It’s hard to describe my emotions today as I watch what is happening in Afghanistan. As the parent, step-parent, cousin and in-law to young people who were deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m equal parts angry, melancholy, disappointed, fearful, and relieved.

Relieved that American soldiers will no longer be fighting a war where leaders were not committed to absolute victory.

Fearful that we have left in place an enemy that has not just hated us for years, or decades, or even hundreds of year but for over a millennium.

Disappointed and melancholy that we have abandoned thousands and thousands of people, who were allies, and now have been left to a primitive horror we cannot even begin to imagine.

Angry about the wastefulness our American resources. AP recounted the tangible costs in this article: https://apnews.com/article/middle-east-business-afghanistan-43d8f53b35e80ec18c130cd683e1a38f but the costs go way beyond the dollars wasted and the casualties which in and of themselves are way, way beyond significant.

For 2 decades, our so-called leadership, Republican, Democrat, and military, squandered the most valuable resource of America, its youth. Lives irreparably altered physically and mentally; families broken apart not just because of the death of a loved one but also because of mental devastation of both those who served and those close to them; suicides by veterans because of the trauma they bore; slow death through substance abuse, etc.

We have forgotten the lessons of our fathers’, grandfathers’ and great-grandfathers’.

We have forgotten what we may call “nation building” is not possible when the citizens of that nation, like an addict who cannot get clean, do not have the will to build their own nation. They have to do it themselves; we can’t do it for them.

We have forgotten that we cannot pacify those who have a bigger investment in their cause than we do in ours.

We have forgotten that we do not have unlimited right to intervene other than to protect our citizens.

We have forgotten the most important lesson of the last 4 generations, before we became so woke: That to defeat our enemy, we must destroy them completely and utterly, eviscerating that part of their culture and leadership which keeps them from being a civilized nation.

We have forgotten, if we even learned so, that if we keep electing the same or same type of individuals we can only expect the same type of results.

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