Columbia Up And Left Kabul

World War I recruitment poster that shows Columbia holding a flag and a sword while standing on North America on top of a globe. 1916. Image from Library of Congress, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

It’s been two years since the chaos, confusion, and deaths surrounding the American and other allies withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Others will and have rehashed the two decades of US military involvement in that country. There was inevitably going to be a withdrawal, it happened, it did not go well. Lots of blame to go around for all three of those factors that converged into the debacle in Kabul. The now-seared images of American and British troops manning the perimeter barricades against people desperate to get out. Babies being handed over. Troops dying in bombings. The rush of people chasing a C-17 down the taxiway. The bodies falling down from the rising Globemaster. The very real danger that a bloodbath was going to break out at any minute.

Proud moment for Uncle Sam. Hail, Columbia, or something.

They don’t put moments like this on the recruiting ads for a reason. A century ago the posters would have Uncle Sam pointing and Columbia standing over the world imploring for whatever needed doing that that moment. The male and female personifications of the nation in all their perfect patriotic propaganda glory. Uncle Sam wants you…to try and bail him out of a bad situation of his own making without making him look bad. Oh, and try not to die, it’s bad optics, so if you do get killed try to make sure it isn’t on video.

Would make for a lousy poster.

The worst nightmare for troops is to be in a surrounded, exposed position and be overrun. That was all I could think of as it unfolded. Kabul’s airport is an absolute nightmare for operations of this type: a single runway in an urban environment with no good ways in or out surrounded by 5 million people who mostly don’t want you there. Which is why Bagram AB 60 km to the north was so vital, and it was so inexplicable to close and hand over that facility. With 20 years of improvements and designing specifically as a logistical hub, a decision that was not only inexcusable but maliciously incompetent. Everyone knowing you are leaving makes it worse. The haphazard, ill planned way we were leaving made it impossible for there not to be bloodshed and chaos.

All it would have taken is one trigger happy person with an RPG or worse to bring down one aircraft and that runway is done. Yet somehow the absolute worst never came. The deaths of US service personnel and civilians they were working with at the Abbey Gate was bad enough.

While the Afghans were chasing American aircraft across the airfield, I was doing live radio, guest hosting my friend’s morning radio program. The way the studio is set up, the screens with the news channels are across from you, so there’s no way not to see them. The entire wall behind you is a large American flag, both for the look of it, and much cheaper than drywall for a cash strapped radio company.

I doubt the show was any good for those three hours. If you listen back to that, you can hear me laughing strangely coming off the breaks. The reason for this is I was such a wreck that my producer, TK, was having to crack jokes and do stuff to distract and keep me going with his wide variety of stupid human tricks that aged hippie has at his disposal. Somehow, we got through the morning, some of the harder media duty I’ve done.

I feared the worst. I said so on the air. I’m glad I was mostly wrong. The coming days were very bad, but not the very worst. What a sad testimony that is, that so much of what has happened to the region and the people thereof can be covered by “very bad, but not the very worst.” Afghanistan has had centuries of that, the Afghan people seemingly going from bad to worse and back again. The British came and went, the Russians came and were driven out, the Americans came and botched it up, now the Chinese and others are coming for the rare earth minerals.

Time, and tides, and no man seems to learn a darn thing about Afghanistan.

Now two years gone from those horrible days of chaos and death and embarrassment at one of the great shambles in United States foreign policy history, we still can’t even get straight answers on any of it. Uncle Sam wants you, Columbia calls…then what? Mostly unaccountable government just lurches along undaunted and not learning from the mistakes as folks quickly move on to the next crisis, seems to be the answer.

Hail, Columbia the patriotic song was the predecessor to Hail To The Chief, and is now relegated to being the vice president’s pomp and circumstance walk out music. You know what the actual words are?

Hail Columbia, happy land!
Hail, ye heroes, heav’n-born band,
Who fought and bled in freedom’s cause,
And when the storm of war was gone
Enjoy’d the peace your valor won.

Easy enough to find trouble around the world and causes and people who need fought for. Not hard to find a recruiting office and sign up to go do something about all that. Many have volunteered for the fought and bled part. Didn’t get a lot of say as to which wars got fought but we went, even though our government tended to make a hash of it.

Where, exactly, do we go to get the peace to enjoy?

Or, failing that, maybe some straight answers as to what the hell happened and why?

Our great country has a government that really likes and thrives on silence and unanswered questions. Mostly because we tolerate it to be so. That’s who was in charge for the twenty years in Afghanistan and the horrible last days before Columbia up and left Kabul. Ask the folks at any VA medical center and they’ll let you in on the morbid joke of relying on the same system that was in charge of Kabul two years ago to also run your medical care now. Or you could ask the 11 Marines, Navy Corpsman, and soldier who were cut down with ball bearings from a suicide vest a terrorist in their midst detonated as they tried to help a surging mob of civilians in a canal.

But they won’t give you an answer.