By MacKenZie Rumage
Air Force Airman Holding Refugee Child in Dar Ul Aman, Kabul by Cecilio M. Ricardo Jr., April 8, 2007 via Flickr
On Saturday, March 1, the United States and the Taliban signed a peace deal after a week-long semi-cease fire and months of negotiations. The peace deal comes after President Donald Trump tweeted that he had called off secret negotiations in September between the United States, the Taliban and President Ghani of Afghanistan. Trump wrote that the reason was because the Taliban admitted to killing an American service member and eleven other people. The cancellation caused widespread controversy for multiple reasons, from Trump’s reasoning to what the actual deal would have resulted in. The peace deals look similar, with a full withdrawal of American troops within fourteen months — a withdrawal that is dependent on a guarantee from the Taliban that they will start negotiations with the Afghan government and no terrorist action against the United States will be taken on Afghan soil. However, not everyone is excited about the peace deal.
How did the ‘Forever War’ become so forgettable?
Our relationship with the media renders the war even less relevant. Both F. and P. said they check the news semi-regularly, and check news on the war in Afghanistan even less. Neither of them study anything related to International Relations or the Middle East, and neither of them have a loved one serving in the military. In fact, very few Americans have served in Afghanistan compared to the number of service members who fought in previous American wars.
The other reason why the war is still prevalent is why it has always been prevalent: because civilians have suffered since we invaded in 2001. Eighteen years is a long time to be at war, and a long time for a people to live in a war zone. According to Brown University’s Watson Institute of International and Public Affairs, about 43,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan since 2001 and over 300,000 civilians have died ‘violent deaths’ as direct results of the War on Terror. In 2018, Reuters reported that over one thousand children were killed from January to June of that year. When I gave these numbers to P., his jaw dropped, as had mine. None of us knew the true scale of the problem.
And yet, these numbers are just that — numbers. The war in Afghanistan has been reduced to them: the number of casualties, the number of bombs dropped, the amount spent by the American military. As powerful as those numbers can be, they can only tell us so much about actual experiences of the war and the lives of Afghan civilians. In a twenty-four-hour news cycle like America’s, where are the stories about the civilians who have endured generations of occupation and war, from the British to the Soviets to the Americans?
In a 2019 piece for The New Yorker, Luke Mogelson wrote about specifically about the many civilians who faced the consequences of American military decision-making on a daily basis. He told the story of a man who tried to convince his brother to flee violence between ISIS and the Taliban with him. His brother refused, and his execution was the first of ten shown later in an ISIS video. Mogelson writes that if a peace plan does not work and current trends continue, ‘within a decade, hundreds of thousands more Afghans could die.’ In a war that the American public struggles to remember and the government struggles to end, the Afghan civilians are truly the ones who are forgotten.
Protocol Magazine 