Yesterday, I am reminded of the morning of 11 September 2001, when I was attending military training at a university where mobilization was being held.
The principal, who was making a mobilization speech, suddenly put down his manuscript and said loudly: The United States mainland has been attacked.
The students cheered and applauded.
Later, after watching the news, I learned that that morning, the World Trade Center One and the World Trade Center Two in New York were hit by two civilian airliners hijacked by terrorists and collapsed one after another after being attacked; Another hijacked airliner crashed into the U.S. Department of Defense Pentagon in Washington, USA, where local structures were damaged and collapsed.
The organization of military training that year went very smoothly, as if the students and instructors were affected by this big event.
After a month of military training, on October 7, which had not yet ended, President George W. Bush announced the beginning of a military offensive against Afghanistan.
Image from the Internet
No one expected that this war would be fought for 17 years and withdrawn for 3 years.
Exactly 20 years later, on August 15, 2021, the United States and NATO withdrew from Afghanistan in a hurry.
The Afghan Taliban returned to power.
As a result of the war, more than 30,000 Afghan civilians have died in the fighting, and countless have been displaced. Nearly 2,300 U.S. troops were killed in the war in Afghanistan, which cost more than $900 billion directly and $2 trillion indirectly.
While convalescing in the hospital in 2015, I read The Kite Runner by Afghan-American writer Khaled Husseini. Written in 2003, Afghans are going through the ordeal of the century, describing the betrayal and redemption of humanity.
Let's look at the former Soviet Union, December 24, 1979, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, to February 15, 1989, nearly 10 years. It has also brought great suffering to the people of Afghanistan, with some 1 million people killed in the fighting and 6 million forced to flee their homes as refugees.
The scourge of war is always borne by the civilian population of the country in the end.