Editor,

The shame with the war in Afghanistan is not just in the way it ended, but also in how it was started and allowed to continue — for 20 years — at a cost of a trillion dollars and so many lives.

For President Biden to claim, “zero comparison” to the war in Vietnam is self-serving and transparent. He was right to bring the troops home, but he first supported the war and voted for legislation that allowed former President George W. Bush to start it.

To be fair, it is wrong to place all the blame for the withdrawal fiasco on Biden. The military and intelligence leaders whose misrepresentations, or wishful thinking, guided his decisions are also to blame. Former President Trump may have taken, finally, the first big step to end the war. But given the Afghan government’s failures and lack of resolve, we would likely have seen the same fiasco had the withdrawal occurred under his watch.

As a people, I think we all share in the blame — for our blind faith and failure to question. We let the war slip from our radar screens and watched as it all but disappeared from public discourse during the elections. We got used to being a nation at war and a war economy.

Too many people came to depend on the money that trickled down from profiting defense industries and contractors.

Some 50 years ago, I refused to participate in the war in Vietnam and have never supported the war in Afghanistan. Neither made our country more secure or the world a better place.

I don’t begrudge those who participated and believed what they were told. I also feel for the families who lost loved ones and for those who were maimed and injured.

These victims of war should remind us that we cannot, by military might or the propping up of another nation’s government, win the hearts and minds of its people. We couldn’t do it in Vietnam and we have clearly failed to do it in Afghanistan.

Rick Abraham

Greenbank