Ilana Hairston

The series is very well made. The criticism of the war in Afghanistan, US lack of strategy, torture, violations of the Geneva convention, of the 4th amendment, the Islamophobia are an important reminder of the folly. Especially for a generation that grew up with the war in back-background. However, It would have been great if some of the interviewees were people who had levelled these criticisms in real time, there were such people. Another lacuna is the absence of Afghan victims of US violence. Just like there were families who lost loved ones in 9/11 and the subsequent war, so there were many, many Afghani families who lost family members, and many were injured and maimed in the failing onslaught in pursuit of the resurgent Taliban. Finally, there’s a lack of historical perspective as to why nationalist anti-American Islam arose in the Middle East and Africa. The US has supported the most oppressive regimes in the ME and North Africa, supports the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians, it intervened in the Iran-Iraq war to make the war longer and bloodier, waged the 1st war in Iraq, imposed sanctions on Iraq that killed hundreds of thousands, stood by while Muslims were slaughtered in Bosnia, the involvement in Sudan, all these and many more are the backdrop against which terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda, Al Shabab, ISIS recruit disillusioned young people. So it’s not enough to point out that the the war in Afghanistan was destined to fail because there was no strategy and no attempt to understand the people of Afghanistan.