9/11, Twenty Years On

The gloom has been as hard as ever to bear on this twentieth anniversary, given recent events. I’ve said this, and meant it, many times before, but I’ve never felt it with greater alarm or grief than now: We are in some bad, bad shape as a culture, and serious consequences are coming down the pipe that we’re going to have to reckon with over the course of many years to come.

Whatever one may think about the 20-year-long US & allied operation in Afghanistan that the Taliban’s harboring of 9/11’s al Qaeda Jihadists and their training camps kicked off — including valid disagreement over reasonable strategic aims, realistic goals, rules of engagement, and conditions for success and exit (and there is plenty of room for sane discussion and debate on these matters) — the shape and form of our needlessly bungled exit from Afghanistan has been an unmitigated disaster that we will pay the price for for decades to come. From the profoundly foolish, premature abandonment of the essential and well-defended Bagram Air Base, to the surrender of massive combat assets and a “kill list” to our Taliban adversaries, to the stranding of vulnerable American and allied personnel behind enemy lines that left many to find their own ways out with no help from the US government, and the others left behind and in ongoing peril — it’s hard for me to imagine a worse execution or worse result. This was an unforced error and a colossal failure that will cost us dearly. It has both armed and emboldened those who seek to cause us harm, broken the trust of those we’ve asked to take great risks with us, and given costly weight to the claim that we are but a paper tiger, weak and easily frightened, that can be worn down, demoralized, and defeated with sustained effort. The result of this will be lives lost when we are not taken seriously in future battles. We can count on it.

No less severe, I expect, will be the domestic consequences of this self-inflicted catastrophe. A resurgence of Jihadist attacks on our own soil seems entirely likely, given the weakness of resolve and gross incompetence of leadership we’ve demonstrated — not to mention the act of abjectly surrendering territory from which the prior attacks were planned and staged, and that can easily be used again for the same purpose. (I would love nothing more than for the coming decades to prove me wrong in this expectation.) Moreover, those among us who ardently seek a weakened USA that is unwilling and unable to stand up for itself have been given another example of defeat and dishonor that they are sure to employ with enthusiasm toward their ends for decades to come. Those of us who saw the despicable way our prior withdrawal from Vietnam was used these past two decades, as a cudgel to convince the public of both dishonorable intentions and inevitable failure, know this to be true.

All of this was unnecessary and could have been avoided, and it kills me to see it. Nothing short of a toxic mindset bent on cultural suicide seems adequate to explain it. I do not understand how one can be anything less than livid about this. It grieves me to see it, and I can only begin to imagine how this disastrous turn of events is being felt by our servicemen and women — people for whom I hold a deep and abiding love and respect. Their chain of command all the way up to Commander-in-Chief has utterly failed them and betrayed their honorable sacrifices, and the look of things thus far is that no one who’s been responsible for this massive failure in judgment will actually be held accountable in any significant way — either by law, electorally, or by a supine press that maybe finally got the failure it’s been ghoulishly cheering for all these years.

I don’t know what to do with this situation but take issue with those who’ve cheered for our demise while laboring to weaken, demean, and demoralize us. I will not forget this betrayal or what it has revealed to me. With my children now old enough to have awareness of and questions about the 9/11 attacks and the years since, I feel as strongly as ever the determination I felt on that September day twenty years ago, when so many of us pledged to ourselves that we would not forget what we had witnessed, nor falter in standing for the land we love.