Cartoon by Saad Hajo

American Purpose After the Fall of Kabul

By Phil Klay

The New Yorker: There’s a story that marines tell—I’ve heard it more than once, in slightly different forms, and it goes something like this. Years into the war in Afghanistan, a squad of marines heads into a remote village in the mountains. When they arrive, at first the villagers mistake them for Russians. When they explain, “No, we’re American,” the villagers ask, “Why are you here?” One marine I met claimed to have initially been stumped by the question. It was 2010, he recalled. Why were we there? He said that he ultimately responded to the villager, that some bad people who lived here flew planes into buildings and the buildings fell down. At which point, the villagers looked at one another in utter confusion. No one who lived there, they were certain, had ever been inside a plane, let alone flown one.

The story is told with a grin, like it’s a joke. That’s how you know it’s deadly serious. Look at this ridiculous war, the marine is telling you, and look at me, with my American flag on my shoulder, trying to make sense of it. It suggests the element of the American psyche that Ralph Ellison called “an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality.”

Since the fall of Kabul, though, the gap between appearance and reality has shrunk, bringing many long-running jokes to an end. The joke of generals boasting about how much progress has been made training the Afghan army. The joke of the intelligence community predicting how long the Afghan government could resist the Taliban. The joke of our promises to Afghan allies that, if worst comes to worst, we’d protect them, give them visas, and reunite them with their families somewhere safe.

Instead the Taliban walked into cities unopposed; the President of Afghanistan fled the country; and crowds of desperate Afghans surrounded an American C-17 cargo plane as it took off from Kabul, some so desperate that they clung to the landing gear as it lifted. Videos show an Afghan falling from the sky. News reports tell of human remains later found in the wheel well of one of the planes.

How does it feel, as a veteran who watched the Iraqi province where I served fall to isis, to now watch this country—where marines I knew were shot or blown up or killed—fall to the Taliban? Who cares? As the Taliban goes house to house looking for those Afghans who believed in us, and who had the physical courage to put that belief to the test, who cares how I feel? Who cares how the vets who battled alcohol addiction only to start drinking again this week are feeling? Who cares what my marine friends are feeling as they receive frantic text messages from Afghans allies? Not, for sure, Americans for the last twenty years.

“Everyone wants to know, am I O.K., and I’m, like, ‘Really?’ ” a friend who served in Afghanistan during Obama’s brief surge told me. “Is the burden of feeling guilty about this also a burden veterans have to carry, too? Not only did you not care about Afghanistan, not only did you not follow Afghanistan, it’s like you gave such a little shit you can’t even feel bad yourself? Could somebody else please take some of this, take some responsibility? I’m so fucking tired of it and it’s killing me and it shouldn’t be fucking me up this much.”

Dane Sawyer, a veteran who served with Afghans in an Army civil-affairs unit, wrote to me of his effort to save Afghans. “I have had no success despite all of the forms I’ve completed, phone calls I’ve made, and emails I’ve sent. It feels oddly familiar.” He’s been working with a family of eight who have been camping outside the Kabul airport for four days, with a family near Herat sending messages every morning asking whether they can go to Kabul, with a single mother waiting in Kabul for a call to go to the airport, and others. “I wish I could turn a blind eye but the messages I am getting are so utterly desperate and harrowing, but I know soon I will have to just tell people there is nothing more I can do.” >>> Read the rest in the New Yorker