Maccabean Lessons on Afghanistan

This year's fall semester began just as U.S. Forces made their last withdrawal from Kabul. Freshman students ended their second day of classes on August 26, when a suicide bomber killed thirteen U.S. personnel at Kabul's airport. The operation soon morphed into the morbid anticlimax of a conflict most Americans ignored, leaving behind both U.S. citizens and Afghans dreading the same fate. For a moment, the withdrawal left millions of Americans wondering how the world's greatest power could bring twenty years of conflict to such an ignominious end, and what that end might portend for U.S. leadership in the future?