The Fifth Act, page 13
The day after Shah makes it through the North Gate, I find myself on the phone with Sherrie Westin, the president of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit behind Sesame Street. A mutual friend has put us in touch. She’s trying to evacuate twenty-three puppeteers from Baghch-e-Simsin, the Afghan Sesame Street. That show, which premiered in 2016, introduced the first Afghan Muppet, a six-year-old girl named Zari, which means “shimmering” in Dari. Before she was taken off the air, Zari the Muppet loved going to school and spoke about it often. The show became the most-watched TV program among children in Afghanistan. Eighty-one percent of children aged three to seven saw Zari on television. As did the Taliban. Which is why Sherrie Westin is determined to get her puppeteers out of Kabul.
Sherrie is relentlessly upbeat in her efforts. Even though I don’t have great news for her, she is determined, whereas I must sound a bit worn out. At one point, I tell her that the door is closing on these flights, that most people aren’t going to get out, that, in fact, the majority of people are going to be left behind. What I don’t say—but rather imply—is that getting only a few people out feels futile when placed against the larger need. After that conversation, she sends me an email linking to an article on a self-help website. With some skepticism, I click the link. It takes me to the following story, a parable:
Once upon a time, there was an old man who used to go to the ocean for exercise. One day, the old man was walking along a beach that was littered with thousands of starfish that had been washed ashore by the high tide. As he walked he came upon a young boy who was eagerly throwing the starfish back into the ocean, one by one.
Puzzled, the man looked at the boy and asked what he was doing.
The young boy paused, looked up, and replied, “Throwing starfish into the ocean. The tide has washed them up onto the beach and they can’t return to the sea by themselves. When the sun gets high, they will die, unless I throw them back into the water.”
The old man replied, “But there must be tens of thousands of starfish on this beach. I’m afraid you won’t really be able to make much of a difference.”
The boy bent down, picked up yet another starfish, and threw it as far as he could into the ocean. Then he turned, smiled, and said, “I made a difference for that one.”
The cynic in me wants to dismiss this homespun wisdom, but after a morning spent with my own children—on a beach like the one in this story, no less—I find that difficult to do. Sherrie’s message isn’t the only one waiting for me after a few hours away from my phone. Ian has been in touch. He has another group he’s trying to get out. I also have an email from a friend who leads a Washington, D.C.–based center for the promotion of democracy. His name is Hardy, and his email begins formally, “I hope this message finds you and your family well,” and I can imagine the many people he has likely sent it to. The email goes on to outline the plight of a dozen Afghans he’s trying to help, a group of translators and democratic activists trapped in Kabul. Attached to the email is a list of their names. The email ends, “Thank you very much for any help you are able to provide in this case.”
I call Ian. I then call Hardy. Both groups, twenty-nine people in all, are at the airport right now, waiting outside and not far from one another. If we move quickly, they could link up. With a little luck, we might have an opportunity to get everyone out. I send a message to Richardella, to see if his Marines can help us one more time: I’ve got a group trying to get through Abbey Gate (just got notified). See attached. Is this possible right now?
Then I wait for a reply.
While I’m waiting, I receive another message from Sherrie. Her persistence has paid off. Her puppeteers are inside the airport. They’ll fly out tonight.
SCENE IV
Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, 2009
I was back in Afghanistan a year after Tubes’s funeral, though not as a Marine. I was now a paramilitary officer working for the CIA. My first mission with the organization was against a top-ten al-Qaeda target. I had been deployed in my new job—one Jack had helped me get—for a total of two days. On this mission it was our CTPT and a handful of members from SEAL Team Six. Our plan was to conduct a raid to capture or kill our target, who was coming across the border from Pakistan for a meeting in the Korengal Valley.
The night was moonless as we slipped into the valley. The seventy-odd members of our raid force hiked under night-vision goggles for a couple of hours, taking on hundreds of feet of elevation in silence until we arrived at a village on a rocky outcropping where the meeting was being held. As surveillance and strike aircraft orbited the starry sky, a subset of our force sprinted toward the house where an informant had told us the target was staying. There was a brief and sharp gunfight; none of our men were hurt, and several of our adversaries were killed. But the target was taken alive. Then we slipped out of the valley as expeditiously as we had arrived. By early morning, we had made it safely to the nearest US Army outpost, where our prisoner would soon be transferred to Bagram Air Base.
The sun was breaking over the jagged ridgeline as we filled out the paperwork transferring custody. The mood among our raid force, which had remained tense all night, suddenly eased. We lounged in a small dirt parking lot, helmets off, laughing and recounting the details of our mission. A convoy would soon arrive to usher us back to our base, where we would get some much-needed rest and a decent meal. We would then await our next target, continuing what was proving to be a successful campaign to decapitate al-Qaeda’s leadership. We were feeling, in short, victorious.
While we waited, a column of scraggly American soldiers, little older than teenagers, filed past. They lived at the outpost, and their plight was well-known to us. For the past several years, they had been waging a quixotic and largely unsuccessful counterinsurgency campaign in the valley. Many of their friends had been killed there, and their expressions were haggard, a mix of defeat and defiance. Our triumphant banter must have sounded to them like a foreign language. They gave us hard, resentful looks, treating us as interlopers. It occurred to me that although our counterterrorism unit was standing on the same battlefield as these soldiers, we were in fact fighting in two very different wars.
At a joint session of Congress on September 20, 2001, President Bush announced what was then a new type of war, a “war on terror.” He laid out its terms: “We will direct every resource at our command—every means of diplomacy, every tool of intelligence, every instrument of law enforcement, every financial influence, and every necessary weapon of war—to the disruption and to the defeat of the global terror network.” Then he described what that defeat might look like: “We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place until there is no refuge or no rest.”
If Bush’s words outlined the essential objectives of the global war on terror, twenty years later the United States has largely achieved them. Osama bin Laden is dead. The surviving core members of al-Qaeda are dispersed and weak. Bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, communicates only through rare propaganda releases, and al-Qaeda’s most powerful offshoot, the Islamic State, has seen its territorial holdings dwindle to insignificance in Iraq and Syria. Our calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan could undermine these accomplishments, but that is where the United States stands as Kabul falls.
Most important of these accomplishments is our success in securing the homeland. If someone had told Americans in the weeks after 9/11—as they navigated anthrax attacks on the Capitol, a plunging stock market, and predictions of the demise of mass travel—that the US military and US intelligence agencies would successfully shield the country from another major terrorist attack for the next twenty years, they would have had trouble believing it. Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of thirty-eight Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terrorism has been to prevent significant acts of terrorism, then the war has succeeded.
But at what cost? Like that night in the Korengal, can success and failure coexist on the same battlefield? Can the United States claim to have won the war on terror while having simultaneously lost (or at least not won) the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq?
Let’s start by framing the discussion of cost around blood and treasure. Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash. Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: as discussed, the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending. It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered us our longest war.
This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood twenty years later. Today, with a ballooning national deficit paired with inflation, it is worth noting that the war on terror became one of the earliest and most expensive charges on our national credit card after the balanced budgets of the 1990s; 2001 marked the last year that the federal budget passed by Congress resulted in a surplus. Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.
If deficit spending has anesthetized the American people to the fiscal cost of the war on terror, technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the US military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war, whether they be deaths of US troops or those of foreign civilians. Meanwhile, the absence of a draft has allowed the US government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as American society has ever known.
In 2020, in response to nationwide civil unrest, Americans finally had the chance to meet their military firsthand, as both active-duty and National Guard troops were deployed in large numbers throughout the country. Americans also got to hear from the military’s retired leadership, as a bevy of flag officers—both on the right and the left—weighed in on domestic political matters in unprecedented ways. They spoke on television, wrote editorials that denounced one party or the other, and signed their names to letters on everything from the provenance of a suspicious laptop connected to the Democratic nominee’s son to the integrity of the presidential election itself.
For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the US military. What then? From Caesar’s Rome to Napoléon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions. Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics. The wide divide between the military and the citizens it serves is yet another inheritance from the war on terror.
Although it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror, it is worth remembering that immediately after 9/11, the wholesale invasion and occupation of either country was hardly a fait accompli. It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale US invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice. Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland.
What has made the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one. In this war, victory doesn’t come when you destroy your adversary’s army or seize its capital. It occurs when something does not happen. How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative? After 9/11, it was almost as though American strategists, unable to conceptualize a war that could be won only by not allowing a certain set of events to replicate themselves, felt forced to create a war that conformed to more conventional conceptions of conflict. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a tyrannical government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.
In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost. The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the depths of American political dysfunction and has hinted at the dangers of a civil-military divide. Perhaps even more important from a national security perspective, it has also brought the United States’ complex relationship with China into stark relief. For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the US military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.
Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the US Navy’s roughly 290. Although US ships generally outclass their Chinese counterparts, it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent twenty years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers. Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies. In the first, a former US Navy SEAL plays the archvillain. The sequel, released in 2017, became the highest-grossing film in Chinese box-office history; that is, until 2021, when The Battle at Lake Changjin beat its record.
That film is about a Chinese victory over US forces in the Korean War. Clearly, Beijing has no qualms about framing Washington as an antagonist. After Kabul falls, China is one of the first nations to recognize the newly formed Taliban government.
China isn’t the only country that has taken advantage of a preoccupied United States. In the past two decades, Russia has expanded its territory into Crimea and backed a separatist movement that culminated in an invasion of Ukraine; Iran has backed proxies in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria; and North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons. After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to US national security. This prediction came true, but not in the way most people anticipated. Nonstate actors have compromised US national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.
How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range, land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyber offense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly. The greatest minds in the US military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the US Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.
After two decades, the United States also suffers from war fatigue. Even though an all-volunteer military and the lack of a war tax have exempted most Americans from shouldering the burdens of war, that fatigue has still manifested. Under four presidents, the American people at first celebrated and then endured the endless wars playing in the background of their lives. Gradually, the national mood soured, and adversaries have taken notice. Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.
This dynamic played out most starkly in Syria, in the aftermath of the August 2013 sarin gas attack in Ghouta. When Syrian president Bashar al-Assad crossed President Obama’s stated red line by using chemical weapons, Obama found that not only was the international community no longer as responsive to an American president’s entreaties for the use of force but also that this reluctance appeared in Congress as well. When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ red line had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.
