Longest war: Were America’s two decades in Afghanistan worth it?

Here’s what 19-year-old Lance Corporal William Bee felt flying into southern Afghanistan on Christmas Day 2001: purely lucky. The US was hitting back at the Al Qaeda plotters who had brought down the World Trade Centre, and Bee found himself among the first Marines on the ground. “Excitement,” Bee says these days, of the teenage Bee’s thoughts then. “To be the dudes that got to open it up first.” In the decade that followed, three more deployments in America’s longest war scoured away that lucky feeling. For Bee, it came down to a night in 2008 in Afghanistan’s Helmand province.

By then a sergeant, Bee held the hand of an American sniper who had just been shot in the head, as a medic sliced open the man’s throat for an airway. “After that it was like, you know what — ‘F—k these people,’” Bee recounted, of what drove him by his fourth and final Afghan deployment. “I just want to bring my guys back. That’s all I care about. I want to bring them home.”

As President Joe Biden ends the US combat role in Afghanistan this month, Americans and Afghans are questioning whether the war was worth the cost: more than 3,000 Ameri- can and other Nato lives lost, tens of thousands of Afghans dead, trillions of dollars of US debt that generations of Americans will pay for, and an Afghanistan that in a stunning week of fighting has falling back under Taliban rule, just as Americans found it nearly 20 years ago.

For Biden, for Bee and for some of the Ameri- can principals in the US and Nato war in Afghanistan, the answer to whether it was worth the cost often comes down to parsing. There were the first years of the war when Americans broke up Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and routed the Taliban government that had hosted the terrorist network. That succeeded. The proof is clear, says Douglas Lute, White House czar for the war during the George W Bush and Barack Obama administrations, and a retired lieutenant general: Al Qaeda hasn’t been able to mount a major attack on the West since 2005. “We have decimated Al Qaeda in that region, in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” Lute says. But after that came the grinding second phase of the war. US fears of a Taliban rebound whenever Americans eventually pulled out meant that service members such as Bee kept getting sent back in, racking up more close calls, injuries and dead comrades.

Lute and some others argue that what the second half of the war bought was time a grace period for Afghanistan’s government, security forces and civil society to try to build enough strength to survive on their own.

Quality of life in some ways did improve, modernizing under the Western occupation, even as the millions of dollars the US poured into Afghanistan fed corruption. Infant mortality rates fell by half. In 2005, fewer than one in four Afghans had access to electricity. By 2019, nearly all did. The second half of the war allowed Afghan women, in particular, opportunities entirely denied them under the fundamentalist Taliban, so that more than one in three teenage girls — their whole lives spent under the protection of Western forces today can read and write. But it’s that longest, second phase of the war that looks on the verge of complete failure now. The US war left the Taliban undefeated and failed to secure a political settlement.

Taliban forces this past week have swept across two-thirds of the country and captured provincial capitals, on the path of victory before US combat forces even complete their pullout. On many fronts, the Taliban are rolling over Afghan security forces that US and NATO forces spent two decades working to build. This swift advance sets up a last stand in Kabul, where most Afghans live.

It threatens to clamp the country under the Taliban’s strict interpretation of religious law, erasing much of the gains. “There’s no ‘mission accomplished,’” Biden snapped last month, batting down a question from a reporter. Biden quickly corrected himself, evoking the victories of the first few years of the war. “The mission was accomplished in that we … got Osama bin Laden, and terrorism is not emanating from that part of the world,” he added. Richard Boucher, assistant secretary of state for Central Asia during much of the war’s first decade, says the criticism was largely not of the conflict itself but because it went on so long. “It was the expansion of war aims, to try to create a government that was capable of stopping any future attacks,” Boucher said. America expended the most lives, and dollars, on the most inconclusive years of the war.

The strain of fighting two post-9/11 wars at once with an all-volunteer military meant that more than half of the 2.8 million American servicemen and women who deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq served two or more times, according to the Costs of War project at Brown University Some Afghans asked that question before the Taliban’s stunning sweep last week respond that it’s more than time for Americans to let Afghans handle their own affairs. But one 21-year-old woman, Shogufa, says American troops’ two decades on the ground meant all the difference for her.

The repeated deployments contributed to disability rates in those veterans that are more than double that of Vietnam veterans, says Linda Bilmes, a senior lecturer in public policy at Harvard University. Bilmes calculates the US will spend more than $2 trillion just caring for and supporting Afghanistan and Iraq veterans as they age, with costs peaking 30 years to 40 years from now. That’s on top of $1 trillion in Pentagon and State Department costs in Afghanistan since 2001.

Because the US borrowed rather than raised taxes to pay for the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, interest payments are estimated to cost succeeding generations of Americans trillions of dollars more still.

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