{"id":192110,"date":"2021-08-23T12:00:15","date_gmt":"2021-08-23T11:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=192110"},"modified":"2021-08-19T06:10:31","modified_gmt":"2021-08-19T05:10:31","slug":"a-hell-of-our-own-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2021\/08\/a-hell-of-our-own-making\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hell of Our Own Making"},"content":{"rendered":"

Reflections on the Road to Kabul<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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18 Aug 2021 – <\/em>The last week has been hard for me, and yet I can only imagine what this week has felt like, and what the future will bring, for the people\u2014the peoples\u2014of Afghanistan.<\/p>\n

Nearly 20 years after it was launched in the wake of 9\/11, the long war in Afghanistan, one of the great cruelties of my generation, has unexpectedly reached its expectedly tragic conclusion.<\/p>\n

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I am certainly not sad to see it go, but it\u2019s difficult to avoid a profound sense of regret at the error of it all. When I\u00a0recently spoke with Daniel Ellsberg<\/a>, he pointed out that neither of us is entirely a pacifist. Dan and I agree, and are on-record agreeing, that certain wars are wrong, but if one can conceive of a \u201cjust\u201d war<\/a>\u2014or at least a less-injust war\u2014there are wrong ways to fight it, and particularly wrong ways to finish it. There are also, come to think of it, wrong ways to begin wars too\u2014namely refusing to declare them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The war in Afghanistan was not one of those wars\u2014it was not justifiable. It was, is, and forever will be wrong, which means leaving is the right decision.<\/p>\n

Yet there was a time when I felt like picking Afghanistan up by its ankles and shaking it until all the terrorists fell out, like scorpions from a boot. Most Americans felt that way, in the autumn of 2001, and I was no different. I was 18 years old and almost competitively wrong about everything. I actually believed most of what I heard on TV from \u201cofficial sources\u201d\u2014not everything<\/em> I heard, but enough. I trusted my government, at least I trusted it to know more about Afghanistan than I did, and the government told me this: that Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda, and that both the Taliban and al-Qaeda hated us for our freedoms. My youthful\u00a0righteousness was\u00a0manipulated by\u00a0collaborators in the media<\/a>\u00a0until it burned all the red, white, and blue of a flame\u2014a flame that could scorch, but also a flame that could serve as a beacon of light in the darkness.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHeadlines like this dishonest crap sure didn\u2019t help,\u201d said Francisco Silva<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

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This was why I signed up: to defeat the \u201cenemies of freedom,\u201d or to make the enemy unto us… fair, equitable, democratic. The motto of the United States Army\u2019s Special Forces was to my younger self a hook so perfectly baited as to be irresistable: De Oppresso Liber<\/em>\u2014\u201cTo Free the Oppressed.\u201d<\/p>\n

Shamefully, it took me a very long time, peering down from my technocratic perch at the CIA and later the NSA, to apprehend the nature of my work: transforming the internet\u2014a liberating, democratizing tool\u2014into an architecture of oppression. But before I took that step toward clarity, I struggled to apprehend the nature of our violence in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.<\/p>\n

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\u201cYou are either with us or you are against us in the fight against terror,\u201d said Bush the Younger<\/a>. But he never defined who, exactly, was the enemy. If you look beyond the label, terrorists are just murderers with a political motive: mere criminals. So were our enemies states, or were they criminal groups within those states? And were\u00a0those criminal groups subject to direction by the states in which they operated, or to other states, and how? And if we dealt with criminals in the way we dealt with states, does that not unduly elevate them to something close to a peer? In substituting a military action for a police action, are we not setting a dangerous precedent for the future? These questions spread like a net\u2014a dragnet, and caught up everyone.<\/p>\n

I’m not trying to say this realization was immediate. It was not. It was a process, beset by rationalization\u2014the reflex of a mind desperate to escape an inevitably dark denouement. Precisely because\u00a0I had intended\u00a0<\/em>to do good, it was difficult to accept the possibility that I had become involved in something\u00a0bad<\/em>\u2014perhaps even evil<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Intentions are what paved the roads to Kabul, a hell of our own making.<\/p>\n

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In a distressing video, Afghans can be seen attempting to hold onto a U.S. military plane as it takes off from Kabul airport. According to reports, at least three people died after falling from the aircraft. pic.twitter.com\/WvrO0FIIyv<\/a><\/p>\n

— euronews (@euronews) August 16, 2021<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n