I attended the War on Terror Table Talk. Because it was on the 16th anniversary of this tragic event, we started with talking about what we remembered about this day. It was interesting because most of us were 3 or 4 years old, and had no memory of the actual day it occurred, but rather remembered learning about it or noticing something off about the day. For me, I didn’t remember 9/11 nor the first time I heard about it, but I can remember having moments of silence every year in elementary school to remember the event and having conversations in my classes, talking about the Twin Towers and the additional planes that went down.

But 9/11 was not the end, rather it was the beginning of a U.S. policy declaring ‘War on Terror’. This event lead to a sharp increase in military operations, and a month later the first of countless many US troops were sent into Afghanistan to remove the Taliban regime and capture al-Qaeda forces. This also means that the US has been fighting a war in Afghanistan for almost 16 years. Naturally, the discussion shifted to what the US can do to bring back troops from the Middle East. The method I agreed with was training the Afghan troops, so they could be self-sufficient with the US maybe supplying weapons.

This was an interesting conversation that allowed us to explore a important but uncommon topic. Even though we are still fighting a war in Afghanistan, the coverage about it has decreased. So this table talk gave us the opportunity to share our views about this.