Sacrifices on the altar of freedom

Over the coming days communities across our nation will gather to celebrate their hometown heroes, killed in Afghanistan Thursday. Friends and loved ones will recall their scholastic and athletic feats, their treasured roles within families, and their honor, fortitude and courage.

They died fulfilling their sworn duty, protecting fellow Americans and allies until they could be evacuated, standing true and holding firm in the face of unimaginable danger. Addressing the nation after the killings, President Joe Biden rightly called them "the spine of America, the best the country has to offer."

They are heroes, as are many of the civilians they were trying to protect. They worked to make Afghanistan more secure and freer and more prosperous, particularly for girls and women, for as long as they safely could, and then longer.

At least 13 American service members and more than 100 Afghan civilians died after one explosion rocked the Abbey Gate of Kabul’s airport, where those who were cleared to leave waited, and another detonated at a downtown hotel where evacuees were being processed. Both were believed to be suicide bombings.

The United States and its allies in the evacuation mission knew such terror threats were likely. They had been warned that an ISIS splinter group was planning attacks that were imminent. That did not cause them to abort the evacuation, which is taking place under a hard deadline agreed to, rightly or wrongly, by the United States and the Taliban, nor could it.

The danger of the rumored attacks did not change the importance of the mission.

The Taliban claims it is not responsible and those most knowledgeable about this effort believe them. They say this new round of chaos does not serve the goals of an organization that wants international recognition and cooperation after it takes over full governance of the country when the United States departs. That this is believed to be the work of a resurgent ISIS branch that opposes both the Taliban and the United States gives a clue to the complexities of peace seeking in this region.

We went to Afghanistan, in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, to degrade al-Qaida and kill Osama bin Laden. That took longer than we’d hoped, and while there the mission crept beyond what we could achieve. It is plain that we cannot free Afghans from their own grudges and conflicts, cannot solve their problems or "fix" their society.

We have to go, after we get our troops and allies out.

This was, for the past several weeks at least, a mission dedicated only to that, to protecting and evacuating the endangered. Whatever vision of God or justice told these bombers to strike was utterly perverted.

Murder does not beget peace. That is the oldest lesson in humanity’s textbook, and the hardest to learn.