Or consider Afghanistan, where we recently lost the 2000th U.S. service member. We've been at war in Afghanistan for over a decade, struggling to keep the Taliban at bay, build up a democratic government, eliminate corruption, and create an Afghan military capable of defending the population and disinclined to prey on it. All worthy aims -- and to achieve them, Presidents Bush and Obama let U.S. troop levels creep up over the course of eleven years, going from fewer than 10,000 in late 2002 to more than 30,000 in November 2008. By mid-2009, Obama had doubled that number. By mid-2010, he had tripled it. And although Obama's promised "civilian surge" never got very surge-like, we did substantially increase the number of U.S. civilian officials tasked to help with Afghan governance and development issues.
The result? Today the Afghan government remains corrupt, insecurity remains rampant, civilian deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the U.S. presence remain high, and a 2011 poll found that 76 percent of Afghans say they feel "some fear" or "a lot of fear" when encountering international coalition forces. If the Afghan population doesn't trust us much, we now trust them even less: green-on-blue attacks have spiked, killing more than 50 Americans so far this year. Meanwhile, the Taliban have decided they can't be bothered to negotiate with us, and as in Iraq, we're now limping ignominiously towards the exit.
What if the United States had done things differently? What if we had pummeled al Qaeda's strongholds, helped the Northern Alliance oust the Taliban, and then...left? If we had left early in 2002, we could have continued to strike al Qaeda targets of opportunity as needed, using special operations forces and aerial attacks; we could have used diplomacy and foreign aid to urge governance and human rights reforms. Perhaps there wouldn't have been many reforms. But would things really be any worse than they are today?
Here again, my point isn't that the war in Afghanistan was a mistake, or that our efforts in Afghanistan have fallen badly short, an argument that has been made often and persuasively. And I'm not arguing that we're now "less safe" than we used to be, or insufficiently "more safe" -- claims that have always struck me as hard to prove one way or the other. My point is that it has often been our best instincts, not our worst, that have led us to do harm in the world. In Afghanistan and Iraq, we spent billions of dollars and suffered thousands of U.S. casualties. Worst of all, we caused untold suffering for the very populations we so earnestly intended to help.
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I'm not suggesting that the United States is all idealism, all the time: we're capable of plenty of cynicism, and occasional acts of plain old evil. But even our most cynical moments are accompanied by idealism. We want to help, and we want to set things right. We want everyone to share in peace, justice, and the benefits of the American way -- even if it hurts.
And hurt it does. The United States and those we try to "help" are is often the victims of our own idealistic commitments to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.
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