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9/11 Redux And The Country’s Newest Forever Wars*
Originally Posted September 11, 2021
As inevitable waves of criticism pounded from every quarter, for both the withdrawal and how it was carried out, President Biden ended one of America’s forever wars. The President’s levies seem to be holding. The US carried out an historic airlift of over 122,000 Americans, vulnerable Afghans, and Special Immigrant Visa applicants. My son-in-law, who served a tour in Afghanistan as a US Army medic, refers to those invaluable Afghan interpreters as “terps.”
While the United States may have withdrawn, I have some assurance that the Afghanistan forever war continues to haunt its soldiers and their families. Among those who survived, the number of physically and mentally harmed and with permanent disabilities is astonishing. During his speech on the withdrawal from Afghanistan, President Biden repeated the disturbing statistic that every day a combined 18 US soldiers and veterans end their lives.
Do the math.
In a single year, that’s more than double the number of people killed on 9/11 and approaching triple the number of US soldiers killed during the 20 years in Afghanistan.
History will judge whether the Biden Administration made mistakes in planning and executing the withdrawal. Admittedly, it has considerable work left to…