Eight years after the Sept. 11 terrorist strikes, the United States has a new president and a Congress dominated by Democrats, but the vexing problems that followed the attacks — how to stifle al-Qaida, what to do with the men rounded up as part of the war on terror and how to wind down the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — remain unresolved. To truly honor those who died on Sept. 11, 2001, these questions should return to center stage and be answered in a way that recognizes what the U.S. can and cannot accomplish.
The war in Afghanistan, which was long overshadowed by military operations in Iraq, has recently returned to the headlines as violence has escalated and the Taliban, which the U.S. believed was allowing refuge to Osama bin Laden, has gained strength. A recent report by the top American general in Afghanistan painted a dim picture and Gen. Stanley McChrystal is expected to ask that more U.S. troops be sent there. There will be 68,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the year.
His request is likely to be met with skepticism in Congress. What is needed, Sen. Susan Collins wrote in her blog shortly after returning from Afghanistan last month, are “surges of Afghan troops and of American civilian employees.” Without more civilians to build needed government, legal and economic systems, the work of U.S. Marines — “who battle the Taliban village by village, freeing these communities from repression and fear” — can’t succeed, wrote Sen. Collins, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The building of civic infrastructure is complicated by rampant corruption and the country’s reliance on the drug trade for revenue. Widespread reports of corruption in recent national elections highlight the fragility of Afghanistan’s democratic reforms.
In Iraq, the picture is brighter but problems remain. After an increase in the number of troops and a change in leadership — and strategy — violence decreased markedly. U.S. troops have withdrawn from the cities and more authority has been handed over to the Iraqi military and government. Bombings and other violent attacks, however, remain too frequent.
U.S. combat personnel are to leave Iraq within a year, but up to 50,000 may remain as advisers. That is too many and for too long, conservative commentator George Will recently wrote.
“After almost 6½ years, and 4,327 American dead and 31,483 wounded, with a war spiraling downward in Afghanistan, it would be indefensible for the U.S. military — overextended and in need of materiel repair and mental recuperation — to loiter in Iraq to improve the instincts of corrupt elites,” he wrote in a column that appeared in the Sept. 5 Bangor Daily News.
While Attorney General Eric Holder has launched an investigation of possible CIA interrogation abuses shortly after Sept. 11 — against the advice of President Barack Obama — the terrorism detainees held in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba remain in limbo. Despite pledges from the president to close the facility, no state or country has agreed to take the prisoners.
With an overstretched military still involved in two wars and the legacy of interrogation and detention of terrorism suspects unresolved, remembrances of the Sept. 11 attacks will indeed be somber.