The Taliban Have Returned

Photo by Sohaib Ghyasi on Unsplash

September 11, 2001 was a beautiful early fall morning until it wasn’t. Close to twenty years ago, I sat at a long conference room table, sketches scattered end to end, struggling to find the key to unlock the stubborn design for the new Germantown Library—you can read the story here: Libraries as an Art Form. How I was gifted with a solution to the problem amidst that nightmare—the memory has been grafted onto to me like an ugly scar.

“When something as horrific, as insane, as flying jets into the face of a building, it calls into question any reason for optimism.” from Libraries as an Art Form

Today I’m at the dining room table working another design problem, this a far more trivial one, for a beach house of all things. A folly, as the English might call it. Half a world away, the Taliban have retaken Kabul, and are beating people in the streets with whips, canes and pistols.  

From the conference room window twenty years ago, I witnessed the Pentagon’s black smoke slowly swelling, filling the eastern sky only a few miles from where I was continuing to design the Germantown Library. The obscenity of those more local murders—of those in Manhattan and Pennsylvania as well, stood in stark contrast to creating a place for literature and education to flourish, and I was struggling to justify the work.

It was my small public avowal to uphold faith in the future. The beach house? Not by a long stretch. It’s just a pleasure to be designing anything after a three year hiatus, though, again I’m working to resist the temptation to walk away from it all. The human race is an inconceivable contradiction.

That day in September, I came to realize the practice of architecture, by its very nature, is one of optimism—else what’s the point? If there is only an Armageddon on the horizon, why build anything?

Osama bin Laden’s murderous pilots made ruins of Manhattan and the Pentagon—and they might have done still worse if the third plane’s terrorists hadn’t been defeated. Now, twenty years later, the Taliban have returned to power. If you read Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between, written shortly after their initial downfall, or Sebastian Junger’s War, it seemed clear the outcome would never be the West’s shining hour—not for want of trying by the U. S. and allied soldiers who fought. Grunts and privates, up through the ranks, soldiers who gave years and some their lives following orders sent from four different Presidents—did they swear fidelity to a failure?

Even Vietnam, after that country’s long, brutal struggle, found peace, so perhaps we can hold out hope for the same in Afghanistan. It is hard for a Westerner to see past the cultural chasm separating us, particularly after all we tried bringing that people into the modern age—yes, dominated by Western culture, but dominated also by more inclusive freedom.

I’ve heard it argued a generation of Afghan children has grown to adulthood in the past two decades without the subjugation by a throwback band of murdering zealots, but it’s also true these children of war have never known peace. What will become of them now? What will become of their mothers?

Of the women of Afghanistan, did they know all along the promises would turn out to be hollow?

In a hundred years, perhaps in two hundred, will the plains of Afghanistan remain barren and ruined? Now that we’ve left the Afghans to their own devices, with they find the means to make a country from their disparate tribes? It was an arid land of feuding clans long before we came—will it be left to the vultures now?