Everyone over ten or so knows exactly where they were and what they were doing when they found out what had happened on what should have been just another Tuesday morning. It's seared into my memory enough that I did not have to look up that it fell on a Tuesday. I was 15 years old, and our whole sophomore class was taking the ISTEP test, a test all Indiana students were required to pass to graduate. I gather that's not a thing any more, some other test has taken its place. In any case, we took the test in the cafeteria, one of the few places with both enough space and tables to house a quarter of the school at a time. We hit a break in the test, so we all went out into the hallways to take our breather. I walked by the counselor's office, which was both right outside of the cafeteria and had a window to look into the small reception area outside the counselor's actual office. All I remembered seeing on the screen through the window was flames everywhere, but I had no context for what I was seeing. I don't remember what the chyron said, but whatever it was did not immediately have me understand what I was looking at. Another teacher must have seen me standing out in the hallway looking dumbfounded, so she told me "Come in here and look at this." So I did. That's when I finally understood what had happened. By that time, both planes had hit the buildings. All I could see were those enormous gaping holes in some of the most recognizable buildings in the world and all the smoke pouring out of them. I don't remember if the other planes had crashed yet or not, but I don't believe I knew about them before we had to go back in and start our test again. I remember mentioning it to a few other people on the way back in. Some knew, some didn't. Some realized it was a big deal right away, some didn't. Even those of us that knew we were seeing something big, though, still had no grasp of how history-altering that day would become. We did our tests for the rest of that morning. We had to go back to classes that afternoon. Most classes just had the TV on, watching the horror unfold. Everyone was unsure of exactly what was happening, student and teacher alike. I think only one class actually stuck to regular instruction, but none of us were in the mood for it. As soon as I got home, the TV was right back on to try to understand what had just happened. The video kept playing over and over. The first tower burning. The second plane hitting. The first tower falling. The second tower falling. We were continuously warned other buildings might fall. At least one finally did. We heard about the Pentagon, we heard about Flight 93 and how the passengers and crew heroically brought that plane down before it found its target.* As far as news coverage at the time was concerned, though, they were afterthoughts. The coverage was always mainly focus on New York, and the images from the building and all the soot and ash all over everything and everybody in lower Manhattan was certainly dramatic. *I don't know that anybody has ever officially said what that target was supposed to be. I have always mostly heard the White House with some Capitol sprinkled in. For whatever it's worth, this Washington Post article is very confident it was supposed to be the Capitol. We started hearing reports from people who had managed to get out. We started to hear about the people who decided to try jumping instead of taking their chances of being found beneath the rubble of an entire skyscraper. Those reports made my mom cry. Aaron Brown at CNN became a star in the absolute worst kind of way. He handled himself impeccably through the whole immediate crisis. I don't know how many people remember that now, but he deserved an awful lot of respect for his work back then. I have seen some different memes floating around talking about, for as absolutely awful as 9/11 was (and it most certainly was), they will forever be grateful for 9/12. I have to tell you, I am not on board with that. 9/12 was chilling in its own way for me. I watched much of the world around me transform overnight into something I could no longer recognize as America. There were flags everywhere. Everyone wanted those "towel heads" or "sand monkeys" bombed back into the Stone Age, or doubting Afghanistan had ever gotten out of the Stone Age to begin with. A quick Google search about Kabul in the 70's will tell you otherwise, but I don't know that too many people realized that at the time. And that's not casting aspersions. I didn't know that history at the time. I had some vague notion that the Soviets had a bad time there around the time I was born. In my head, I basically had the comparison that it was their Vietnam, but I didn't know anything specific. I know more now than I did then, but it's still not an entanglement I knew a lot about. I had just recently learned about the Taliban before 9/11, after the outcry over all the Buddhist statues they had destroyed for being un-Islamic. I knew about Osama bin Laden because of the attack on the USS Cole that had happened the previous year, and I had some memory of the embassy bombings before that. It was enough that I immediately thought bin Laden was behind the attacks as soon as I had my wits about me enough to think that through, but I didn't know at the time his personal history of being intertwined with the US throughout the Soviet campaign and subsequent spurning. We all learned a lot in the following months about all of that. And then shit really got weird. We launched our war in Afghanistan, which the vast majority of people were on board with. And then we launched a war into Iraq on very transparently flimsy ground. I don't have the polling on that at the time, but I get the feeling most people were behind the effort at first. For as fuzzy a picture we had of Afghanistan and its leaders, everybody knew about Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In my neck of the woods, I was definitely in the minority in thinking this was an awful idea. I tried to write an article in the school paper about it, but they wouldn't publish it. They claimed it was a libel threat. I still don't buy that. I am sure they knew the community at large was going to have a shit fit at the school if they published what I had written and they didn't want to deal with the fallout. I don't necessarily blame them for that. I'm sure it was going to cause an awful lot of headaches for people in the school who were not necessarily enamored with me to begin with. But, I think it's also safe to say that my take aged well on that one. It wasn't just Iraq, though. The Afghan war got weird, too. We displaced the Taliban easily enough, but we didn't find bin Laden right away. Things got unfocused and the mission got lost somewhere in there. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, we tried to force our style of democracy on the people there, despite that never initially being the goal, despite the people of those countries not having a lot of history or interest in that sort of government, and despite the United States wasting almost all the goodwill initially built up in the aftermath of 9/11. And that still wasn't the weirdest thing. Remember all that performative patriotism I talked about earlier? Somehow, the Republican Party claimed that as their own. Somehow, in so many minds, because a big chunk of the Democratic Party and its electorate was not on board with the whole Iraq misadventure and was not on board with what Afghanistan was turning into and was not on board with how the government was using its power to police our own people in the name of anti-terrorism, somehow that meant that the Democratic establishment was not as American and somehow outright hated America. Then Obama happened, and then race got tied up in all that stuff, too. The Tea Party was born, and politics have been broken ever since. It's so bad that I don't think it can be repaired until we have a complete generational turnover. It all ties back on 9/11, and I think the entire Republican identity would have been totally different if Al Gore had been in the White House that day. I'm not exactly sure how. I'm sure it all would have been weird and broken still, but it definitely would have been weird and broken differently. Speaking of Obama happening, we finally caught up to Osama bin Laden in 2011. Obama came out and made a short statement the night that it happened. He was not jubilant or celebratory. Just matter-of-fact and to the point. The atmosphere outside the White House was quite different. Scores of people gathered to cheer and party the news. Many of them appeared to be my age or slightly younger. Chants of "USA! USA!" just went on and on and on. I wanted some sort of justice, too, if you can call the death of one man in exchange for thousands that. But this scene made me uneasy and at times downright disgusted. I decided that night I would never cheer or celebrate a death again as long as I live, no matter how vile the deceased was. I resolved I would pass that lesson down to my children, too, whenever they came to be. Now that my daughters are here, I intend to do that still. We had gotten our pound of flesh, but the war was still not over. We would manage to pull out of Iraq later in 2011,* but we were still firmly entrenched in Afghanistan. The government we were propping up still needed propped up, and the local military and security forces still woefully unable to project power. Even at the time, there were only two real options on the table. The war was a decade old by now. We could cut our losses and go home, or surge more troops in to somehow finish the job. It should be noted here that Vice President Joseph Robinette Biden wanted to bring people home. The vast majority of the rest of the government, on both sides of the aisle, wanted more force. So more force it was. I was never exactly sure how the extra troops were supposed to accomplish what was being asked of them, and I still don't really understand how that plan was ever supposed to work. But in the troops went, and not all of them made it out. Including some from my area of the country. *Until ISIS came along, anyway. Things seemed to stay more or less the same in Afghanistan for the next ten years. Donald Trump got elected in the meantime, a symptom of the rot in the Republican base who managed to form a personality cult and do just enough to game the Electoral College. I went on to vehemently disagree with everything he did, said, and stood for for his four years in office with one shocking exception right towards the end of his term. He announced American troops were going to leave Afghanistan, and they were going to leave soon. Now, there were some issues with how this was done, naturally. I don't blame the Trump administration for negotiating with the Taliban. That was going to be necessary. As stated earlier, the Afghan government in place never showed that it was going to be able to keep the Taliban at bay, so the Taliban was always going to have a seat at the table one way or another. The most sensible thing to do was to try to peaceably fold them in rather than shoot their way in. But it does seem a bit odd that the government we spent two decades trying to build and legitimize never got a seat at the table. And then, of course, there was the illegal delaying of all the special visas for Afghans who worked with the military. That is a very big deal that had very big consequences when we did start getting people out. When it became Joe Biden's turn to decide whether to pull the troops out or not, it should have been no surprise he stuck to that plan. He has been consistent all along with that, and good on him for sticking with a position that I'm sure he knew was not going to be universally loved, to put it mildly. Now, I do have some issues with how evacuations took place. I think we all do. I'm not an expert here, but it seems like we could have been pulling some smaller number of people out of Afghanistan the moment Biden took office. There had to be some sort of line there where we could have been getting some people out without also causing mass panic. I also don't believe the administration was caught that off-guard at how quickly the Taliban took back the country. That was the whole point of getting out now, it was clear now as it had been clear for at least the last ten years that there was never any stomach for Afghans to actually fight that fight. In short, there was no universe where the Taliban were going to be meaningfully delayed, so the administration had to have known that evacuations were going to have to be very quick and necessarily get messy. All things considered, though, with the hand Biden was dealt, I do truly believe the evacuations went okay. Not perfect, but there was always going to be chaos whenever that trigger was pulled. And obviously there was the horrific attack right at the end from ISIS-K.*. Tragic, but some attack like that was probably unavoidable once the US forces were pinned to such a bound position. We have too many enemies in that part of the world to expect otherwise. *ISIS-K and their relationship to the Taliban is an important discussion, but a separate one from this post. And just a few days short of the 20th anniversary of the attacks, the US is out of Afghanistan. Was it all for nothing? I wouldn't go that far. We did kill Osama bin Laden, though Al-Qaeda still lives on. It does seem to be in quite a diminished state, though. The Taliban have been maybe not quite as awful as they were before, though I imagine it is just for show for now. Just an act long enough for attention to be drawn elsewhere before quietly resuming atrocities within their own borders. Unfortunately, with the nature of the group and that region, it was clear that destroying them was never going to happen. Still, this did give twenty years for people to have a chance at education and other opportunities that would have otherwise never existed. That's not nothing, and who knows what that might still grow into. People borne out of those efforts are likely going to be a bigger existential threat to the Taliban than our military ever was. But it is bleak. I don't deny that, and I cannot imagine the fear so many in that country must be living through while they either try to find a way out or wait for their retribution. When I was very young, I used to sit in history class and hear about things like the Civil War and Pearl Harbor and things like that and wish I could live through some big history turning moment like that. Then 9/11 happened. I don't wish that any more and I don't wish it for my kids. It's a wish I have little control over, though. I just hope that maybe the tail of the 9/11 fallout it near the end and that some new positive force will rule the politics of their time. I'm not holding my breath, though. Comments are closed.
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