The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, argue a group of five American veterans in a New York Times video op-ed. One of them is Lyle Jeremy Rubin, a PhD candidate in history at the University of Rochester, who served in the Marine Corps from 2006 to 2011 and is a veteran of the war.
“When I signed up for the Marine Corps I really believed in the mission. I believed that it was bringing something like democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan,” Rubin says in the five-and-a-half-minute-long video clip. “But now I don’t see how you can be a killer and a nation builder at the same time.”
Rubin’s work has appeared in The Nation, Dissent, Jacobin, the Washington Post, and other outlets. Last December, he wrote an opinion piece for n+1 magazine, a version of which appeared in The Guardian, called “ ‘A torrent of ghastly revelations’—what military service taught me about America.”
