9/11, Afghanistan, and More on Covid-19
by Errington C. Thompson, MD –
I am sorry, but I am going to be a little clichéd for a minute: it’s hard to believe it has been 20 years since 9/11.
On the 10th of September, 2001, I was on call. I cannot remember whether I was terribly busy that night or not. All I know is that I slept in the next morning. I was living in Tyler, Texas at the time. Sometime around 8 a.m. CST, the phone rang. It was my mother-in-law. She said something about a plane flying into the World Trade Center. I quickly turned on the television. I scanned several channels including CNN and found nothing. Nobody was talking about planes flying into anything. I handed the phone to my wife thinking that my mother-in-law was mistaken.
Just before I turned over and went back to sleep, CNN had breaking news. The North Tower of the World Trade Center had been hit by a plane. While I was watching this unbelievable tragedy unfold, another commercial airliner flew into the South Tower. Before the day was over, I would learn that a plane crashed into the side of the Pentagon. A fourth plane crashed in the fields of Pennsylvania.
It is hard to describe the feelings that coursed through me that day. Disbelief, anger, fear, helplessness, as well as a host of other emotions. We were the United States of America. We have a huge infrastructure that was designed to keep us safe. How could this happen? Where was the CIA? Where was the FBI? Where was our mighty military?
Soon, everyone decided that this attack had to have been carried out by al-Qaeda. Al what? Now, of course, 20 years later, al-Qaeda is a common term. In 2001, most Americans had no idea who or what al-Qaeda was. We had no idea who Osama bin Laden was. It took days if not weeks for us, as a nation, to collectively wrap our minds around the fact that we were attacked by what was a gang of Islamic extremists/terrorists.
In hindsight, we should have seen this coming. Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden had been targeting the United States for almost a decade. In 1996, bin Laden tried to take out President Clinton with a bomb planted under a key bridge as he was visiting Manila. The plot was intercepted: the bomb was found and disarmed.
Interestingly, there was no response from United States. Early in 1998, Osama bin Laden released a fatwa (religious mandate) calling on all good Muslims “to kill the Americans and their allies.” That same year, al-Qaeda set off truck bombs outside our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya.
These nearly simultaneous attacks killed more than 200 people. In retaliation for the bombings, we sent cruise missiles into the Sudan and into Afghanistan, targeting al-Qaeda training camps. Unfortunately, Osama bin Laden was not at neither location.
Then, in 2000, a small dinghy filled with explosives pulled up next to the USS Cole as it was getting refueled in Yemen. The resultant explosion killed seventeen American sailors. Again, there was no significant military response from the United States. Now, placed in this context, it is not surprising that al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11. Instead, it is more surprising that we were not ready. Almost 3,000 people died on 9/11 because we didn’t do what was necessary to protect Americans.
Afghanistan
After 9/11, the United States was searching for the perpetrators. All the evidence pointed to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. They were located in Afghanistan. At the time, Afghanistan was being controlled by the Taliban. Although the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not the same, they were very similar. Both groups were made up of Muslim extremists who believed the prophet Mohammed wanted them to commit violence to restore the Muslim homeland.
When you look at a map, it appears that Afghanistan is a single country, but it really is not. Instead, Afghanistan is made of several tribes. Each tribe is led by a warlord who controls a province or region of the country. Afghanistan has never really had a working central government. For generations, fighting periodically breaks out between rival warlords; the region has long been unstable, with prolonged, protracted infighting and chaos.
In the late 1970s, Russia invaded Afghanistan to “stabilize” the region. They were quickly able to overrun the warring factions, but they were not able to keep the peace. A group of fighters, “Holy Warriors” called the Mujahideen, began to fight back against the Russian invasion.
The Russians and the Mujahideen
Osama bin Laden was one of the founders of the Mujahideen. Because they were fighting the Russians, the United States decided to fund their efforts and supply the Mujahideen with weapons and stinger missiles. After 10 years of fighting, Russia pulled out. This left a power vacuum. Many of the Mujahideen morphed into the Taliban. It took another seven or eight years of fighting before the Taliban controlled Afghanistan.
It is important to remember that these tribes had been fighting nearly continuously for the past three decades—in some cases for centuries. It was common for a warlord to change sides or flee the country, often in the middle of a battle, to avoid being killed—or because he got a better deal (money) from the other side. When circumstances improved, these warlords would return to Afghanistan.
Hunt for Bin Laden
With the lessons of Vietnam freshly in the minds of our military, we did not want a prolonged conflict. We wanted clear objectives. So, Donald Rumsfeld, President George H.W. Bush’s secretary of defense, decided that the United States would have an extremely small footprint in Afghanistan. We would use the Northern Alliance, a loose band of tribes/fighters from the North of Afghanistan, as our “boots on the ground.” We would support them with air power.
So, after 9/11, we sent multiple small teams of special forces along with the CIA into Afghanistan. This strategy worked extremely well, at least initially. The war started in the North. The CIA and spotters on the ground would identify targets. The US military would send in planes and smart bombs and obliterate Taliban positions. The Northern Alliance would then kill or capture whatever Taliban remained in that area.
Problems began to surface once the Northern Alliance reached and took the capital, Kabul. The Northern Alliance had no desire to move further South into the Taliban stronghold. They didn’t want to move further East, either. From their perspective, they had captured all the land they wanted. They were basically done—but bin Laden and his clan fled south towards Kandahar and east towards Jalalabad in the Tora Bora mountains.
The US put together a group of somewhat reluctant Northern Alliance fighters and special forces. They pursued Bin Laden east into the Tora Bora mountains that border Pakistan.
Bin Laden and the leadership of al Qaeda were trapped in the rugged, inhospitable, and ridiculously cold Tora Bora mountains. There was intense fighting. There were tons of bombing raids followed by more intense fighting. Bin Laden and his men hid in a complex series of tunnels and caves that were dug into the Tora Bora terrain. In order to take bin Laden quickly, we needed more troops, according to CIA and military accounts. The Northern Alliance were less than eager to charge up the mountain and root out bin Laden.
The United States had several options. We could have deployed troops to block Bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan, or simply to overwhelm al Qaeda, or both. But, instead of doing some combination of this, we did nothing, hoping that the reluctant Northern Alliance plus about 100 of our special forces could get the job done. We couldn’t. We didn’t. Bin Laden and his top lieutenants somehow slipped into Pakistan and vanished.
Second, Hidden Motive
Now, let’s think about this failure. Suppose we had killed bin Laden in those mountains. Americans would have felt triumphant. There would have been a groundswell of pride and a deep desire to bring all of our troops home. But Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld had plans for more war. They wanted to take out the leader of Iraq, Saddam Hussein.
I am not saying that George W. Bush duped the American people. What I am saying is, if our objective was to kill or capture Osama bin Laden, our moves in the Tora Bora mountains don’t seem to make any sense. If, on the other hand, our objective was to rack up some victories in Afghanistan and then pivot towards Iraq, we did exactly what we planned to do.
This brings me to today. After Donald Trump “negotiated” our withdrawal from Afghanistan—in talks with the Taliban, cutting out the supposed national government that we had installed and supported for almost two decades—and released 5,000 Taliban prisoners, he left the work of trying to figure out how to actually extract ourselves from Afghanistan up to President Biden. As the United States began to withdraw troops from Afghanistan, the Afghanistan army, the one that we have trained and equipped for almost 20 years, collapsed. According to the mainstream media, nobody understood how this happened or why it happened. But a brief reading of history clearly shows us that Afghanis tend to switch sides. They do it often. They do it for personal gain. To assume that 20 years of training would overcome centuries of culture is a little naïve.
Evacuation
The first several days of airlifting Americans and Afghans who helped us during these long 20 years did not go as smoothly as anyone would like. As a matter fact it was pretty awful. Joe Biden took personal responsibility for the failure and promised he would fix things. Over the next several days, he did what he said he would do. Things got better.
Over the final weeks of August, we flew more than 100,000 people out of Afghanistan. Did we leave some people behind? Of course, that was inevitable. Will this close the chapter on Afghanistan? I don’t think so. The Taliban are truly awful people. They will do despicable things. I would not be surprised if they do something atrocious which would cause us to have to reverse course and invade Afghanistan again in the next five or 10 years.
Covid 19 is Our Enemy
I have to admit that I did not believe that I would still be talking about the novel coronavirus almost 18 months after it first surfaced in United States. If we wanted to create conditions in the United States in which a coronavirus could thrive, I’m not sure we could’ve done any better.
Developing a vaccine was not a political issue. It was done in record time, building on decades of mRNA research (remember SARS, Ebola, Swine flu, Asian bird flu?) And every Republican from Donald Trump on down claimed credit for the scientist’s work.
But then, when Joe Biden took office and was able to implement a nationwide, hugely successful vaccination program, every Republican took the position that the vaccine—for which Trump still claimed credit—was dangerous, not good, developed too fast, not tested. And from there the GOP’s position evolved into conspiracy theories, hoax theories, and absurd claims that nobody actually has died of Covid-19, but that thousands have died from the vaccine!
Similarly, Republicans have made wearing protective masks a political issue—a fascist attempt to control our children, our bodies, our minds, and force us to follow the tyrants in the scientific community and, of course, Democrats.
As a result, our average daily cases of Covid-19 have risen, and they correlate almost perfectly with Republican voter strength and refusal to be vaccinated. Hospitals from Texas to Florida and up into Kentucky are nearly at capacity. In several regions of Texas and Florida, all of the ICU beds are full with patients infected with Covid-19.
Science Versus the Right Wing
The original report of the Pfizer vaccine was published in late December 2020 in the New England Journal of Medicine. This was an extremely well-designed study. Half of the participants got a placebo. The other half that the Covid-19 vaccine. The vaccine proved to be more than 90% effective. There were no major complications. Yet, some Americans now believe that these vaccines have been poorly studied. There were over 42,000 participants in this study!
Another report in the New England Journal of Medicine, published in mid-August 2021, was based in Israel. This large study was conducted using the database from a large HMO in Israel. There are over 1 million participants. The purpose of this study was to consider the safety of the Pfizer vaccine. The authors also looked at the complications that patients suffered when they got the Covid infection.
As expected, the Pfizer vaccine was extremely safe. There seemed to be a slight increase in a rare inflammation of the heart called myocarditis. The authors estimate that it occurs in 1 to 5 per 100,000 injections (.0001% to .0005%). For those patients who were infected with the Covid-19 virus, they had a higher incidence of myocarditis, pericarditis, abnormal heart rhythms, deep venous thrombosis, clots in the lungs (pulmonary embolism), heart attack, intracranial bleeding, and an extremely low platelet count than patients who got the vaccine. The conclusion was clear: the vaccine was extremely safe.
There are many people who are now telling Americans that they need to sit down and do their own research. Really? How is the average American going to interpret risk ratios and confidence intervals? Most Americans have not taken a statistical course. How are they supposed to evaluate the nuances in a medical study? I’m not saying that the average American is stupid, dumb, idiotic, or foolish. Instead, I’m saying that for most Americans, reading the medical literature is out of their field of expertise.
If my car breaks down, I don’t take it to a plumber who I hope will pull up the right YouTube video to figure out how to fix my car. Instead, I take it to an automobile mechanic—an expert. If my air-conditioning goes out, I’m not going to ask the cashier at McDonald’s to come over and fix it. Instead, I’m going to call an expert.
And the medical experts have spoken with almost a completely uniform voice and have told Americans that these vaccines are safe and effective. We are living in a changing environment. We are learning about this virus as we go. The experts are giving us their best advice at this time. Six or eight months ago, there was no discussion about booster shots. There was discussion about the fact that we knew little or nothing about how long immunity would last. Now we know. After receiving the vaccine, it appears that over time, our immunity begins to fade. Therefore, experts are now recommending booster shots. I promise you that my wife and I will be getting our booster shots as soon as they become available.
One thing I can tell you is that Covid-19 is not going anywhere. It’s going to stay around, and mutate, evolve into different strains, and infect and kill more people—mostly the unvaccinated. We need to get as many people vaccinated as we can as quickly as we can. That is the best way that we can fight this enemy. Oh, don’t forget to wear your mask!
NOTE: The views and opinions expressed here, as well as assertions of facts, are those of the author. They do not necessarily represent the views or opinions of The Urban News.
