Thread by @LauraJedeed

Boy howdy am I having a lot of feelings about Afghanistan today

I deployed there twice--once in 2008 and once in 2009-10

It was already obvious that the Taliban would sweep through the very instant we left

And here we are today

I know how bad the Taliban is. I know what they do to women and little boys. I know what they're going to do to the interpreters and the people who cooperated with us, it's awful, it's bad, but we are leaving, and all I feel is grim relief

Afghanistan is a dusty beige nightmare of a place full of proud, brave people who did not fucking want us there

We called them Hajjis and worse and they were better than we were, braver and stronger and smarter

I remember going through the phones of the people we detained and finding clip after clip of Bollywood musicals, women singing in fields of flowers

Rarely did I find anything incriminating

I remember finding propaganda footage cut together from the Soviet invasion and our own Operation Enduring Whatever

And laughing about how stupid the Afghans were to not know we aren't the Russians

And then eventually realizing I was the stupid one

I remember how every year the US would have to decide how to deal with the opium fields

You could let them alone, and then the Taliban would shake the farmers down and use the money to buy weapons

Or you could carpet bomb the fields and then the farmers would join the Taliban

Or you could give the farmers fertilizer as an incentive to grow wheat instead of opium poppy, and the farmers would sell the fertilizer to the Taliban, who used it to make explosives for IEDs that could destroy a million dollar MRAP and maim everyone inside

I remember we weren't allowed to throw batteries away because people who worked on base would go through the trash and collect hundreds of dead batteries, wire them together so they had just enough juice for one charge, and use that charge to detonate an IED

I remember the look on my roommate's face after she got back from cutting the dead bodies of two soldiers out of an HMMWV that got blown up by an IED that I have always imagined was made with fertilizer from an opium farmer and detonated with a hundred thrown-out batteries

I remember an Afghan kid who worked in the DFAC (cafeteria) who we called Cowboy, always wore this cowboy hat and an "I'm with stupid" t-shirt someone had given him, always with a big smile, high school age

Cowboy was a good student and he wanted to go to college in America, but there weren't colleges that took Afghans, the education system was too shit. No program to help kids like him. I looked

I wonder if he's dead now, for serving us food and dreaming of something different

But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it's our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet

We use people up and throw them away like it's nothing

And now we are leaving and the predictable thing is happening, the Taliban is surging in and taking it all back

They have what you can't buy or train, they have patience and a bloody-mindedness that warrants more respect than we ever gave them

I am Team Get The Fuck Out Of Afghanistan which, as a friend pointed out to me today, has always been Team Taliban

It's Team Taliban or Team Stay Forever, there is no third team

So I'm sitting here reading these sad fucking tweets about the suffering in Afghanistan and the horror of the encroaching Taliban and how awful it is that this is happening but I can't stop feeling this grim happiness, like, finally, you fuckers, finally you have to see it too

No more blown up soldiers. No more Bollywood videos on phones whose owners are getting shipped god knows where. No more hypocrisy

No more pretending it meant anything. It didn't

It didn't mean a fucking thing

Wow, this seems to be really resonating with folks. I'm kind of blown away

I made this post into an article, if that's a thing that people want:

laurajedeed.medium.com/afghanistan-me…