Nearly 800,000 Americans served in Afghanistan. Of that number, 20,093 were wounded, and 2,218 died.
I’ve set forth before why I think we must stay the course in Afghanistan. But the thing that surprises and disappoints me about this bad decision coming from President Joe Biden, for whom I voted, is the terrible impact it will have on Afghan women.
On my first Afghan tour, I remember driving by the old Olympic stadium in Kabul. A more veteran service member told me that the Taliban had used it to stage public executions of women before cheering crowds of men. A favorite method was to take a woman accused of adultery or lesbianism, cut out part of her intestines, tie it to a donkey, and send the animal running around the track with the poor dying woman sprinting behind, eventually disemboweling her.
On my second Afghan tour, I remember going on a patrol in the Arghandab area of Kandahar. Our mission was to support a pop-up medical clinic run by female military doctors, nurses, and medics from the United States to treat Afghan women. Under the Taliban, women frequently died of preventable causes. That was partly because women were not allowed to be educated, and secondly, it was because women were not allowed to be seen unclothed by men outside of their families. Unless they unusually had a male doctor in their family, sick or injured women were left to their own devices, and in their desperation, they often resorted to ghastly, unrepeatable home remedies.
Of course, the Taliban put bombs on the roads leading to the clinic, which, thank God, were spotted by sharp-eyed infantrymen and rendered safe by brave explosive ordnance disposal technicians. In my mind’s eye, I can still see gutsy mothers and daughters literally coming over the hills to see a doctor for the first time in their lives.
Those trying to kill these innocent women are the evil and sadistic sociopaths we are negotiating with and are asked to trust. Nobody seriously thinks the government in Kabul will survive the withdrawal of U.S. forces. Everyone knows that the Taliban will quickly reestablish control over most of Afghanistan. The women and girls of Afghanistan will then suffer and die awful and cruel deaths. And the Taliban will, like Ozymandias, taunt us: “Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Abandoning the women of Afghanistan is especially incomprehensible coming from a party that boasts of the number of women serving it in high offices, from the vice president to the speaker of the House. To paraphrase Plutarch on Alexander, the U.S. feminist movement weeps, seeing as it has no more worlds to conquer. While the Democrats tie themselves in knots over the number of women in the Cabinet or appointed to the federal bench, literally and figuratively First World problems, they now cut loose defenseless and innocent women who, since 2001, placed their trust in us to go to school and learn to read, for example.
I cannot understand why a fundamentally compassionate and decent man such as Biden would not just allow this to happen but act to make it happen. Hope is not a method, as we were taught in the Army, and the wishful denial of an obvious consequence of a decision is no excuse. Biden and his national security team own what’s certain to come in the fall of 2021 and beyond.
Kevin Carroll served as the joint staff’s liaison to the XVIII Airborne Corps Leadership Targeting Cell in Bagram in 2003 and as a military case officer augmented to the 75th Ranger Regiment in Kandahar in 2010.
