Opinion: Eight years later

America owes it to those who have died since 9/11 to be more clear about what it can accomplish in Afghanistan.

C.M. SennottSeptember 11, 2009 06:48Updated May 30, 2010 12:07

A general view of the World Trade Center construction site in New York, Sept. 8, 2009.(Shannon Stapleton/Reuters)

NEW YORK — Eight years.

On a beautiful September morning not unlike that day in 2001, I watched the loud, dusty construction site that is Ground Zero waking up.

Cranes stretched across the sky, dump trucks idled and the construction crews yawned in the early morning light where the World Trade Center once stood.

You can’t help but wonder why the hell it's taking so long to build a suitable monument there?

Why is this open wound in the island of Manhattan and the heart of the country not stitched up and healed — at least physically — by now?

Eight years.

And you watch the flag-draped coffins coming off the cargo planes at Dover Air Force Base and the mangled bodies and blown minds of young American servicemen and women coming home to ragged, ill-equipped VA hospitals, and you can’t help but wonder what the hell have we accomplished in Afghanistan? Why is this land, where empires dating back to Genghis Khan have failed to establish rule over the people, still consuming our blood and treasure all these years after 9/11?

Eight years on, and there are no good answers.

Not that would satisfy the cluster of families that will gather here on the anniversary of Sept. 11 to mourn those who they’ve lost. Not that would satisfy most of those who have loved ones still serving in Afghanistan, the place from which the attack on America was authored by Al Qaeda.

This is the truth — as clear as the sky that September morning eight years ago — that faces President Barack Obama at this moment.

Obama inherited a war where the ends are ill-defined and the means are inadequate, a struggle that went too-long neglected under President George W. Bush to think about victory in any conventional military sense.

The task now in Afghanistan is to recognize these facts and resist the military inclination — the instinct of the beast — to draw more and more troops into a doomed conflict.

Obama will need to listen to his Vice President, Joe Biden, who has warned about the dangers of escalating the conflict. He needs to be sure he is not operating out of fear that the far right will bludgeon him as weak or being swayed by generals who while often brilliant and convincing are selling war because it is what they do.