Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
Print Edition

Only a matter of time

Never in my lifetime have I seen such dramatic national scenes of such painful desperation. Not that I am comparing the politics (although there’s food for thought there), but it was like going back in time and glimpsing an echo of some of the desperation and trauma my great-grandparents and their families endured under Nazism.

That photo of human beings desperately clinging to the wings of a moving airplane, falling to their deaths — anything! just so as not to fall into the clutches of the evil Taliban. Anything, even death or suicide, just to avoid the bitter fate and destiny of living under that regime. It’s too much to bear.

It was as if Khaled Hosseini’s magnificent yet heartrending storytelling in The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns came to be real life. Because, tragically, it did.

That breathtaking betrayal and miscalculation within this still evolving story — heartbreaking.

To think, the upcoming 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack on American soil, perpetrated by al-Qaida terrorists, is just mere weeks away — and now it these haunting scenes from Afghanistan that will be imprinted 20 years from now, inextricably be linked to the upcoming 20th anniversary of 9/11. It will be marked with the Taliban having just swept through Afghanistan, reinstated in power at lightening speed.

You just knew, intuitively, the second you glimpsed these scenes of pandemonium that you were witnessing a seismic historic shift. Something was had gone terribly wrong.

The Afghani humanitarian crisis has been birthed. Callous abandonment of people to a terrorist regime that is hungry for their blood. Women whose lives now hang in the balance, simply by virtue of being women.

The “moral injury” for America, that former veteran and founder of No One Left Behind Mark Zeller poignantly spoke of — along with his other very powerful statements and testimonies on behalf of the Afghan people.

The wisdom of Richard Kemp, former British commander: “Biden has condemned the United States to strategic irrelevance.”

And with that, there comes the niggling fear that follows, the question about global leadership and its shifting center of gravity,the prayer that the levers of power in China and Russia are not lighting up.

This story is not about whether America should or should not have left Afghanistan. Even for those who say that that America could not have left a day too soon, this is a story is about the how of the departure, a epic historic failure by America.

Ultimately, the ones whose lives have changed overnight, the ones who are unlucky enough to be left to with contending with this horrible tragedy, are the Afghan people.

In life, how one chooses to walk away, how one navigates a departure, is one of life’s thorniest cross over moments. Without wisdom in how one chooses to leave, terrible and unintended consequences can emerge.

America was in Afghanistan for two decades. This is a generation. American and Afghani lives became intertwined. Given the stakes at hand, given that America’s presence had succeeded in keeping the Taliban at bay, an exodus from Afghanistan demanded above all: time. Time for a proper transition. Time for caution, for realism.

No doubt, any method America would have chosen would have been a fraught passage. This horror, this departure, this method, however, is not the stuff of the normal range of complexities. For 20 years, Afghanistan’s military was side by side with Americans. However effective or ineffective, the same team was fighting the Taliban. Good vs. evil. Rarely are things in life so black and white.

Yet now, many Afghanis’ fate seems to be sealed. They know the Taliban is coming for them, especially those who collaborated with America.

Words fail.

This tragedy is Afghanistan’s tragedy. At the same time, it is the whole world’ tragedy in the sense that first and foremost we must as a human family care about the troubles of one another. Also, pragmatically, Afghanistan’s Taliban can emerge as a powerful terrorist state, like Iran.

This mess, this rush, this abandonment absent any plan, is a cautionary tale for Israel, too.

Every single day that passes, every hour and every minute that is a normal day in Israel, Israelis have the luxury of discussing policy about the terrorists that surround Israel because the IDF is keeping the terrorists at bay, protecting them from seizing control of Israel — which they want to do just like the stunning, swift takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban.

Taliban bided its time for 20 years, but never abandoned its mission. You think Hamas or Hezbollah is any different?

Leave Gaza? Abandon the West Bank? — the scenes from Afghanistan are the preview of what that, G-d forbid, would look like.

Unless there is a war in Israel, my Facebook page is usually on radio silence. But when there’s conflict in Israel, my page is awakened and I post in support of Israel defending herself.

One of my comments-status updates during the recent Hamas rocket assault on Israel was:

“Siding with Hamas only emboldens terrorists. You think treacherous Hezbollah isn’t watching? You can be sure these terrorists are all smugly smiling to themselves . . . how easily the masses have swallowed [their antic of using Gazans lives as pawns].”

I might as well have written “Taliban” instead of “Hezbollah.” All terrorists took notice.

The only ones who stand to benefit from how America left Afghanistan are terrorists and future terrorists states.

I can’t escape the terrible feeling that my country, the United States of America, let down innocent good people and are sending them to a terrible fate. It’s haunting because it feels that it was, at least to a degree, preventable.

With the Taliban now in power, the wound is on the people of Afghanistan, but this wound will haunt those in the West and our democratic values and way of life. 

This week in August of 2021 might unfortunately be pointed to as a time when something significant was set into motion — sort of like August, 1914 — with price in blood we don’t yet know, yet a price that seems to be only a matter of time.

Copyright © 2021 by the Intermountain Jewish News



Tehilla Goldberg

IJN columnist | View from Central Park


Leave a Reply