Attention to the Unseen

Michelle Goldberg writes: I’ll always remember Sept. 11 as something that happened in the evening. At the time I was living in a town in northern India, and I watched the towers fall on a TV someone had dragged into the street. Because I was so far away, I’ll never know the terror people in New York and Washington felt on that day, the fear that more attacks were coming, that the epic disaster movies so popular during the bored…

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Dylan Matthews writes: There have been no 9/11-scale terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 20 years. Meanwhile, according to the most recent estimates from Brown University’s Costs of War Project, at least 897,000 people around the world have died in violence that can be classified as part of the war on terror; at least 38 million people have been displaced due to these wars; and the effort has cost the US at least $5.8 trillion, not including…

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  The New York Times reports: It was the last known missile fired by the United States in its 20-year war in Afghanistan, and the military called it a “righteous strike” — a drone attack after hours of surveillance on Aug. 29 against a vehicle that American officials thought contained an ISIS bomb and posed an imminent threat to troops at Kabul’s airport. But a New York Times investigation of video evidence, along with interviews with more than a dozen…

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The Guardian reports: The men of Zangabad village, Panjwai district lined up on the eve of 11 September to count and remember their dead, the dozens of relatives who they say were killed at the hands of the foreign forces that first appeared in their midst nearly 20 years ago. Their cluster of mud houses, fields and pomegranate orchards was the site of perhaps the most notorious massacre of the war, when US SSgt Robert Bales walked out of a…

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Garrett M. Graff writes: On the Friday after 9/11, President George W. Bush visited the New York City site that the world would come to know as Ground Zero. After rescue workers shouted that they couldn’t hear him as he spoke to them through a bullhorn, he turned toward them and ad-libbed. “I can hear you,” he shouted. “The whole world hears you, and when we find these people who knocked these buildings down, they’ll hear all of us soon.”…

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Yaroslav Trofimov reports: Clad in body armor and helmets, Uzbekistan’s border guards took positions in the middle of the bridge spanning the wide Amu Darya river on Monday morning, examining the papers of a handful of Afghans coming their way. Beyond them, the Taliban’s new Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan began. A small minivan, carrying me and three Afghan men heading home, pulled up by the customs office on the Afghan side of the river. A white Taliban flag flew above…

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Anand Gopal writes: Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war…

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Faisal Devji writes: Most accounts of the Taliban’s emergence in the 1990s attribute it to a Saudi-funded and Pakistani-led project. Its aim was to create an Islamic state in Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal, one that would keep Iran at bay for the Saudis and India for the Pakistanis. This was necessary because the mujahedeen, who had routed the Soviets with help from the United States, were too riven by internecine quarrels to form a government. But the Taliban were…

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RFE/RL reports: Hundreds of Afghans stand along dusty roadsides in the capital, Kabul, desperately trying to sell their meager possessions. Many offer used pots, plates, and cups that are piled up on bedsheets. Others sell tattered mattresses and old rugs or hope someone will buy their television or refrigerator. “There are no jobs and we don’t have any money,” says Haji Aziz, an unemployed cook who stands by a heap of kitchen utensils for sale along a busy road in…

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CNN reports: Stephen Miller seemed floored by the idea, raised during a fall Cabinet meeting in 2018, of  keeping open the doors for Afghan allies and other Middle East refugees to enter the US.  “What do you guys want?” Miller, then a top adviser to President Donald Trump, asked incredulously, according to one person in the room. “A bunch of Iraqs and ‘Stans across the country?” His words stunned many in the meeting, but they were no accident. Under Miller’s guidance, several…

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Jeff Greenfield writes: Much of the commentary on Biden’s speech today will focus on his defense of the Afghanistan withdrawal strategy — his celebration of the U.S. military’s mass evacuations and whether his promise to get those left behind has the ring of plausibility. But perhaps more significant for American politics is that Biden seems to be embracing a belief now shared across ideological lines: America’s international role has been an exercise in overreach. For more than a decade, in…

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NBC News reports: More than 120,000 people of all nationalities were evacuated from the Kabul airport as the U.S. military withdrew, but initial figures suggest that only about 8,500 of those who left Afghanistan in recent months were Afghans, according to numbers released by the Biden administration and estimates from advocates. That is a small percentage of the tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government or U.S. organizations and applied for special U.S. visas, and an…

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