Thread by @MMazarr

A powerful story in @nybooks about the human effects of waging war. It is surely true that Taliban takeover threatens many bad outcomes. It is *also* true that persistent war imposed tremendous suffering in ways not often captured by the US media ...
nybooks.com/daily/2021/10/…

2/ How easy it was for us to fall into thinking of an ongoing stalemate as "stability." Preserving that stalemate required airstrikes, raids, empowering local despots. It killed and maimed innocents, destroyed families and villages, drove many into the arms of the Taliban

3/ "The US will be remembered for enabling ... progress in women’s rights, an independent media and other freedoms." But in rural areas, "the main battlegrounds of America’s longest war, many Afghans view the US primarily through the prism of conflict, brutality and death"

4/ It will be a crime, and an invitation to future tragedy, if the primary lessons we digest from this war are about technocratic aspects of COIN doctrine + geopolitical credibility. The more important lessons have to do w/the moral and human cost of war we wage ...

5/ ... and the great danger, once committed, of falling into an endless justification for continued war which views human beings as mere instrumental tools of your strategic goals, and ignores the categories of suffering inconvenient to the narrative you wish to tell