Lessons Learned by Catholic America Twenty Years After 9/11

How can we define this historic moment in American history? We should have known better but the withdrawal from Afghanistan was instantaneously embraced as a happy ending to the longest American war. The war was imposed on the world twenty years ago, a cruel, insidiously calculated provocation by Afghan Muslim allies and by our own decennia-long political laziness, sustained by our systematic and dreadful misunderstanding of the world’s realities.

The fallen fighting for the freedom of Afghanistan will be remembered and prayed for, the wounded should be healed and helped to live. And yet, we have by the grace of our Lord no moral obligations neither to foreigners themselves, nor to their historical or religious stature, no responsibility for, or debts to pay to, our former enemies, no real remembrance to share with our kids of all those provincial military horrors lived through to the very end. Still, the usual ugly limits of our comprehension and of our alacrity should be investigated, reformed, and overcome in order to sustain our Christian dignity and our historical success. These are the topics of our present Catholic discussion. As Pope Francis said about the withdrawal from Afghanistan:

In historic moments like this one, we cannot remain indifferent; the history of the church teaches us this.

The Withdrawal

The United States Armed Forces completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan on 30 August 2021. The  Washington Post-ABC poll shows 77 percent of Americans say they support the decision to withdraw all U.S. forces. Support crosses party lines, with 88 percent of Democrats, 74 percent of Republicans, and 76 percent of independents aligned behind the decision.

However, before this date, on 15 August 2021, the Taliban seized the capital city of Kabul as the Afghan government under President Ashraf Ghani dissolved, the speed of which surprised the US government. This led to panic among Afghans who decided to leave their country with American soldiers, and their immense crowds on the airport of Kabul have been penetrated on 26 August by terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL-KP); at least 182 people were killed in the suicide bombing, including 169 Afghan civilians and 13 members of the United States military. Through a tweet of their spokesperson, the Taliban condemned the attack, saying “evil circles will be strictly stopped”. On the 27th of August, missiles were launched successfully by American retaliatory air and drone strikes.

The withdrawal disorder during the last week of August and the terrorist strike have produced a negative effect on Americans.  While approving the end of the war, the majority disapproved of President Joe Biden’s management. Biden has fiercely defended his decision to end the war, delivering a defiant speech the day after the last U.S. troops departed Afghanistan in which he took on his critics and called for an end to U.S. military intervention aimed at nation-building abroad. He has cast the recent evacuation as an ” extraordinary success”.

He also has cast blame on his predecessor, President Donald Trump, arguing that a deal the Trump administration struck with the Taliban in early 2020 had tied his hands and forced him to choose between getting out hurriedly or being forced to significantly increase the number of troops on the ground.

We certainly think that US President Biden is absolutely right. We admire his courage and determination to end the wrong American political tradition of “nation-building abroad”, which
in the Afghan case took 20 years but achieved nothing. Courage is needed to face serious unforeseen consequences of such an approach. The determination is needed to not succumb to the naive
political pressure on the current political leadership of the American public frustrated by long useless wars.

The final disorder at the Kabul airport is just a minor, negligible side-effect of the impetuous, immediate, definitive, undreamed-of fall of the Afghan “democratic nationhood”. The same nationhood with whom President Trump had the intention to discuss the future of Afghanistan after his successful discussion in 2020 with the Taliban.

The Fate of the Afghans

Today, one discusses the future of millions of Afghan refugees, learned, talented, peaceful, not
indoctrinated by most violent and restricted forms of Islam. Afghanistan is an ethnically complicated but religiously almost homogeneous nation of 38 million, that has been in a state of continuous war for more than 40 years.

Daniel Runde, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, who has written extensively on Afghanistan and has been working on international development issues for 20 years, is a Republican, an energetic optimist, and a compassionate Catholic conservative, with a deep faith in the Constitution. He suggested that Afghan society may have been irrevocably changed by the landscape altered by the now-departed Americans and Europeans: some 10 million girls attended school over the last 20 years, more than 25 million cellphones were disseminated, women reentered the workplace, and two of every three citizens are now under the age of 25 (Washington Post, September 3, 2021).

This is the really precious Christian outcome of the European and American interventions! Let us pray
that with time our Christian civilization, not necessarily explicitly defined as such, would heal and
organize this nation. Pope Francis asked people to pray with him:

to the God of peace so that the clamour of weapons might cease and solutions can be found at the table of dialogue.. . Only in this way, can the battered population of that country – men, women, elderly and children – return to their own homes, and live in peace and security, in total mutual respect.

Wars in the Middle East

Two different Islamic men have provoked the two longest military conflicts in American history: Saddam Hussein of Iraq, which started in 1991 and resumed from 2003 to 2011, and Osama bin Laden of Saudi Arabia, later of Afghanistan, from 2001 to 2021. Their (in the case of bin Laden, allied) armies were decisively confronted by the US military under the American presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Barak Obama. In the end, both men were found in hiding, in Iraq and Pakistan, to be executed by hanging and gunshot.

For decades, Saddam Hussein (1937-2006) successfully exploited the duplicity of the American and
European diplomacy — till the absurdity of his war against Kuwait. This was punished by the US
President George H. W. Bush in 1991, still leaving Hussein the owner of Iraq. However, 12 years later, the second President (George W.) Bush, apparently attempting to correct this last omission of his father, decided to invade, to fully restructure, and to direct Iraq starting 2003 — a serious, grave, and irreparable mistake concerning all Middle East countries.

Saint Pope John Paul II publicly condemned this military intervention, saying directly to George W. Bush:

Mr. President, you know my opinion about the war in Iraq…. Every violence, against one or a million, is a blasphemy addressed to the image and likeness of God.

In 1992 the US Defense Secretary during the war, Dick Cheney, future vice-president of George W.
Bush, made a similar but more down-to-earth point why Americans didn’t stay in Iraq after the victory of the Western Coalition in the war 1991 for the liberation of Kuwait:

I would guess if we had gone in there, we would still have forces in Baghdad today. We’d be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

The invasion in 2003 produced the falling of the Middle East, a “domino effect” — from Iraq to the
corruption of Liban, to the civil war in Syria, to militarist Iran, to the creation of the catastrophic Independent Islamic state, to the Russian control of Syria – local wars without end. Today, it is still a very dark perspective. Fortunately, President Barak Obama, in 2011, finally ended our full military presence in Iraq.

Still, the current, extremely dangerous situation of the Middle East is obscure and, including the Israeli-Arab-Iranian conflict, might become uncontrollable … Those are the traces of Saddam Hussein’s crimes and American powerful but blind military and diplomatic reactions during the 20 years 1991-2011.

Osama bin Laden’s Hatred of the West

And yet, Osama bin Laden (1957-2011), a devout Sunni Muslim, has been a much more personal, intelligent, and dangerous enemy of the United States than Hussein. Bin Laden had a peaceful upbringing in a rich Saudi family. He freely studied at the universities of Saudi Arabia and later in the United Kingdom, interested mostly in Islam, but also in the atmosphere of a frugal, faithful demeanor of very private, Islam-cultivated relationships. Other interests included writing poetry; reading, with
the works of Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and General Charles de Gaulle being among his favorites; black stallions; and association football, in which he enjoyed playing at center-forward and followed the English club Arsenal.

Bin Laden believed that the Islamic world was in crisis and that the complete restoration of Sharia law
would be the only way to set things right in the Muslim world. A major component of his ideology was the Islamic concept that civilians from enemy countries, including women and children, were legitimate targets for jihadists to kill.

Bin Laden criticized the US for its secular form of governance, calling upon Americans to convert to Islam and reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury, in a letter published in late 2002. His faith-inspired hate of America — not for what it is, but for what it’s doing — has manifested itself in the project that the United States is to be lured into a long war of attrition in Muslim countries, attracting large numbers of jihadists who would never surrender. In a 2004 tape broadcast by Al Jazeera, bin Laden spoke of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy” and that he wanted to “lure us into a long, long war”. He did that successfully in 2001, aided by his friends and helped by primitive, worthless political and religious instincts of our presidents and their collaborators. And yes, certainly we are bleeding now. Like many probably think, including the mob of Taliban, to the point of bankruptcy.

As a Christian Nation

It was more than enough to clarify the origins, nature, and intentions of our mortal enemies. They didn’t succeed in spite of the fact that we, as a Christian nation, did not reciprocally apply to them, the militant Muslims, their dominance and terror criteria: we (excluding some mistrusting self-lovers, such as Donald Trump) respect our compatriots and the results of our elections; we do not allow that civilians from enemy countries be targets to kill; and we respect liberty and independence of other countries, even without particular military force and their “nation-building”. In other words, we can make serious mistakes, but we are conscious of them and understand that we are always exposed to the judgment of our compatriots.

In fact, grace to our Lord, we have finally survived two brutal, merciless confrontations with Islam,
organized and fought by its most courageous, capable, inventive, belligerent followers. Other confrontations will evidently follow.

Lessons Learned

And yet, all this that has happened to us becomes clear, fruitful, and joyous lessons — external, internal, and spiritual: to teach us good Christian behavior toward our Lord, toward ourselves, and toward nations of a different faith, Islam in the first place. What lessons?

Our Afghan survival after our 20 years of “bleeding to the point of bankruptcy” in the traps of bin Laden, is not the result of our strategic or military merit or achievements. The Arab newspaper Aljazeera writes:

Since 2001, the United States has spent $2.26 trillion in Afghanistan, the Costs of War Project at Brown University calculates – an investment that has yielded a chaotic, humiliating end to America’s longest war.

It is a grace of God, which our nation has merited, we repeat, despite our brutality and our materialist
obsessions and not, we repeat, because of its economical, technological, military, scientific competencies. But because at the heart of our nation lives and flourishes the Christian faith, tout especially the Catholic liturgical, ascetic, and monastic tradition.

The Spectator columnist Cockburn writes:

Twenty years of war in Afghanistan are over. What comes next is 20 years, or even more, of recriminations and blame for why the war ended as it did.

Let us drop the blame and recrimination. Let us also refuse to accept Islam’s wisdom about the
“chaotic, humiliating end” of our war. Muslims don’t understand that our faith, our hopes, and our mistakes are coming from our Christian destiny. The prophet Jonah decided to run away from Yahweh when he was appealed by Him to go to Nineveh [the capital of an idolatry nation] and inform them “that their wickedness has become known to Me”, so now we, Europeans and Americans, formed during many centuries at the Christianity missionary schools, have recognized “their wickedness”.  We did and went to their terrorist camp, in Afghanistan but what for?

Cockburn asks (Spectator, August 19):

Did ‘gender studies’ lose Afghanistan? So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

This makes our America fully similar to Jonah: as he was swallowed by a great fish, three days and
three nights, for his refusal to think about, to pray to, and to hear God, so we were swallowed by Afghanistan for 20 years, exercising there among our battles the meaningless and most amoral exercises with believing intelligent Muslims, our potential friends, women, and men who have their own morality, more primitive than our Christian morality, but still more valuable than we proposed to them!

So, finally, we are out. And similar to Daniel Runde, from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, many professional, honest, and often good Christian Americans, men, and women, have a deep understanding of Afghan problems, are providing help and reception of new Afghan immigrants.  Let us try to understand what Americans can do for Afghanistan now to make it a friend.

During these 20 years, Taliban who have lived in Pakistan’s exile, have also received their lessons. Most
probably, America is the foreign country best prepared to create for Afghanistan necessary friendly conditions for their international, peaceful accommodation.

Always keeping in mind, that this is a believing nation: Moses is their prophet, Our Lady is the Mother
of Jesus, their messianic prophet. The specific Islamic brutalities can be neutralized: America is a good friend of several important Muslim nations. Sure, the problems will remain. But let us pray and act!