John J. Waters
President Biden said he ended the war in Afghanistan.
In truth he abandoned it.
Over 20 years, 800,000 young Americans did their duty to country by serving in Afghanistan. Of those, 20,000 were wounded, and more than 2,000 were killed.
Our mission was twofold: defeat the Taliban on the ground; and build a new military, a democratic government, a new Afghanistan.
The first part of the mission was clear, and when we killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011, there was a feeling among many in the armed forces that we had finished the harder task.
The mission’s second objective, however, proved to be the more difficult. If building a nation sounds ambitious, complex, even foolhardy, it was all those things. For conventional troops, it was often unclear whether we were fighting a war, investigating a crime, or participating in a massive public works project to build a modern nation-state brick-by-brick, road-by-road.
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