Melissa Harris-Perry: Hi, everybody. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry, and this is The Takeaway. On Monday, the United States finished the evacuation process for troops in Afghanistan one day ahead of the August 31 deadline set by President Biden. Since October of 2001, 800,000 US servicemembers have served there. More than 20,000 have been wounded and somewhere between 2,300 and 2,500 US military members have lost their lives in Afghanistan, including 13 lost in the bombing at Kabul airport last week. The Taliban is now in power.
I want to turn to our veterans to begin to understand how at least some of them are feeling about this moment. Joining me today to discuss how our military veterans are coping on this last day of US troop withdrawal from Afghanistan is Tim Kudo, Marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim, thank you for being here.
Tim Kudo: Thank you for having me.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Your recent op-ed in the New York Times is entitled I Was a Marine in Afghanistan, and We Sacrificed Lives for a Lie. Can you tell me if you can, what you mean by that, especially in this moment?
Tim Kudo: I think for 20 years, we were sold [unintelligible 00:01:06] goods in Afghanistan as to what we could accomplish there. That was presidents of both parties, first, George Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and finally now, President Biden ending the war. During those times where we were continuing the war, escalating it, particularly the Obama surge, there was a belief sold to us that we could achieve the goals of nation-building of creating a stable democracy there of training the Afghan security forces to repel the Taliban once we leave. There's a whole narrative that all the generals in charge, all the presidents took their advice and accepted it.
Ultimately, we found out that they didn't believe themselves through reporting in the Washington Post about the Afghanistan papers. To realize that soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines were just sent over there thousands, and thousands and thousands of them to get injured and killed for something that nobody in charge really believed could be one was incredibly dispiriting. I think we've seen in the end, particularly in the past few weeks, the rapid takeover of the country by the Taliban, just how fraudulent a lot of those lies were.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Dispiriting is a very understated word to use in this moment, and I appreciate that. I'm also wondering what the long-term consequences might be already in a nation where so many don't trust our systems, our structures, to feel that, particularly in this moment, in this space, the one thing your country should only ask you to do and be honest with you about that, maybe there's a reason to distrust again, both parties on this question.
Tim Kudo: I think it's deeper than parties, though. I think there is an issue with the kind of trust that the American citizens give to people in uniform. Obviously, the American military has been one of the most trusted institutions in the United States for the past 10, 20 years, particularly during this time of war. The fact is that many of those generals put on those uniforms, went to Congress, and lied to the American people about what they were seeing on the ground about their own personal beliefs about the ability to win the war.
Then, likewise, the powers of the presidency, cloth them in a sense of trust, when they stand there in front of the White House or in the Oval Office, and they tell you, "Look, we're going to war, this is what we're doing, this is why it's important." I think people are inclined to give all presidents the benefit of doubt. The reality is that not only did they lie about a lot of these things, but they also were incredibly incompetent in their execution of the lies that they were trying to sell us on to.
When we went over there to train the Afghan army, they put numbers on the board, and they got the Afghan army and police up to 300,000 people, and that vanished overnight. Clearly, there is just a Ponzi scheme going on, and when the cards fell the whole thing came tumbling down. That's mixed metaphors. I think this is the issue here is that, ultimately, the American people think that our military particularly can solve almost any problem. It's "the greatest military in the world, most powerful military in the world." In fact, it has incredibly limited use. It can accomplish very small tactical objectives, it can win battles, but it cannot transform a country, and it was a lie to believe that it could in the first place.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Tim, pause with me for just a moment. This is The Takeaway, we'll be right back. Back on The Takeaway, I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking about the effect of the withdrawal from Afghanistan and how that's being received by our military veterans. With me once again is Tim Kudo, a marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. Tim, I'm deeply interested in the point you were making as we took our break. Rather than labeling our military simply a failure, I think it's so important that we were framing that. What is it that we can achieve with our military?
Tim Kudo: It's a good question. Certainly, counterinsurgency which is what we attempted to do in both Iraq and Afghanistan, with limited effects may be too much for the American military given how it's trained and equipped now in the priorities given to it to achieve. Certainly, we can conduct a massive airlift at an airport to get more than 100,000 Afghans and American civilians out of a dangerous country with loss of life, but minimal loss of life.
That's the reality of all war, there's going to be casualties, there's going to be people killed. We should accept that that's going to happen when we use our military in any way, and try to minimize it with everything in our power. I think the American military is geared towards high-scale, high-intensity conflict with other great powers going against tanks, and armored divisions, and things of that nature. The type of wars that we're fighting, particularly in the Middle East and Africa aren't those kinds of wars.
Even when we rely on special forces to do the surgical strikes that I think a lot of Americans become used to and just accept is an endemic part of American killing abroad, even then we see that there's regularly serious issues with violations of the law of war, civilian deaths. We need to start looking beyond the military as a solution towards these problems and take a much more all-of-government approach. I hope that as we transition away from the global war on terror, that we accept the problems are not just military problems to be solved but are actually all government's problems.
Melissa Harris-Perry: I'm wondering if you have a sense that maybe the American people through the American media could have behaved in different ways over the course of the past 20 years? It's interesting to me that you talk about the withdrawal as something that was actually done well, relatively limited loss of life, swift getting folks out. Of course, it doesn't necessarily feel like that was done well because for once in about two decades, we've been focused very, very clearly on what is happening in Afghanistan. Should we have been paying more attention all along?
Tim Kudo: Yes. I think there's been a tremendous skew in media coverage, both in terms of what's emphasized and what's given prioritization, which obviously, the past week was given enormous media coverage across almost every outlet, and station, and paper. The problem with that is that what you've seen is just what's been going on in Afghanistan for 20 years. The same Marines, sailors, airmen, soldiers getting killed, bombs going off, suicide vests, retaliations with drone strikes where large numbers of Afghan civilians are killed. That was just the steady-state of the Afghanistan war for many, many years.
For civilians to turn into the back-end and be outraged, and morning at the Marine Corps Memorial in DC, and they can't believe what's going on here, it's like, you should have just read page A10 of your paper every day for the past 20 years, and you would have seen this just constantly. I think for veterans like me, who realized that as Americans basically tuned out, they, in large part delegated that responsibility to the Presidents and the generals who I have said have mismanaged this war, and so there's a huge burden that should fall on the American civilian, for basically not caring at all about what was happening in Afghanistan until now.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Is there a way that you can imagine as we move forward, being able to direct the American civilian attention more clearly so that we are responsive and responsible to our service members who are, after all, doing this work on our behalf?
Tim Kudo: Yes. I think there's two ways. The first is our connection to Afghanistan doesn't end just because of military withdrawal. There's still going to be a long permanent commitment to that country and to its people. I think that would be a good thing and that's something that the media should really focus on. I also think that as we go forward, there will be another war somewhere at some time with some new generation. We have to go back as well to the lessons of 2001 when after the attacks of 9/11 people were terrified, people were afraid, and there was just enormous consensus that we should go to war.
Even in the House that voted for the war resolution, only a single rep representative Barbara Lee opposed it. I think part of that was because when these events happen, as we've seen in the past week with withdrawal, the media, which shapes the public opinion can become very, very pro-war, whether, through conscious bias or unconscious bias, I don't entirely know. We should be aware of that that we need to create space for diversity of opinions on issues of war and peace.
Melissa Harris-Perry: Tim Kudo, a marine veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, thank you for joining us today.
Tim Kudo: Thank you very much.
Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.
New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.
