SIPA STORIES: 'What do you do when forever ends?'

By: James Paisley

I remember moving to Yonkers, NY on September 8, 2001. My grandmother was driving my sister and I from North Carolina to New York after my parents moved to a small house just north of the Bronx/Yonkers border. My mother was starting her Masters degree at Sarah Lawrence College. That Sunday, we finished the paperwork to enroll me in first grade and then drove into Manhattan to pick up school supplies, go to the parks, and explore. On the way back up West Street, we passed the Twin Towers and made note to return and see them up close. I was six years old that Monday, the first day of school. My parents dropped me off that Tuesday, only for my mother to come back and get me. I remember getting home and seeing my father watching the news, hands gripped in front of him. Sifting through the memories now, everything seemed so quiet. 

One month later, I was on the playground at school when President Bush launched Operation Enduring Freedom and ousted the Taliban from Kabul for harboring Al-Qaeda. I was 14, in eighth grade, when President Obama recommitted 17,000 troops in the first stroke of the Surge and later set 2011 for a troop drawdown. In May of 2011, I was a 16-year-old sophomore taking finals when Osama bin Laden was killed in Pakistan – the fireworks in the Westport district of Kansas City clued me in to something monumental. I cried inexplicably when President Obama delivered the news, a moment I shared with my online friends in a state of bewilderment. As an 18-year-old college freshman, I was skeptical of the handoff of security responsibility to President Hamid Karzai’s government of warlords. President Trump escalated bombings against ISIS in Afghanistan when I was 22. I was 25 and in the first year of my Master’s program in International Security Policy when a peace deal was finally signed with the Taliban – without the support of the Afghan government – in Doha. I wrote a paper for class arguing that the talks aimed to get the United States out, but on the ground the Taliban intended to keep fighting until they reached the halls of Kabul’s National Assembly. I was 26 years old, living in the Bronx just south of Yonkers, my partner pursuing her Master’s at Sarah Lawrence College, when Kabul fell to the Taliban on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. In a way, I have come full circle.

It is through the lens of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that I learned the geography and history of the Middle East and Central Asia – Afghanistan’s borders with Iran, Pakistan, former Soviet Republics to the north, and China via one of the smallest tracts of land I have ever seen on a map. My familiarity with places like Kabul, Helmand, Kandahar, and the Khyber Pass are informed by their role in the conflict. I remember the yellow ribbon my grandmother put on her door while my uncle was deployed to Djibouti in 2003, the way the kids in school joked about hiding in a hole in the desert. This war has been with me for almost as long as I can remember, a quiet thrum in the back of my interest in international security. I am cerebrally aware that I am part of the generation that grew up in the shadow of 9/11, unaware of a world without the unrelenting threat of terrorism. There are only sparse memories before the war.. 

With the Fall of Kabul, I saw a sudden influx of commentary from just about everyone, ranging from strangers to Columbia students, ISP students to members of the Kansas City theater community. What struck me was how everyone was suddenly talking about Afghanistan: “How did Afghanistan fall so quickly?” “The Biden Administration owns all of this.” “Bush got us there and Biden got us out.” “This country is a joke that abandons its allies.” “You can’t expect America to fight for a country that doesn’t want to fight for itself.” Other than responding to the major headlines, I couldn’t remember the last time I spared Afghanistan an active thought outside of class, yet now everyone seemed to have an opinion on how the war was executed. My area of focus is East Asia, not Central Asia or the War on Terror. There were always updates on Afghanistan in the chyrons of CNN or BBC, articles briefly ruminating on China or Russia’s interests in the region, but it rarely served as the main point of discussion, absent major developments. But the osmosis one experiences by living in a society with a 20-year long war in the background teaches a great deal, and it is impossible to not have thoughts on the war. 

So now, I find myself wondering, what’s next? With Afghanistan over will we turn swords to ploughshares and decrease the military budget over the next decades to invest in domestic priorities? Will we reallocate money to get our veterans the help they need after 20 years of toxic exposure, injuries, and trauma? What do you do with US$715 billion when major operations have ceased? If the adage is true – that god created war so Americans would learn geography – will we learn about places like Kinmen and Matsu or the Baltics? Will the United States hover in a fugue state while we grapple with the costs of these 20 years of war? I don’t know the answers, but I know the event that brought us to Kabul, the sacrifices of people who served, and the opportunity that Western involvement brought to a generation of Afghans will not - cannot - be forgotten. I can only hope that the lessons of Afghanistan are not lost on the American people or our leaders.