Twenty Years
"Leaving hasn't made it any clearer, just harder to ignore."
Jessie Daniels checks in from the city where this all started, New York, where ending the war that 9/11 started means something different.
by Jessie Daniels
Along the Battery at the very southern tip of Manhattan, the idea of New York City fully takes shape: as the song goes, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. The air teems with the palpable feeling of unbridled possibility that has existed here across centuries. It's as vast as the harbor Henry Hudson sailed into in 1609 as he made his way up the river that now bears his name, as high as the twin towers that stood just due north, buildings that led Governor Nelson Rockefeller to declare at their 1973 dedication: “It’s not too often that we see a dream come true. Today, we have.”
We saw on September 11, 2001 how dreams also collapse, literally, floor upon floor into a pile of rubble. But also figuratively. Suddenly, an icon of the skyline was gone. New York – and, by proxy, America – the invincible, had been knocked down.
Broken dreams breed resentment, bitterness, and sometimes, retribution. And through the ash-filled air that choked with the taste of death, President Bush told us, the people who knocked down these buildings will hear all of us soon. So, united in vengeance, we went to war in Afghanistan.
For a short time, retribution was simple, and everyone was wild about the promise of an ever after with Hamid Karzai and his little hat and Western-style institutions in a faraway land. But what came after retribution wasn't so easy. Across four presidents, the bonds of American solidarity that once propelled us forward have frayed, as has the taste for fighting open-ended wars. In the two decades since, we've faced other pressing crises, including a financial crisis, a pandemic, another reckoning on race, and a growing authoritarian threat at home—crises that have forced us to grapple with who we are. And yet, Afghanistan, though subsumed, lingered on, improbabilities of its fall baked into the illusion of winning. We knew how to take it, we just didn't quite know how to leave it.
America is back, President Biden has told the world. But so too is the Taliban.
Now we are, and the chaos of the withdrawal has drawn comparisons to the American evacuation of Saigon in 1975. Vietnam, though, still animated the American consciousness then after more than a decade of war. But the idea of Afghanistan never fully took shape for many here. It was by fits and starts counterterrorism, counterinsurgency, nation-building, the good war, the forgotten war, the forever war, secret negotiations with terrorists, and then back again to the old “graveyard of empires" trope. Leaving hasn't made it any clearer, just harder to ignore.
A few months back, when the naysayers were predicting New York's demise from the pandemic, inspirational street art urged us to "Dream Until It's Your Reality." Despite the fatigue of war, many Afghans tried to do just that too, showing the courage to live for the dreams dangled before them. From those who helped our military to the women and girls who sought an education previously denied, the idea of what Afghanistan could be was always clear to them -- a transformed nation where they could be empowered and reach their potential. So we cringe in horror to see their idea of their country collapse in a New York minute. Watching the ability to dream this into reality fall out of their reach on the tarmac in Kabul takes a toll on all of us in its own way.
Meanwhile, as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11, traffic again flows north and south at a clip along the wide lanes of West Street—up which people once ran for their lives as the towers fell—past the Freedom Tower, built to replace them. It's taller than its predecessor, indicative of the myth of the city and its unbridled possibility. New York always comes back.
Little reignites dreams like the prospect of a comeback. It even reinvigorates our foreign policy after being mired in America alone. America is back, President Biden has told the world. But so too is the Taliban, a nightmare for many of the Afghans we inspired and who supported us. They know the threat of retribution simmers. Is there a comeback for them on the horizon? The answer may tell us just as much about the idea of America as it does about the idea of Afghanistan.
Jessie Daniels is a policy professional and writer based in New York. Daniels previously worked in the U.S. Senate as a national security legislative aide to Majority Leader Harry Reid. Daniels writes frequently on foreign policy and political issues. Her writing has been published in outlets including The Guardian, The Orlando Sentinel, and The San Francisco Chronicle. This is her third piece for The Experiment. Her previous contributions are last August’s “Roll Call Bracketology,” “What it Takes Now,” and “Dolley's Mandarinquat.”
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