Nearly 9 years ago, on a late September afternoon in 2001, I joined maybe 150 other people at Westlake Center in Seattle to protest the looming war in Afghanistan.
It felt like screaming into the wind. Most passersby looked at us as if we had two heads. Others shouted at us, calling us traitors or terrorist-lovers. A few times a pickup truck with a big American flag on a pole mounted in the bed drove by and shouted at us. And this was in a city that, just a year and a half later, saw over 100,000 people march against the Iraq War.
The protest accomplished nothing. We didn't stop the invasion from happening or change many minds at all about the Afghanistan conflict. But as the war grinds on after 9 years, and as it becomes clear that it has been a failure, it's worth re-examining why we were right to protest it.
I don't post this out of a desire to gloat. The dead soldiers and dead civilians make it difficult if not impossible to do any such thing. Instead I offer this in the spirit of "lessons learned" - so that we not only bring the Afghanistan conflict to a rapid close, but ensure that we're never again so willingly deluded into supporting a war when it is neither necessary nor desirable.
Within days of the September 11 attacks, it became clear that America's response was going to be one of militaristic bloodlust. As that day recedes into hazy memory, it may be hard to recall that there was a brief moment where national unity might have meant a more constructive, peaceful response.
Perhaps that was just the initial shock. As we know, the Bush-Cheney regime almost immediately began planning to take advantage of the attacks to push their neo-conservative agenda, including an invasion of Iraq and a desire to link Saddam Hussein to the attack.
But first, the actual issue of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden (remember him?) had to be dealt with. Even though we knew where bin Laden was, and had the capability to send in a team to go after him and his support team, Bush and his allies pushed instead for a massive invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. By late September it was clear this was where things were headed.
I opposed this move. It was obvious to me that an invasion of Afghanistan would lead to a long-term occupation that would resemble the ill-fated Soviet invasion and occupation of the late 1970s and 1980s, and would needlessly kill Americans and Afghans alike.
Further, it seemed that an invasion of Afghanistan, as opposed to a surgical strike designed to capture bin Laden, would solidify a militaristic response to terrorism and open the door to future military adventures. Even I didn't imagine that Bush really would seek to invade Iraq, not in September 2001, even though it was already being planned - but that was how it played out, with the apparently "successful" invasion of Afghanistan softening the public to the big enchilada, the Iraq War.
The response to our protest from Republicans and right-wingers was predictable. As I noted above, we got called traitors, pacifists, idiots, terrorist enablers, the whole gamut. This was Seattle, after all, so there was no obvious acts of violence directed toward us, but the right made it clear what they felt about our protest.
For most Democrats and liberals (few of us called ourselves "progressives" at that date), the reaction was also dismissive and/or incredulous, but for different reasons. That evening, I got home to find my new roommate had arrived (I was just about to start grad school the following week). After introducing ourselves, I told him how I'd spent my afternoon, and he was alternately stunned and outraged. How could I not understand that we had to invade Afghanistan and take out the Taliban government that was housing and enabling terrorism? I was nuts for even thinking that military action wasn't the only option.
Democrats and liberals tended to embrace this view in greater numbers - that we had to send a multinational force into Afghanistan to take out the Taliban, round up al-Qaeda, and rebuild the country into a Western-style democracy.
Those of us who questioned this idea - including we who did not trust the Bush Administration to do this right, if at all - were seen as uncaring about the fate of women in Afghanistan, or as tacit defenders of the Taliban.
After nine years, it's been proved beyond a doubt that the original criticisms we made that sunny September day in downtown Seattle were sadly and tragically correct. The Taliban was beaten back initially, but has made quite a resurgence. Women are somewhat freer today, but have lost most or all of those gains in many parts of the country. Others have lost their lives, their families, or their livelihoods due to the ongoing war.
As we all know, al-Qaeda wasn't beaten and bin Laden was never captured. The promised reconstruction has not fully materialized. The promised democracy hasn't materialized, with a corrupt oligarchy instead ruling Kabul but with the US having no other viable governing option aside from the Taliban, we leave Karzai in place. The promised peace hasn't materialized either, and isn't likely to anytime soon.
Before much longer, the US and its allies will withdraw its troops from Afghanistan, leaving the country not all that different from the shape we found it in 2001, but with more dead civilians. All of this warfare, this death, this cost has produced hardly anything of use or value.
It shouldn't have taken two wars to teach that lesson. I protested the Afghanistan War in 2001 not because I was psychic, but because I drew the conclusions from the Vietnam War, from the British occupation of Northern Ireland, and from the Soviet Union's own Afghanistan War - that invading and occupying a place in order to bring peace is not going to work.
Way too many Democrats and progressives fell for the militaristic argument in 2001. It's hard to see how it could have been otherwise. My act of protest wasn't ever going to end the war or change the mind of a nation. We can't turn back the clock and undo the damage.
But we can make sure we get it right going forward. In the years and decades to come, there will be other moments where the warmongers and militarists tell the American people we have no other choice but to go to war against this or that enemy. They'll have arguments that seem persuasive, and a media that's almost certain to do all it can to make the case for war - to make war seem inevitable, and to make opposition seem foolish and deluded.
We cannot let this happen again. And that's why it's so important to get the lessons of Afghanistan right. 9 times out of 10, a military solution is going to fail to solve the underlying problem. There are plenty of odious regimes still in power - in Zimbabwe, in Iran, in North Korea - but as we know from Afghanistan and Iraq, military force isn't going to solve those problems. All it'll do is replace it with a lot of dead people.
We were right to protest the Afghanistan War in September 2001. I hoped more people would have joined. But that's in the past now. I have every reason to hope - and to expect - that the next time our government tells us we have no choice but to go to war, or to escalate a war, and we realize that the war isn't really necessary at all, we will find effective ways to not just protest, but to organize and ensure that the war doesn't happen.
