Ark of the Lost Angels

_{Credit: (The Associated Press)}

We burned twenty years for nothing. 
Made a promise when I was a boy,
To build a world where your sons and daughters were free.
When I became a man, we threw them to the fire instead,
Hoping to counteract the cold in our hearts. 

We paid for every inch in our blood
To cast out the monsters we painted as the vilest of evils,
Only to shake their fucking hands when we got bored of helping.
We won the first fight in a matter of weeks.
Then we lost the greater struggle the very next moment. 

We chose not to help build you a nation,
But touted how we were there to help your women taste freedom.
Their voices barely began to ring from the rooftops
Before we handed the clubs to the barbarians
Who only sought to silence them again. 

I have heard enough of your stories to weigh my soul,
But still I must listen. Still I must repeat them. 
Still I must ensure the world hears them too,
Even just to remind them of the blood of inaction on their hands.
All of us watching from our comfortable lives are as guilty as the gunmen. 

We failed as human beings offering each other basic decency. 
There is no liberty and democracy in the world,
For its weakest are still crushed beneath the harsh heels of monsters.
Petty men who use lies wrapped in the supposed words of the almighty.
It is easy for a silent god’s goals to align with those of soulless men. 

My tears are shed for you, Afghanistan.
With poetry the world does not deserve to hear,
With beauty most are unworthy to see.
Because we will not listen to the cries for help
You still shout while swaying from the noose meant to silence you. 

My tears tonight are shed for you, Afghanistan. 
For your children who are forced to endure horrors
That we supposedly freed them from.
My tears are shed for the cause that so many people fought and died for,
Only for the world to forsake you again. 

My tears are shed for those I shall never get to meet,
For the brave women whose stories will never be told,
For the hopes of a better tomorrow obliterated by our callousness.
My tears tonight are shed for you, Afghanistan,
And it’s simply because there’s nothing more I can do.

This poem was originally written on August 15^th, 2021, originally inspired by the Morrisey song “We’ll Let You Know.” The inspiration for this poem came from my absolute despair at watching the American evacuation from Kabul. I revisited and revised it today because something terrible is happening in Afghanistan and the world does not seem to care about it. The new version is inspired by the song “Inshallah” by Sting.

I wrote multiple times of America’s rather difficult history with the nation of Afghanistan. I wrote, in 2024, of the common struggles facing Afghan and Iranian women shortly after women in Afghanistan were banned from being heard in public. During that summer, I wrote a five article series titled “The Child of Two Shadows” about the world in the 1990s and 2000s, how the end of the Cold War and the birth of the War on Terror changed the world into which I grew up. Specifically, Parts II, III, and IV dealt with Afghanistan in part. The genesis of that series of articles came from a fascination I developed during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. I wanted to learn what shaped the world I grew up in, the events I lived through but was too young to understand. When the felonious occupant of the White House held the summit with the Taliban for America to withdraw from Afghanistan, I wanted to be more learned. I missed out on a lot of knowledge about Afghanistan growing up, it was just some vague country we were fighting in because of 9/11. When the withdrawal was announced, I knew it would become a hot topic of discussion, and I wanted to make sure I knew at least a little something about the country to filter the noise and the bullshit that were about to be thrown around.

I discovered a country of amazing people with incredible spirit and a culture unlike anywhere else on earth ravaged by decades of war as the great powers of the world used their homeland as a sick and twisted playground. It quickly became a place I was fascinated with and wanted to visit, only for those hopes to be dashed in the following months as I watched the Taliban’s resurgence across the country as America pulled back. The Afghan National Government, Army, and its citizens were left to fend for themselves. Or more accurately, they were left to die. I was checking social media religiously during the evacuation, keeping tabs, watching videos of people begging for a salvation which would never come. People begging to be let into an airbase as the nation was collapsing around them in hopes of being taken to safety, going so far as to cling to the landing gear of cargo planes in an attempt to escape the country. Because falling from the landing gear of departing planes was a more preferable fate to staying in the nation under Taliban control. I couldn’t sleep, I was sick to my stomach, but I wanted to witness what the world would quickly forget. I didn’t want to forget. I don’t want to forget. I wanted to bear witness to history which most people around me would never be affected by.

I then watched as we fucked over every person from Afghanistan we supposedly helped. We never gave the ones we evacuated the visas they deserved, and we just left interpreters and other officials to die brutal deaths at the hands of the Taliban. We gave up these people to fanatics who were determined to torture them to death as a way to get even, send a message, or just get their rocks off now that they held all the power in the nation. The United States is directly responsible for the deaths of thousands because we did not prosecute the war and its aftermath in the correct fashion. There was absolute justification for an invasion after 9/11 when the Taliban sheltered Al Qaeda. Any other nation would have done everything in their power to take out those responsible for such a devastating attack. There is no justification for the way we steamrolled over the wishes of the Afghan people, carried water for corrupt and feckless leaders busy enriching themselves at the expense of Afghans, and refused to commit the proper resources to help Afghanistan become a sovereign nation of its own. The United States kept Afghanistan as a quasi-colony, reliant on America for political and military support until deciding it wasn’t convenient to continue doing so. It was a litany of incompetence, ego, and apathy. I blame Bush for going in without a plan and then pulling most of the resources out to launch his illegal and immoral and disastrous invasion of Iraq. I blame Obama, for kicking the can down the road his entire presidency and not having the guts to stand up to the American people and either pull out entirely or double down in the right way. I blame Trump for cutting the deal with the Taliban in the first place, stabbing the Afghan National Government in the back so he could get an easy ‘win.’ I blame Biden for following through on a half-assed plan that was never given the proper leeway to work and leaving behind so much military equipment that the Taliban were able to become a heavily armed force capable of oppressing its citizenry even worse than their first instance in power. Above all, I blame the American people for our overall lack of empathy and willingness to permit such gross negligence and malice to define who we are to the world.

In June of 2023, I met a young woman from Afghanistan on a dating app. We texted for a few weeks and finally met up when she had a layover near me on a flight back to where she was living at the time. We ate a late meal at a 24 hour diner, we walked empty city streets and the whole while, we talked. She spoke of her rather conflicted feelings about America. We were a nation which liberated her country from a terrible evil, the Taliban. We were a nation that executed a war and occupation so carelessly and incompetently that we killed innocent civilians fighting a war we knew not how to win, nor had the stomach to truly try. We were a nation which then decided we had enough of our own children dying for Afghanistan’s, so we packed up and left. We just shanked the Afghan national government, and the innocents across the nation in the back before we left. It was a surreal experience, talking to a young woman who fled the fall of Kabul to Ukraine only to pass through several European nations until she ended up in America, pursuing a master’s degree and unsure of what would happen in the future and believing she would never see her family again. I could never have forgotten that evening if I tried, and what she talked about always stuck with me. I haven’t spoken to her since shortly after that night. In fact, I never knew where she ended up or what happened to her until recently when I found her on social media, and I only tried to find her again because I wanted to know she was okay during these very troubling times in America.

It’s because I followed her last week that I found out about this story.

This week, the Taliban announced new rules for women, that they are not allowed to wear makeup and their feet must be covered. In the province of Herat in western Afghanistan, protests sprung forth against these new rules after a woman was arrested for improper dress. The protests were quickly met with the Taliban’s characteristic violence. The actions of such a violent and authoritarian regime committing atrocities such as firing into the crowd with live ammunition are sadly predictable. This is already in a country with the absolute worst record for women’s rights across the world. Women are not allowed an education, to hold jobs, or to really make their voices heard in both the literal and figurative sense. The systematic stripping of women’s rights is part of a focused campaign to make them subhuman in Afghan society, and it is becoming increasingly hard to get airtime across the world. Afghanistan is dismissed by many people across the world as an inherently backwards dustball ruled by religious fanatics. It gets a few things wrong about the geographic features of the country for starters. More infuriatingly, it dismisses the women who have been fighting for their rightful place in Afghan society and erases the women struggling against brutal civil rights abuses for years. The UN has condemned this latest atrocity, but it is not enough.

I honestly cannot say what to do other than to make noise. Make this too big of a story to ignore. Give where you can. Find the people who are in positions to be leaders for this movement and they will give better ways to help than I ever could. I’m trying to shine what little light I can on this story that the world cannot be bothered by. Afghanistan isn’t a sexy headline like Gaza or Iran is right now, but it doesn’t mean the people struggling for their lives and freedom there should be any lower of a priority than anywhere else. Afghan women are dying and the world is content to do nothing.

None of us are free until all of us are.