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Were so many sacrifices worth it? This is the unanswered question that a generation of American soldiers is asking themselves in the face of the rise of the Taliban and the destruction of the Western model of society they have tried to build in Afghanistan.
About 800,000 young Americans They have fought in the war in Afghanistan since its inception after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
According to the Pentagon, 2,352 lost their lives and over 20,000 were injuredAlthough the numbers may be higher due to the difficulty of counting suicides and mental health issues.
Chris Velazquez is one of the names behind the numbers. He was in the Afghan province of Helmand between March and December 2009, but upon his return he left the Marines and for nearly a decade he was manage fear and anxiety of post-traumatic stress disorder, fueled by drug addiction.
Families evacuated at the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan. AP Photo
Over the years, he realized that his experience in Afghanistan was a “waste of life and time” Not only because of the damage he suffered, but because he believes that the United States did not understand Afghanistan and occupied the territory for almost 20 years in an unsuccessful attempt to build a nation.
“A lot of people, a lot of veterans believe that behind it there would be like a ‘big plan’ of what was going on, but they didn’t realize that in reality, behind it all. there was only a group of people trying to guesshe reflected in a conversation with Efe.
She considers that Washington has never been clear about her mission and, therefore, no wonder the chaos surrounding the evacuation American citizens and Afghan collaborators.
A mission
Similarly, Jeremiah Knowles, who was a “19-year-old boy” when in 2008 he started working as an intelligence analyst at the Camp Phoenix military base in eastern Kabul and famous for being one of the Taliban’s favorite targets to commit suicide attacks.
He hardly ever left the base, but on one occasion he was ordered to go to a town collect intelligence information.
He told the locals that he was going to “check their eyesight”, but in reality he devoted himself to doing retinal exams and take your fingerprints to put them in a database that was used by Washington to identify Afghans, in case they were arrested.
Fire in a truck on the outskirts of Kabul. Reuters photo
“Any aid to the civilian population it was made to serve the interests from the USA, ”she told Efe Knowles with a hint of bitterness.
And so, little by little, he came to the conclusion that the war was “unnecessary”. “We only worked with the West-friendly version of Afghanistan, but we don’t work with the afghan people“Look now.
Others, however, take a different view and believe that the war had two faces: a positive with weakening Al Qaeda and another negative with a trail of the dead.
On Facebook, Lt. Gen. James “Jim” Slife, chief of the Air Force Special Operations Command, said he has had “ups and downs”, with moments of triumph like the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011 and other bitter like the “countless” soldiers which he sent to the battlefield and which in some cases never returned.
Pain
“As many, I find it hard to make sense of it all “, admitted a few days ago the lieutenant general, who between 2002 and 2011 was constantly “inside and outside” of Afghanistan.
Slife is not the only one among the principal American military commanders who devoted much of their careers to the war in Afghanistan.
The United States Secretary of Defense himself, Lloyd J. Austin III, who led soldiers on the battlefield between 2003 and 2005, recently admitted at a press conference that the fall of Kabul to the Taliban is something “very personal” to him.
“It is a war that I have waged, that I have waged. I know the country. I know the people and I know the people who fought alongside us, ”Austin said.
Still in Afghanistan nearly 6,000 American soldiers in order to secure Kabul airport and allow American citizens and their Afghan collaborators to flee.
In total, with the United States, 51 other countries – between NATO partners and allies – took part in the war in Afghanistan.
In addition to American lives, the war killed 66,000 Afghan soldiers and police, in addition to some 47,200 civilians killed and 2.5 million others who had to flee their homes, according to data from the UN and Brown University, dedicated to the investigation into the costs of the conflict.
EFE Agency
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