Pierce writes: "Now, though, we've been in Afghanistan for 11 years - for 3,844 days, for nearly 520 billion dollars - and the war is less of a presence in our lives than Hilary Rosen is."



NATO troops in Afghanistan. (photo: Marco di Lauro/Getty Images)

Why the Hell Are We in Afghanistan?

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

he attacks, they said, were "orchestrated." Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were "carefully orchestrated." The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government's statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what "winning" in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.

But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. - they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.

Now, though, we've been in Afghanistan for 11 years - for 3,844 days, for nearly 520 billion dollars - and the war is less of a presence in our lives than Hilary Rosen is. The country has soured on the war; in an ABC-Washington Post poll taken two weeks ago, 66 percent of the respondents said they thought the war was not worth fighting. At the end of March, a CNN poll showed 72 percent of the people polled disapproved of the war. What happened in Kabul over the weekend was not Tet because Tet was the beginning of something, and the attacks on Sunday were not. What happened in Kabul was not Tet because there is no sign yet that there is the political will in this country of ours to put its money where its polling mouth is. The issues in the election are jobs and the economy, not the suppurating business in which the country never heavily invested its time or its attention anyway. It has been a war in a bell jar. It was conducted off the books and (relatively, but not really) on the cheap. It was such a secondary thing that, when George W. Bush and the unspeakable Richard Cheney wanted to gin up a case for war in Iraq, they were able to strip the military in Afghanistan and hardly anyone noticed or cared, except the people who had to live with the consequences in the field. It is shapeless now, with no discernable beginning, middle, or end. With Iraq wound down, there are rockets being fired at the parliament building, and the most basic questions are not being asked.

What in the hell are we doing over there anymore?

There is no "mission" short of keeping as many of our people alive as possible while they wait for... well, while they wait for what? For Afghans to stop killing each other? The Romans waited for that. So did the British and the Russians. Great powers get bled white in Afghanistan because they never can overcome the Afghan genius for self-slaughter, their seemingly limitless capacity to make civil war on each other and guerrilla war on the invaders, all at the same time. It is not unkind - nor culturally insensitive - to point out that this kind of thing has been going on for centuries. Sooner or later, the Afghans have to decide to govern each other or not. Whatever institutions they might have been developing to do so down those years either have been crushed, or they have been manipulated against each other, by the various invading powers. Charlie Wilson's War was, at bottom, a civil war in which the great powers chose up sides. The Great Game, with American weapons and an Aaron Sorkin script. As Braithwaite writes, comparing the American experience in Vietnam with the Russian experience in Afghanistan...

Both the Americans and the Russians set themselves unachievable strategic goals. Neither were able to achieve their main political objective: a friendly, stable regime which would share their ideological and political goals. Their projects were overthrown and the peoples of Vietnam and Afghanistan rejected the political models they were offered.... But there was one essential difference between the two wars.... The victors in Vietnam, the government in Hanoi, were coherent, dedicated, ruthless and efficient. At great cost they were able to impose order on their country, which in the next thirty years became increasingly prosperous and open to the outside world. The mujahedin never achieved anything like that coherence and discipline, and their entry into Kabul was only the prelude to more decades of war and foreign intervention, which made it almost impossible to repair the physical, social, moral, and political damage which had been initially caused by the Communist regime and the Soviet invasion. The Vietnamese were able to enjoy the fruits of their victory, The Afghans were not.

And that is the biggest reason why what happened in Kabul this weekend is not Tet: because, when Tet happened, we didn't have Tet to remember and to learn from. Afghanistan was supposed to be the Soviet Union's Vietnam, and it did rather work out that way. But it turned out that Afghanistan was a worse Vietnam than Vietnam ever was, and we wandered over there just in time to make Russia's Vietnam our own. We have done what we came for. Osama bin Laden is as dead as Lord Kitchener; the al Qaeda network, at least in Afghanistan, is in a shambles. We do not have the power to enforce a stable government on a country that so manifestly resists the notion, especially when it comes from foreigners. What in hell are we doing over there anymore?

There doesn't seem to be any point to any of it. Is there any indication from the analysis of the weekend attacks that the Taliban won't be able to do this again in two weeks, a month, every six months? The Taliban is announcing its spring offensive as though it were a white sale or the new model cars. Plainly, the intelligence apparatus of the Afghan security forces flatly failed. The longer the Americans stay, the more and more horror stories we're going to hear about what's happening to Afghan civilians. Sooner or later, the country might actually pay attention, too. Leaving the Afghans to their fate may be all that's left to do. It is their fate, and their country, after all.