“The United States invaded in the weeks after 9/11, at the behest of George W. Bush, to dismantle and destroy the Al Qaeda terrorist group who’d attacked us. We sought something between justice and vengeance. Once Al Qaeda and its Taliban enablers had been defeated, the original mission accomplished, we stayed. Once Osama bin Laden was killed, in neighboring Pakistan, we stayed. We stayed and we stayed and we stayed.
We stayed for democracy at one point, human rights at another. To nation-build, if you believed in counterinsurgency, or to ‘mow the grass’—a euphemism for killing terrorists that admits doing so will produce more—if you favored counterterrorism.
Somewhere along the way, the war lost public interest and support. Those matter in a republic, though one could be forgiven for getting lulled into thinking otherwise the past twenty years. The war’s justification became the war’s existence itself, and that’s a twisted reason to keep killing people in the name of country, as well as risking the lives of our own.”
– Matt Gallagher, “Leaving Afghanistan Behind,” esquire.com, October 7, 2021