Thread by @LeftistsUk

@wikileaks The motto of the United States Army’s Special Forces was to my younger self a hook so perfectly baited as to be irresistable:

De Oppresso Liber—“To Free the Oppressed.” (6/22)

@wikileaks Shamefully, it took me a very long time, peering down from my technocratic perch at the CIA and later the NSA, to apprehend the nature of my work:

transforming the internet—a liberating, democratizing tool—into an architecture of oppression. (7/22)

@wikileaks But before I took that step toward clarity, I struggled to apprehend the nature of our violence in Afghanistan and especially in Iraq.

“You are either with us or you are against us in the fight against terror,” said Bush the Younger. (8/22)

@wikileaks But he never defined who, exactly, was the enemy.

If you look beyond the label, terrorists are just murderers with a political motive:

mere criminals.

So were our enemies states, or were they criminal groups within those states? (9/22)

@wikileaks And were those criminal groups subject to direction by the states in which they operated, or to other states, and how?

And if we dealt with criminals in the way we dealt with states, does that not unduly elevate them to something close to a peer? (10/22)

@wikileaks In substituting a military action for a police action, are we not setting a dangerous precedent for the future?

These questions spread like a net—a dragnet, and caught up everyone.

I'm not trying to say this realization was immediate.

It was not. (11/22)

@wikileaks It was a process, beset by rationalization—the reflex of a mind desperate to escape an inevitably dark conclusion.

Precisely because I had intended to do good, it was difficult to accept the possibility that I had become involved in something bad—perhaps even evil. (12/22)

@wikileaks Intentions are what paved the roads to Kabul, a hell of our own making.
...
But that might be the charitable explanation. Because for all the talk of democratizing Afghanistan, it was never clear that it was Afghanistan we were fighting. (13/22)

@wikileaks Weren't we fighting the Taliban?

Or Al-Qaeda?

And weren't they backed by Pakistan?

And what about Saudi Arabia?

Ultimately, we Americans were fighting ourselves, or our own governance, as we came to understand how the agony of 9/11 had been politicized. (14/22)

@wikileaks Of all the great cliches to be revived by this new lost war—“Afghanistan:

the grave of empires,” “never get involved in a land war in Asia”—the most banal was also the truest:

We are our own worst enemies. (15/22)

@wikileaks Just hours before I sat down to draft this, the President of the United States gave a speech in which he tried to defend the honor of this war

—a defense that is frankly offensive,

and that I think most offends the families of the injured and the dead. (16/22)

@wikileaks President Biden then went on to assert that our erstwhile ally, Osama bin Laden, had been brought to justice—our noble lie.

He could have been brought to justice, but we shot him instead.

He wasn't even in Afghanistan. (17/22)

@wikileaks If there are any lessons to be learned from this tragic sequel to Saigon, you can be assured, we will not learn them. (18/22)

@wikileaks We will just sit by as the people of Afghanistan—many of whom were as deluded by American promises as Americans themselves—cling to hopes and cling to planes and fall, lost to the desert of theocratic rule. (19/22)

@wikileaks Some will say, they didn't fight! They get what they deserve! To which I say, “And what do we deserve?”

A fractious country comprised of warring tribes, unable to form an inclusive whole; (20/22)

@wikileaks unable to wade beyond shallow differences in sect and identity in order to provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to themselves and their posterity, and so they perish (21/22)

@wikileaks —in the span of a breath—without ever reaching the promised shore.

Today, the country this describes is Afghanistan. Tomorrow, the country this describes might be my own."

© 2021 Edward (22/22)