I served in Afghanistan. Leaving now is a tragic failure.

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US failed the Afghan people

I spent a year living in an Afghan police station, one that has now been overrun. As a Marine colonel I was the provincial police advisor for Helmand Province, Dec. 2012 to Dec. 2013. Nine Marines and I lived in the Lashkar Gah station.

I’m a Naval Academy graduate, a 30-year Marine, and a Raleigh native. The idea of “forever wars” doesn’t hold water with me. The U.S. has been in Germany since 1945 and Korea since 1950. We should not have withdrawn all troops from Afghanistan.

More than 3,500 servicemen and women were holding the line in Afghanistan, providing backbone to the Afghan National Security Force — until they were pulled by President Biden. Yes, withdrawing was also a position pushed by President Trump.

I’m no neocon. I actually had blood in the game — three wars in the service of my country. I served four years of my adult life overseas, leaving my wife and children behind.

In leaving Afghanistan, the U.S. gave up modern airfields on the borders of Iran and China. We left the Taliban to create a new Islamic caliphate. — and we did it all on the nonexistent basis of avoiding a “forever war.”

Our leaders are amateurs. We are about to witness one of the great humanitarian disasters of our time, followed by the greatest concentration of Islamist terrorists from across the globe.

I got a call from one of my interpreters on Sunday. He’s safely in the U.S., but his parents, wife, brothers and sisters are all stuck in Kabul. His father was Afghan National Army, and he’s worried his sisters and wife are “of age” to be Taliban trophy brides. They’re trying to get to Kabul International Airport but are blocked by Taliban checkpoints.

There are a thousand more tragic stories like this.

In hindsight it should be clear that 3,500 American fighting men and women, operating in a risk-managed environment and providing for our national security, was a very minimal investment.

Douglas Mason, Union Grove

The US can’t control the world

The writer is a retired theologian and Episcopal priest.

The image of a helicopter lifting up from Saigon in 1975 is etched into my memory. I was 30 when the Vietnam War ended. Almost a half-century later, this American generation of Vietnam warriors and protesters is now in its 70s and 80s, witnessing another horrific debacle of American foreign policy run amok.

I don’t blame Biden, Trump, Obama, or Bush for the debacle, not personally. I blame our nation’s collective dependence on the war machine, a dependence cultivated by both political parties and supported by most Christian leaders. We are born into believing fighting solves problems; that war or the threat of war can subdue enemies. We learn to depend on the build-up of the military to make Americans proud and to tackle problems around the world — with guns, bombs, bravado.

How naïve I must sound – a 76 year old white woman, educator, religious leader. I have heard it for 50 years. I have too much faith in human goodness; too little hatred of the really bad guys, the men who would slit my throat before they spat on my corpse, a lesbian.

What does it profit Americans to imagine that we can bring the whole world under our control at the expense of our own moral moorings? Does it not make more sense morally, spiritually, and politically to make justice with compassion here at home, in the USA, and do our best to transport throughout the earth our commitments to feeding hungry people, caring for the sick and wounded, respecting our planet, collectively coming together to defeat COVID, and sharing other humanitarian projects with our global community?

In this spirit, I would tell President Biden that our only moral obligation in this moment is to stay in Afghanistan long enough — days, weeks, months — to help every person who has stood with our forces. We should get ready to welcome them with open arms into the USA.

Don’t tell me I don’t understand, that it’s too complicated. Because I do understand, and because together we, the American people, can figure out how to practice the love we preach.

The Rev. Carter Heyward, Cedar Mountain

This story was originally published August 16, 2021 at 3:47 PM.