditionalists in Afghanistan may view as not liberation but an existential threat against their way of life, regardless of their views on the Taliban or Al-Qaeda.
We must humble ourselves to recognize that there are also long-running disputes that are so complicated and messy that we only do more harm than good when we get involved. Take for example that infamous 1993 headline run by The Independent which claimed “Anti-Soviet Warrior Puts His Army on the Road to Peace” with a picture of a young smiling Osama Bin Laden. The CIA training and weapons smuggling the U.S. was conducting in Afghanistan to help the mujahideen give the invading Soviets their own Vietnam in the graveyard of empires, only came back around to bite us with 9/11.
Adding insult to injury, just a decade after those deadly terror attacks in 2001, the U.S. was siding with Al-Qaeda in Syria as we learned from an email sent by our current National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan to his then-State Department boss Hillary Clinton.
These are only two examples of the dozens I could easily cite, in which the U.S. trained and provided aid for a group using the “enemy of my enemy is my friend” formulation only for them to turn on us, using our intel and weaponry to do so. In Afghanistan, that took the form of many locals rejecting the corrupt western-backed government we used shady means to keep in power in Kabul. Some began to find the Taliban less corrupt. The U.S. also sided with some Northern Warlords despite the abuse and sexual slavery engaged in. A Green Beret in 2011 was disciplined by the military after he kicked and body slammed a powerful local police official who was credibly accused of raping a young boy, a practice known as bacha bazi or boy play. The Green Beret was told by his higher ups that there was nothing he could do about the practice since it was their culture and we needed the police to keep working with us. The Taliban had outlawed the practice in the 1990s.
There is also the related problem of sending our young men overseas to fight in conflicts that we are importing here through mass immigration. After the massacre of 9/11 the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) faced intense backlash for sending to a Florida flight school a notification alerting them that two of the hijackers had been approved as students. This happened six months after their deaths.
So what should replace neo-conservatism’s military adventurism? I would argue we need to be more realistic in how we view world events and realize that we are not God and cannot re-shape or socially re-engineer the cultures of faraway nations which are millennia in the making. Dr. Sumantra Maitra, a National Security Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, explained to me the Realist theoretical framework which derives from original reactionary conservatism:
“It argues that (I) the world is anarchic because there’s an absence of hierarchy and no global policeman because hegemony is unsustainable in the long run as great powers rise and collapse due to miscalculations, insolvency, or war. (II) Due to that anarchy, great powers are also the primary actors in world politics. They have interests mostly geographical and trade, and spheres of influence develop organically due to those asymmetry of interest. For example, West Europe and East Europe. (III) When that clashes there’s a security dilemma. In the sense great powers never trust anyone but themselves so miscalculation of intention leads to conflict or competition. (IV) Small states are usually ideological and drag great powers to war, it’s called chain ganging. (V) The ideal realist principle is to have very narrow interests, not waste blood and treasure in ideological or utopian crusades spreading values or rights, only go to war under extreme duress or threat or when under attack, and otherwise seek a balance of power and equilibrium”.
