A suicide bomber sent by the Islamic State group ISIS-K struck Kabul's airport, killing and maiming Afghans as well as American troops. The response? More violence as a Hellfire missile from an American drone supposedly took aim at a member of the terror group responsible. The U.S. military announced that its drone assassination had "prevented another suicide attack," but the missile actually killed 10 members of one family, seven of them children, and no terrorists at all. Later, the Pentagon admitted its "mistaken judgment" and called the killings "a horrible tragedy of war."
How to react? Most Americans seemed oblivious to what had happened. Such was the pattern of the last decades, as most of us ignored the staggering number of civilian casualties from our country's bombing and droning of Afghanistan. As for the rest of us, well, what else could you do but hold your head and cry?
In fact, those final events in Afghanistan crystallized an important truth about our post-9/11 history: the madness of making war the primary method for dealing with potential global conflict and what's still called "national security." Throughout these years, our leaders and citizens alike promoted delusional dreams of violence (and glory), while minimizing or denying the nature of that violence and its grim impact on everyone touched by it.
With respect to the parables of the New Testament gospels, Jesus of Nazareth is reported to have said, "Those who have ears, let them hear." In this case, however, Americans seem unable to listen.
Parables are compact, supposedly simple stories that, upon closer examination, illustrate profound spiritual and moral truths. But too few in this country have absorbed the truth about the misplaced violence that characterized our occupation of Afghanistan. Our culture remained both remarkably naà ¯ve and blindly arrogant when it came to widespread assumptions about our violent acts in the world that only surged thanks to the further militarization of this society and the wars we never stopped fighting.
The Costs of War in Well-Being, Money, and Morality
Over the last 20 years, according to a report from the National Priorities Project, the U.S. dedicated $21 trillion to an obsessive militarization of this country and to the post-9/11 wars that went with it. Nearly one million people died in the violence, while at least 38 million were displaced. Meanwhile, more than a million American veterans of those conflicts came home with "significant disabilities." Deployment abroad brought not just death but devastation to all-too-many military families. Female spouses too often bore the brunt of care for returning service members whose needs were unfathomably wrenching. The maltreatment of children in military families "far outpaced the rates among non-military families" after increasing deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq and children of deployed parents showed "high levels of sadness."
Many analysts have pointed to the culture of lies and self-deceit that characterized these years. American leaders, political and military, lost their own moral grounding and were dishonest with the citizenry they theoretically represented. But we citizens also share in that culpability. Andrew Bacevich recently asked why the American people didn't hold their leaders to a more stringent accounting of the wars of the last 20 years. Why were Americans so willing to go along with the unremitting violence of those conflicts year after year, despite failure after failure? What he called the "Indispensable Nation Syndrome" was, he suggested, at least partially to blame a belief in American exceptionalism, in our unique power to know what's best for the world and grasp what the future holds in ways other nations and people couldn't.
In the post-9/11 period, such a conviction mixed lethally with a deepening commitment to violence as the indispensable way to preserve what was best about this country, while fending off imagined threats of every sort. Americans came to believe ever more deeply, ever more thoughtlessly, in violence as a tool that could be successfully used however this country's leaders saw fit.
The unending violence of our war culture became a kind of security blanket, money in the bank. Few protested the outlandish Pentagon budgets overwhelmingly approved by Congress each year, even as defeats in distant lands multiplied. Violence would protect us; it would save us. We couldn't stockpile enough of it, or the weapons that made it possible, or use it more liberally around the globe and increasingly at home as well. Such a deep, if remarkably unexamined, belief in the efficacy of violence also served to legitimate our wars, even as it helped conceal their true beneficiaries, the corporate weapons producers, those titans of the military-congressional-industrial complex.
As it happens, however, violence isn't a simple tool or clothing you can simply take off and set aside once you've finished the job. Just listen to morally injured military service members to understand how deep and lasting violence turns out to be and how much harder it is to control than people imagine. Once you've wrapped your country in its banner, there's no way to keep its barbs from piercing your own skin, its poison from dripping into your soul.
Canaries in the Coal Mine of War, American-Style
Listening intently to the voices of active-duty service members and veterans can cut through the American attachment to violence in these years, for they've experienced its costs and carried its burden in deeply personal ways. Think of them as the all-too-well-armed canaries in the coal mine of our post-9/11 wars, taking in and choking on the toxicity of the violence they were ordered to mete out in distant lands. Their moral injuries expose the fantasy of "using violence cleanly" as wishful thinking, a chimera.
Take Daniel Hale who, while serving in the Air Force, participated in America's drone-assassination program. Once out of the service, his moral compass eventually compelled him to leak classified information about drone warfare to a reporter and speak out against the drone brutality and inhumanity he had witnessed and helped perpetrate. (As the Intercept reported, during five months of one operation in Afghanistan, "nearly 90% of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.")
Convicted of violating the Espionage Act and given 45 months in prison, he wrote, in a letter to the judge who sentenced him, "Your Honor, the truest truism that I've come to understand about the nature of war is that war is trauma. I believe that any person either called upon or coerced to participate in war against their fellow man is promised to be exposed to some form of trauma. In that way, no soldier blessed to have returned home from war does so uninjured." Having agonized about "the undeniable cruelties" he perpetrated, though he attempted to "hold his conscience at bay," he eventually found that it all came "roaring back to life."
Or listen to the voice of former Army reservist and CIA analyst Matt Zeller. Having grown up in a family steeped in the American military tradition and only 19 years old on September 11, 2001, he felt "obligated" to do something for his country and signed up. "I bought into it," he would later say. "I really believed we could make a difference. And it turns out" you don't come back the same person. I wasn't prepared for any of that. And I don't think you really can be." Describing his post-service efforts to assist Afghans "endangered by their work with the United States" who were fleeing the country, he said, "I feel like this is atoning for all the sh*t that I did previously."
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