Bergdahl is a window. When the previous administration took us to war in Afghanistan, the voices of opposition were few and very far between. The previous administration then turned the war in Afghanistan into a sideshow of the war it really wanted, the war it had planned since before it took office, the criminal debacle in Iraq. The effort the previous administration put into the task of lying us into the war it wanted drained money, and energy, and attention away from the war that was (at least partly) forced upon it. The energy the previous administration put into trying to legitimize its criminal "statutory violations," as McCarthy would put it, and the energy the previous administration put into reversing centuries of American policies in areas such as torture, and the energy the previous administration put into covering it all up, drained money, and energy, and attention away from Afghanistan, which was as distant an outpost of the national administration as it was distant from the officials so hellbent on ignoring it. These were the days in which George W. Bush told us that he didn't spend much time thinking about Osama bin Laden, whose attacks on this country were used to justify the entire decade of crimes and bungling. The current president ran for the office he now holds based on the formulation that Iraq was the wrong war and Afghanistan was the right one. This was a debatable proposition, but at least it gave the war in Afghanistan a pride of place in the national mind that the Iraq-centered geopolitics of the previous administration had denied it.

Of course, even though Afghanistan had fallen out of the spotlight, Americans were still dying there. Americans were still living in a war zone, with all the physical and psychological peril that involved. There were still casualties of all sorts. Much of this damage, and many of these casualties were unique to the circumstances of that war in that place, as is the case in any war. (I remember sitting with my father and his friends, listening to them talking about World War II, and thinking how different the experiences seemed to be between the veterans of the European and Pacific theaters of what was the same war.) We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging that the experiences of the men and women who fought there in many ways were unique to the places where they fought. We have to confront the unique legacy of the war in Afghanistan and the unique legacy of the war in Iraq by acknowledging, as a democratic self-governing people must, that we were taken to war in each different place for different reasons, with different impacts on the history of how we have governed ourselves, and how we will govern ourselves in the future. It is time for the American people to confront the war in Afghanistan not as a sideshow, and not as a theater in a fanciful "war on terror," but as a war we freely launched in a specific place at a specific time and for a specific purpose. We have ignored the unique circumstances of that war for far too long. The return of Bowe Bergdahl gives us a chance to begin that hard and serious work.