Esquire Magazine | RS_News | April 16 2012
OPINION ~ The attacks, they said, were “orchestrated.” Or, if the people reporting them were being particularly precise, the attacks were “carefully orchestrated.” The order of the adverbs is the order of battle. In Kabul on Sunday, Taliban fighters attacked the Afghan parliament building, and several embassies, and a NATO base. There also were attacks in the provinces. Those people old enough to remember the Tet Offensive can be excused if they mention the obvious parallels. Whatever its historical ambiguity as a military operation, Tet was a mind-quake in the United States. It forced the country to face squarely the sheer mendacity of its own government’s statements about the war as a war. It redefined for the United States what “winning” in Vietnam meant and it redefined it as an impossibility. In Afgantsy, his admirably lucid history of the Russian catastrophe in Afghanistan, Rodric Braithwaite quotes an old aphorism of which the guerrilla fighters in that country were fond: The foreigners have the watches, but the locals have the time.
But the fact is that, in terms of the domestic reaction it provoked, Tet was closer to a beginning than it was to an end. The war would grind on for seven more years, two years longer than the Americans chose to stay with it. The domestic antiwar movement was just building toward a crescendo that few people could imagine; the shootings at Kent State were still two years away. Lyndon Johnson was still president, and the presumptive nominee of his party. Nixon was still something of an underdog. Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. – they were still alive. The Vietnam War was just beginning to reach all corners of American society like a dark, living thing with a thousand faces.
Now, though, we’ve been in Afghanistan for 11 years – for 3,844 days, for nearly 520 billion dollars – and the war is less of a presence in our lives than Hilary Rosen is. The country has soured on the war; in an ABC-Washington Post poll taken two weeks ago, 66 percent of the respondents said they thought the war was not worth fighting. At the end of March, a CNN poll showed 72 percent of the people polled disapproved of the war. What happened in Kabul over the weekend was not Tet because Tet was the beginning of something, and the attacks on Sunday were not. What happened in Kabul was not Tet because there is no sign yet that there is the political will in this country of ours to put its money where its polling mouth is. The issues in the election are jobs and the economy, not the suppurating business in which the country never heavily invested its time or its attention anyway. It has been a war in a bell jar. It was conducted off the books and (relatively, but not really) on the cheap. It was such a secondary thing that, when George W. Bush and the unspeakable Richard Cheney wanted to gin up a case for war in Iraq, they were able to strip the military in Afghanistan and hardly anyone noticed or cared, except the people who had to live with the consequences in the field. It is shapeless now, with no discernable beginning, middle, or end. With Iraq wound down, there are rockets being fired at the parliament building, and the most basic questions are not being asked.
What in the hell are we doing over there anymore?