It's pretty much like you would imagine it, and not terribly complicated, but it's still interesting to see it in raw form. An assortment of armed Taliban fighters stand guard in strategically arranged positions while Bowe Bergdahl sits in the cab of a white pickup truck and waits. Then you see the American helicopter approaching. Once it lands, three civilian-clad westerners emerge, collect the prisoner and leave:
For some reason I was surprised that they shook hands. I don't know why. I guess they had made a deal so that's what you do, but for whatever reason I have it in mind that maybe radical Islamists use some sort of different sign. Maybe a throat slash. I guess Bergdahl can tell them all about that now.
More broadly, watching this sort of makes my heart sink wondering what we really achieved over the course of 12-plus years in Afghanistan. Just about everyone supported the initial excursion to a) remove the Taliban from power as the price for hosting Al Qaeda and harboring Bin Laden; and b) teach them the lesson they would never forget for messing with the United States.
After that? The War on Terror was presented as a global effort that would seek and destroy major terrorist organizations wherever they were. It would be a different kind of war because the enemy would not be a single country or a single army. We might be fighting ad hoc groups spread across mulitiple locations, which was the reason we needed to conscript so many other nations (remember when Pakistan was grudgingly on our side?) to the effort, but no matter, we would have to go and find them where they were and take them out.
Yet the Afghanistan effort settled in over the long term as a pretty conventional effort in the sense that it was all about achieving strategic control of that one nation, that one government, that one geographic area. And in the context of the original War on Terror concept, that never made sense to me. I'm all about preventing Afghanistan from being used as a training and staging ground for terrorist attacks, but even if we could do that, what was our strategy for preventing the terrorists from operating in the rest of the region - or the world for that matter? I'm not saying we didn't have one at all - I'm sure we do - I'm just saying I don't understand why we spent 12 years battling for operational control of this one country in the broader context of the effort.
And when you watch this video and see the Taliban looking very much in control of the situation, can you say we really accomplished even that?
Plus: With Obama seemingly content to leave Afghanistan without even a Status of Forces type presence by 2016, how does anyone think these thugs are going to be prevented from returning to complete control of the country?
Democrats held out Afghanistan as the good war because "that's who attacked us on 9/11," as if it only makes sense to fight a battle against someone who has already dealt a blow to you. Of course, this stance was really just a way to destroy the legitimacy of the Iraq War when that was a political imperative for Democrats. But even if you buy the whole "good war" thing, how many would have been pleased to know that 12 years later we would simply abandon it without the Taliban destroyed, without the country's stability secured and without any reason to think Afghanistan will not once again be a training and staging ground for terrorists?
So what did we accomplish in Afghanistan? Aside from the actual killing of whatever terrorists we did manage to take out in the effort, I have no idea.
