The Troops Are Staying, But We Can Declare an End to Our Forever War - The Afghan War on Terror
By
Elliot Ackerman
Dec. 17,
2020
I first
read “The Iliad” in high school. The translation my teacher handed out had a
single photograph on the cover: American G.I.s on D-Day storming out of a
landing craft onto Omaha Beach.
The subtext
of this pairing wasn’t obvious to me, as a teenager. The rage of Achilles, the
death of Hector and all those Greeks in their “black-hulled ships” seemed to
have little to do with the Second World War.
Photo/New York Times
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Many years
later, after having fought in two wars of my own, that image has come to
resonate in a new way. If “The Iliad” served as an ur-text for the shape the
ancient Greeks assumed their wars to take (Alexander the Great, for example, is
said to have slept with a copy beneath his pillow when on campaign), then World
War II has served a similar function in our society, framing our expectations
of war, becoming our American Iliad. We still expect to be the good guys; we
expect there to be a beginning, a middle and an end; and we expect that the war
is over when the troops come home.
But that
final expectation — that a war is only over when all the troops come home — has
never really held true, not in World War II, and not today.
Among the
myriad challenges inherited by the incoming Biden administration will be not
only ending our nation’s longest ever war, in Afghanistan, but also clearly
defining what ending a war actually means. The new president will be handed a
less than durable peace negotiated by the Trump administration with the
Taliban, as well as recent significant troop reductions.
And one of
the greatest trials Joe Biden will face is a public not only expecting our
soldiers back, but also conditioned to believe that wars are over only when the
troops all return. If the goal is reducing all troop levels in Afghanistan to
zero, we’re ensuring that the war will drag on for years to come, enshrining
its status not only as America’s longest war but truly as America’s forever
war.
Which
returns us to “The Iliad,” to the importance of the narratives we apply to our
wars, and to our long-held misconceptions about homecomings.
There are
nearly 40,000 troops garrisoned in Western Europe; their presence has secured a
generations-old peace in the countries where World War II was fought. We also
station nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea in a decades-long effort to ensure
stability in the region. Despite episodic violence and metaphorical saber
rattling, no one would argue that these wars are ongoing, and most would
concede that our presence has proved a much-valued source of regional stability
that has made both the world and America safer and more prosperous.
Obviously,
the situation in Afghanistan today is more volatile than Western Europe or East
Asia. But U.S. troops stationed in-country have remained relatively safe in
recent years. Four men died in Afghanistan this year. But in 2020, many more
service members died in training accidents at Camp Pendleton alone. Indeed,
since 2015, Defense Department training accidents have exceeded combat deaths
worldwide. I raise this point not to sound callous about combat deaths, but
rather to put them in a context that allows us to create sound policy.
Afghanistan
in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 2020. Where once we were fighting to win a war,
today we are fighting to sustain a tenuous peace. This is a distinction Mr.
Biden should make to the entire country. That means, assuming conditions on the
ground remain stable, decoupling the phrases “U.S. troops in Afghanistan” from
“the U.S. war in Afghanistan.”
He should
emphasize how our presence in Afghanistan stabilizes the region and assures
U.S. interests abroad. He should also then explain that conditions for our
forces in Afghanistan have changed over the years, that the work these troops
are doing is different than the aggressive combat operations that characterized
their presence a decade ago, thus announcing what so many already know: For us
the war has all but ended.
The Bidens
are a military family. Beau Biden’s military service, and his deployment to
Iraq, has been a fundamental part of the family’s story. The president-elect
likely understands that the psychology of a forever war is a fraught one,
particularly for veterans and their families who’ve struggled for closure with
a conflict that always simmers on a low boil in the background not only of
their lives, but in American life writ large.
Unlike
World War II, when veterans were welcomed home with ticker-tape parades, or
even the Vietnam War, when stomach-churning images of Saigon’s evacuation at
least gave veterans a moment to pause and declare the nightmare over, veterans
of our generation’s wars have had no such closure. Mr. Biden ran on a platform
of unity, asserting that this was “a time to heal” our country. Perhaps in the
opening days of his administration he might pause and focus on the healing of
veterans as a first step to a broader national healing.
Part of
that healing will be reframing the war in Afghanistan. That means welcoming our
veterans home from what, for some, has been a decades-long odyssey, not only of
service in our forever wars but as veterans of wars that simply refuse to end.
It’s time
to tell veterans that it’s over, that they (and we) no longer need to live in a
state of perpetual war; for service members still deploying to Afghanistan, it
is time to clarify that they are no longer prosecuting a war but advancing a
peace. And who knows, if handled correctly, it might be the first step in
ending our perpetual wars at home, too.
Original
Headline: The Afghan War Is Over. Did Anyone Notice?
Source: The New York Times
URL:
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