What must he be thinking & feeling at this moment?
It’s not the injury. Injuries come and go. It’s the insult. The insults hurt because they are, or seem, more voluntary.
‘Never has Afghanistan been a united country, not in all of its history!’ It was Joe Biden’s most animated moment yesterday in defending the resolve to wash his hands of these cursed people, adding that a couple of his predecessors had made a pledge to them and their divided country, but he did not support this pledge, then or now, stopping just short of saying, ‘I told you so’.
Nothing said about the number of Afghans killed and maimed. Nothing about their sacrifices.
Zalmay Khalilzad made his share of sacrifices. He worked harder than most. He took from the best advantages his adopted country had to offer. He played the game.
The rules were written a long time ago, long before he arrived. By the can-do people, as Biden likes to say, from the greatest country on earth. What other country would spend 20 years trying to sort some cursed nation’s civil war, so far away? Could any country be more generous, more patient?
Zalmay Khalilzad was patient, perhaps too patient. He was as generous as he probably could have been. Still, he must be thinking, what else can I do now? What else can be done? There must be something I can do.
Biden said to the Afghan people: ‘There is a home for you in the United States if you so choose, and we will stand with you just as you stood with us’.
Maybe for some but not for all. Biden insisted that there will be no repetition of smacking erstwhile allies in the head to keep them from climbing aboard helicopters taking flight from the embassy roof; but for every lucky one in the past, like the stepfather the American Secretary of State often mentions, many others in the present will not find a rescuer, and be able to say, ‘God bless America’.
Maybe Zalmay Khalilzad can do it, maybe a few more times for a few more of his kinsmen. Maybe he can still repay the generosity of his adopted country by helping it to stay generous and compassionate and humane. That must be what he is thinking and feeling.