REMEMBERING POST-9-11. I'm going to eschew the 9-11 remembrance motif that's flitting through the blogosphere. Like all Americans, I found the day to be wrenching and horrific, the experience hallucinatory and unsettling. But I lived all the way out in California -- indeed, in the very same town where Duncan noticed a curious detachment from the event -- and to pretend that I can even start to understand the agony it caused those who were immediately affected would be nothing more than an opportunistic attempt to use a national tragedy to enhance my own moral credibility. So I won't. I'll leave that to those who were there and who have more of a right to eulogize than I. That said, the political aftermath of 9-11, the reprisals conducted in the name of America, belong to us all. I've only ever felt the Afghanistan War to be a legitimate response to the hijackings. The Iraq War was falsely sold under the same rubric, but Hussein, as the Senate Intelligence Committee recently reaffirmed, was not involved, and we knew that well before launching the war against Iraq. Our leaders betrayed the country and the memory of those who died by warping 9-11 into a talking point for a war they wanted to conduct for unrelated reasons. As for Afghanistan, while Iraq has distracted us from the "War on Terror," it's really forced coverage of Afghanistan onto the backburner -- which is why so few probably know that the country is deteriorating rapidly, governors are being murdered by suicide bombers, the Taliban is resurgent, and NATO is begging for more troops to support renewed offensives. Among the most convincing, and most depressing, analyses of the country comes from Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's bin Laden unit. Writing in The American Interest, he argues that pacifying Afghanistan is a historically insurmountable task, and reworking it into any form that Americans could find agreeable is a demographic impossibility. It is already lost. Worse yet, we subcontracted out the capture of bin Laden to Afghani warriors who never intended to capture him in the first place. So they arrived, purposefully, a day late at Tora Bora, and bin Laden remains at large. As I said above: Afghanistan was the legitimate reply to 9-11. And we have failed. Whether the War on Terror is nearing victory or not, the war on 9-11 has stalled. America seemed to me, while growing up, nearly invincible. September 11 scarcely changed that: Even the toughest warrior can get sucker-punched. But everything we did after 9-11 worked to slowly and totally undermine the myth of our country's power. Five years ago, we were attacked. But the real damage happened when we responded.
--Ezra Klein
