Help promote human rights in the Middle East and North Africa

Donate Today
Facebook-f Twitter Instagram Linkedin Youtube Envelope
Search
Close this search box.
  • English
  • العربية
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • What We Do
    • Who We Are
    • FAQs
    • Support Dawn
    • Work With Us
    • For the Media
  • Founder Jamal Khashoggi
    • Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?
    • Chronology of a Murder
    • UN Recommendations
    • International Reaction
    • In His Own Words
    • DAWN and Jamal
  • Countries
    • Saudi Arabia
    • Egypt
    • UAE
    • Israel-Palestine
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
  • Democracy In Exile
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines for Democracy in Exile
  • Advocacy
    • DAWN's Advocacy
    • The Lobbyist Hall of Shame
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
    • Reforming Foreign Policy
      • Aid Conditionality
      • Human Rights Go to War
      • China
      • Yemen: Toward Sustainable Peace and Democracy
    • US Foreign Policy in MENA
    • Joint Advocacy
  • Experts
  • Latest
Menu
  • About
    • Our Mission
    • What We Do
    • Who We Are
    • FAQs
    • Support Dawn
    • Work With Us
    • For the Media
  • Founder Jamal Khashoggi
    • Who Was Jamal Khashoggi?
    • Chronology of a Murder
    • UN Recommendations
    • International Reaction
    • In His Own Words
    • DAWN and Jamal
  • Countries
    • Saudi Arabia
    • Egypt
    • UAE
    • Israel-Palestine
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
  • Democracy In Exile
    • About
    • Submission Guidelines for Democracy in Exile
  • Advocacy
    • DAWN's Advocacy
    • The Lobbyist Hall of Shame
    • DAWN's Culprits Gallery
    • Reforming Foreign Policy
      • Aid Conditionality
      • Human Rights Go to War
      • China
      • Yemen: Toward Sustainable Peace and Democracy
    • US Foreign Policy in MENA
    • Joint Advocacy
  • Experts
  • Latest
Donate

Will America Ever Reckon With the Human Cost of the Afghanistan War?

September 13, 2021
in Democracy In Exile
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

John Tirman

John Tirman is executive director and principal research scientist at the MIT Center for International Studies. He is author of The Deaths of Others: The Fate of Civilians in America's Wars. He is a DAWN fellow.

The U.S. evacuation from Kabul in August accidentally highlighted how little Americans pay attention to civilians in war zones. Suddenly, the American news media discovered dozens if not hundreds of stories about Afghans in distress, women facing suppression of their rights and girls again denied an education, or worse. 

Top American journalists like Richard Engel of NBC News expressed sorrow at the abrupt retreat. "It is deeply depressing to watch what could be among the final Afghans loaded up and flying out of their country," he tweeted on Aug. 25. "Afghans had hope. Now millions live in fear. A humiliating end for the US in Afghanistan." 

There was little of this focus on human security and the actual costs of war over America's two decades in Afghanistan. The major U.S. news networks, including Engel's, dedicated a total of five minutes of coverage to Afghanistan in 2020. This is an old pattern in American wars, where public interest is high and supportive when wars are started, but those sentiments are overtaken by indifference when things go awry and the U.S. interests at stake begin to look doubtful. It happened in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and—many years ago—in Afghanistan, well before it became America's longest war.

It is difficult to know if Americans would care more if they knew more. But one modest remedy is for Congress to empower an agency to calculate the human costs of war in real time and hold regular hearings that demand accountability from the president for the consequences of U.S. war making.

- John Tirman

Close to a million Iraqis have died in the two wars and more than decade of sanctions that have ravaged the country for 30 years, starting with Operation Desert Storm. Such an estimate is based on household surveys that provide a fairly accurate picture of war's devastation. In Afghanistan, we don't know the toll—in mortality, displacement, immiseration, social dissolution—because no one has done the work to find out. That, in itself, is a symptom of indifference. Estimates using morgue numbers or border crossings are almost always too low. Less quantifiable impacts of destroyed markets or unusable roads or stolen futures of the young go wanting for attention, even as they are the daily reality for most Afghans.

Journalist Anand Gopal made this point in his recent report from the Afghan countryside in The New Yorker. The American presence in the country's rural areas, where more than 70 percent of Afghans live, was brutally violent. When U.S. artillery or air strikes would kill innocent civilians in isolated villages—which was frequent—it was a bonanza for Taliban recruitment. The endless cycles of violence meant that the Taliban was flush with young men ready to fight the occupiers and the corrupt central government in Kabul. "This is not 'women's rights' when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers," a woman in one rural village told Gopal. "The Americans did not bring us any rights," said another. "They just came, fought, killed, and left."

So much of U.S. foreign policy is dismissive of this indelible scar of human costs from America's wars. Military and political leaders should want to know what is occurring on the ground of these distant battlefields.

- John Tirman

The rapid collapse of the Afghan army and the U.S.-backed government was a "surprise" only because so little was known about what was besetting most Afghan civilians outside the confines of Kabul and other cities. What was known was brushed aside by U.S. officials keen to make the mission appear far more successful than it was. 

And this is not something that only just happened, which is another peculiarity of the shortsighted U.S. media coverage of Afghanistan. The writer Anna Badken chronicled the despair gripping the Afghan countryside a decade or more ago. "The road to women's wellbeing begins with food security, infrastructure that works and a government that protects them against sectarian violence," she wrote in 2014, in one of her many dispatches from the country, this one from the village of Kampirak. "But none of this is in sight. The country is spinning toward more bloodshed; food remains scarce, infrastructure abysmal; the Afghan society, by and large, does not welcome education for women," she added. "The way the women of Kampirak see it, no matter which band of armed men patrol their deeply fissured land, they will go on surviving the way they have for centuries, abused and abandoned by a succession of indifferent governments."

She told me years ago that once the Americans left, the Taliban would take over quickly.

So much of U.S. foreign policy is dismissive of this indelible scar of human costs from America's wars. Military and political leaders should want to know what is occurring on the ground of these distant battlefields. Instead, they and other observers tend to view these wars as another episode of gamesmanship, both internationally and domestically. The obsessive chattering about "U.S. credibility" after last month's evacuation from Kabul is a vivid example of the magical thinking that dominates public discourse.

The years-long destruction of these societies and people by American forces—or indirectly through military assistance, as with the more recent Saudi-led war in Yemen—are the most damning criticism of these interventions, and so they must be shunted aside as "collateral damage" in the schemes of U.S. grand strategy. Public indifference braces Washington's delusions of social progress and winnable wars. 

It is difficult to know if Americans would care more if they knew more. But one modest remedy is for Congress to empower an agency to calculate the human costs of war in real time and hold regular hearings that demand accountability from the president for the consequences of U.S. war making.

Dwight Eisenhower once said, "I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity." If we don't question war's brutality, futility and stupidity before the last soldier boards the last plane, we will have learned nothing while condemning millions more to a wretched life.

Relatives and neighbors of the Ahmadi family gathered around the incinerated husk of a vehicle targeted and hit by an American drone strike, which killed 10 people including children, in Kabul, Afghanistan, Aug. 30, 2021.

Source: MARCUS YAM / LOS ANGELES TIMES

Previous Post

U.S.: Declassified Materials Should Include All Information Concerning Saudi Government's Possible Role in 9/11 Attacks

Next Post

U.S.: Waiver on Military Aid Restrictions Rewards Sisi, Harms Egyptian People

Related Posts

Democracy In Exile

Reckoning With the Nakba That Never Ended

On May 18, DAWN hosted a panel discussion online on the denial of the history of the Nakba and...

Frederick Deknatel
May 25, 2023
NABLUS, WEST BANK, PALESTINE - 2023/04/11: An Israeli soldier aims his rifle from behind a wall during a military operation after the Israeli army forces killed Palestinian gunmen, near Elon Moreh, east of Nablus, in the West Bank. Two Palestinian gunmen were shot dead by Israeli soldiers. According to Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, the two gunmen opened fire at the Israeli soldiers near the Jewish settlement of Elon Moreh, which caused the clashes between them and resulted in the death of the two Palestinian gunmen. The gunmen are identified as Mohammed Abu Dhraa and Soud al-Titi. Both their bodies were taken under the custody of the Israeli military. (Photo by Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Democracy In Exile

The Technology of Occupation Has Become One of Israel's Main Exports

The Israel/Palestine conflict has been exported globally. The tools and technologies Israel uses to repress Palestinians are sold to...

Antony Loewenstein
May 23, 2023
The 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba (Arabic: an-Nakbah, lit.'catastrophe'), occurred when more than 700,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were expelled from their homes, during the 1947–1948 Civil War in Mandatory Palestine and the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.  The exact number of refugees is a matter of dispute, but around 80 percent of the Arab inhabitants of what became Israel (50 percent of the Arab total of Mandatory Palestine) left or were expelled from their homes.  Later in the war, Palestinians were forcibly expelled as part of 'Plan Dalet' in a policy of 'ethnic cleansing'.
Democracy In Exile

Denying the Nakba, 75 Years Later: A Democracy in Exile Roundtable

How has the suppression of the history of the Nakba shaped Western policy toward Israel and Palestine over the...

Frederick Deknatel
May 15, 2023
Democracy In Exile

Neither Here nor There: The Shrinking Physical Space for Palestinians

Physical space has been shrinking for Palestinians for 75 years—sometimes in fits, and sometimes in creeping fashion.

Zaha Hassan
May 12, 2023
Next Post
WASHINGTON, DC - JULY 20: (L-R) Secretary of State Antony Blinken looks on as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks at the start of a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on July 20, 2021 in Washington, DC. Six months into his presidency, this is Bidens second full Cabinet meeting so far. The White House said the meeting will focus on Covid-19, infrastructure, climate issues and cybersecurity. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

U.S.: Waiver on Military Aid Restrictions Rewards Sisi, Harms Egyptian People

Los Angeles, CA - May 16:  Los Angeles City Councilwoman Traci Park (District 11), speaks during a meeting where the Council deadlocked on a proposal, 7-7, to ask City Planning Director Vince Bertoni to consider rescinding a general plan amendment initiation for the Bulgari Resort Los Angeles, a planned 58-room hotel that would rise in Benedict Canyon, at City Hall in downtown Los Angeles, CA, Tuesday, May 16, 2023. Developer Gary Safady's proposal will continue in the process, with an environmental impact report being completed.  (Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

Los Angeles City Council Votes to Rename Street Outside Saudi Consulate as "Jamal Khashoggi Way"

May 26, 2023

Reckoning With the Nakba That Never Ended

May 25, 2023
Attendees walk past the logo of US multinational technology company Microsoft. (Photo by PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA / AFP) (Photo by PATRICIA DE MELO MOREIRA/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)

Microsoft Should Suspend Data Center Plans in Saudi Arabia, Groups Say

May 24, 2023

Categories

  • Advocacy
  • Aid Conditionality
  • Anonymous Interviews
  • Anonymous Interviews Egypt
  • Anonymous Interviews Saudi Arabia
  • Anonymous Interviews UAE
  • Cases
  • Cases Egypt
  • Cases Saudi Arabia
  • Cases UAE
  • China's Uyghur Repression
  • Countries
  • Culprits
  • Culprits Egypt
  • Culprits Israel
  • Culprits Saudi Arabia
  • Culprits UAE
  • DAWN
  • Dawn's Advocacy
  • Democracy In Exile
  • Editor's Pick
  • Egypt
  • Feature
  • Fellows
  • Foreign Policy
  • Human Rights
  • Human Rights Go to War
  • International Actors
  • Israel-Palestine
  • Joint Letters
  • Lobbyists
  • Lobbyists Israel Palestine
  • Palestine
  • Political prisoners
  • Press Release Egypt
  • Press Release Israel-Palestine
  • Press Release Saudi Arabia
  • Press Release UAE
  • Press Releases
  • Saudi Arabia
  • UAE
  • Uncategorized
  • United Nations
  • US – Egypt
  • US – Saudi Arabia
  • US – UAE
  • USA
  • Yemen Conference

SUPPORT OUR MISSION

Donate Today

About Us

Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN) is a nonprofit organization that promotes democracy, the rule of law, and human rights for all of the peoples of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Support Us

Donate Now

Newsletter

Facebook Twitter Instagram Linkedin Youtube

© DAWN All rights reserved. | Website Design by KRS Creative.

DONATE TODAY