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United States troops are now pulling out of Afghanistan, bringing to a close America’s longest war. U.S. intelligence predicts that the Taliban will take over the country within six months, returning the country to much way we found it when we invaded following the 9/11 attacks. Since 2001, the Global War on Terror in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan has resulted in the deaths of 800,000 people, including 7,000 Americans, while spawning terror groups including ISIS and other jihadi organizations.
“We’ve had a bipartisan penchant for militarism, and it hasn’t worked,” argues Andrew Bacevich, a Vietnam veteran and leading foreign policy critic. “If all these interventions resulted in a more secure and prosperous United States of America, an international order that was more peaceful, more prosperous, I would say, well, maybe militarism works,” he says on The Vermont Conversation. “But that hasn’t been the case. The consequences have been strikingly negative. Estimates of total U.S. expenditures since 9/11 are something on the order of $7 trillion. For what? And let’s not talk about the numbers [of people] killed. It’s been a catastrophe.”
America’s endless wars have been justified by the often-repeated assertion of its leaders that we alone can solve the world’s problems, our causes are always righteous, and when things go wrong, well, it wasn’t our fault. As Dick Cheney famously reassured us in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, “We will be greeted as liberators.” Nearly two decades later, American troops are still dying in Iraq.
Bacevich calls for NATO to be disbanded and for the U.S. to pursue a strategy of “sustainable self-sufficiency.” He writes: “Rather than relentlessly pursuing a way of life based on consumption and waste, it means taking seriously a collective obligation to bequeath a livable planet to future generations. It means embracing some version of the proposed Green New Deal… [This] just might enable a government accustomed to squandering lives and dollars to become a government that nurtures and preserves.”
Bacevich is a regular guest analyst on network and cable news and a frequent contributor to The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the American Conservative. He is a graduate of West Point, served 23 years in the U.S. Army and is a professor emeritus of history and international relations at Boston University. Bacevich is president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. His new book is After the Apocalypse: America’s Role in a World Transformed.
