Operation Enduring Desperation

For the record, the war that America had waged against Afghanistan after 9/11 was called Operation Enduring Freedom. The ones who endured that war are the rulers of Afghanistan today. The video of Afghans clinging to the plane and falling to their deaths is gut wrenching. It brought back the memories of those Americans in New York who jumped from the windows of the World Trade Center (WTC) and fell to their deaths. The world has become more cruel than that.

Those Afghans clinging to the plane and those Americans jumping from the WTC made a hard choice between certain death and a miraculous escape. The Americans jumped hoping that someone might catch them on the ground and give them a new lease on life. The Afghans hoped to escape living a life where poverty, starvation, misery, and death are the dominant lifestyle features. They also hoped that America would embrace them in their society and give them a lease on life. But America said we cannot justify embracing you but we can justify killing you. Asylum, refuge, and visas are limited but the war on terror was not. If someone could talk to their ghosts and ask them if it was hard to die, I am sure they’d say, “life was harder”.

And then it occurred to me; this entire war has been defined by desperate measures. It has been a war of desperation. After 9/11, Americans desperately wanted revenge. They wanted to grab their sophisticated weapons and unleash their bombs. The Bush administration was so desperate in its lust for war that when the Taliban demanded proof about Bin Laden’s guilt in 9/11 attacks, the reasonable demand put forth by the labeled barbarians was dismissed and war was announced in a manner in line with the behavior of true barbarians. The Americans were so desperate for revenge that they even sacrificed their own civil liberties for it. And not just that the leadership slaughtered the rights of the American people but the people willingly surrendered their civil liberties as well. All in the name of fighting terrorism and the terrorists.

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Senator Obama came on the scene and promised change and an end to the war in Afghanistan. President Obama made a U-turn and ordered a troop surge, let alone ending the war. So much for bringing our troops home. The ever eloquent president coined new fancy terms such as Counter Violent Extremist (CVE) and so forth, which the leading American columnists internalised overnight and published opinion columns about. The constitutional law professor violated the constitution by killing American citizens such as Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son in drone strikes, without giving them any due process. A memo in his office table drawer authored by the Office of Legal Counsel justified the extrajudicial killing. Every time someone says the terrorists hate America for its laws and freedoms, it never fails to confuse me.

Ashraf Ghani and his VP Amrullah Saleh desperately tried for months to delay the execution of the peace deal that the Americans and the Taliban had signed under President Trump. They also desperately tried to delay and cancel the American withdrawal because they knew rightly that their very existence was owing to the puppet job they had to perform for America.

Both the Taliban and Kabul regime reversed their stances of talking to each other. The Taliban finally did talk to the “puppet”, after refusing to do so for years except they perhaps merely uttered the word ‘run’ to Ghani and Saleh. The Kabul regime, desperate for talks with the Taliban for years, decided against talking and fighting for their country in favour of saving their skin and made a desperate dash for the exit.

The end of this war was made possible by the desperation of the warring sides. The Americans finally negotiated with the terrorists and the terrorists negotiated with the infidel occupiers of their land. Desperate times, desperate measures.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 19^th, 2021.

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