The following article was written by Ryan Brahmstadt, a veteran of Operation Enduring Freedom.
One year ago, I was riddled with emotions, none of which I had felt before.
I was watching from the comfort of my couch as thousands of Afghan citizens clung to airplanes as they tried to flee the country during the exfiltration of American troops.
As I watched, my mind went to the dozens of children I interacted with while serving in Operation Enduring Freedom in 2010 and 2011.
Were they a part of these crowds of people?
Now, a year later, I see reports of what is happening to the people we as a country left behind, and my skin crawls.
We are supposed to be the good guys.
We are supposed to be the saviors of the less fortunate, but instead, we left, and are now ignoring the plight of the people we abandoned.
As John Oliver put it in his breakdown of the situation on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, “It’s pretty disheartening to see our official foreign policy boil down to ‘Sorry champ, can’t win them all’, especially when the U.S. is so directly responsible for so many problems in Afghanistan.”
In that episode, Oliver broke down every aspect of what is going wrong, most of which I was not aware of due to the lack of significant coverage by much of the mainstream media.
If you have time, I would suggest watching the video (which is posted below), so you can also understand exactly how bad things are for the 38 million Afghanis that are once again under Taliban rule.
We as a country need to be better.
