The End

Ten years is significantly longer than America’s involvement in both world wars combined and I assume that we will maintain some sort of presence in Iraq for at least the next four years. I could see no end to the conflict in Afghanistan until President Barack Obama seized the attention of the world with his startling announcement that the man who had started it all was finally dead.

I spent this past summer working as an intern at NATO headquarters in Belgium where, among other responsibilities, I combed through the casualty records for the war in Afghanistan. Every death attributed to the war is categorized as that of a local civilian, insurgent or member of the International Security Assistance Force. The cause of death is marked as insurgent action, ISAF activity or “undetermined.” Every time a drone attack goes wrong — or goes right — a note is taken, thousands of miles away. The registers of these deaths are cataloged and preserved with the meticulous care of bureaucratic immortality. There are years of life in every line; centuries on a page.

My earliest political memory is of the 1996 presidential election. My teacher put up posters of Bill Clinton and Bob Dole on an easel and encouraged her students to think of other, more imaginative possibilities for president. She took a straw poll based on our suggestions; ironically, my class overwhelming approved Arnold Schwarzenegger for the highest office in the land. This was both before his stint as “the Governator” and before I knew he was a real person. I thought Arnold Schwarzenegger was a fictional character from “The Terminator” series.

But for most of my life the cloud hanging over American politics has been one or another of the various aspects of George W. Bush’s sprawling “War on Terror.” By next year, most of the students at Princeton University will have lived most of their lives against the background assumption of whole-scale nation-building in Muslim countries, of interminable and unmanageable national deficits, of trans-Atlantic rancor and the constant worry that our government might be up to unpleasant things in places with unpronounceable names.

When Barack Obama announced that Osama bin Laden had been killed, my only reaction was somber relief. I strongly believe that this was the most significant event of Obama’s presidency — but it was not, I think, an occasion for exuberant celebration. A guilty man was executed. Let the president solve our long-term federal deficit problem and then I will be dancing in the streets.

Osama’s death put a clear capstone on the decade that encompasses the high school and college years of me and my graduating classmates. Whether or not Obama chooses to use this opportunity to slide quietly out of Afghanistan — and I sincerely hope he will — Sept. 11 is now “over.” I have no doubt that it will linger in the lives of those who lost loved ones on that bright late-summer morning, but as a national event there is now a coda to the tragedy. We have read — and written — the last page in that book.

It is, perhaps, unexpected, but the only event I can compare to the announcement of Osama’s death, a few hundred meters from Pakistan’s most prestigious military academy, was the publication of the last volume of “Harry Potter.” I remember holding the book in my hands, not having yet read the final chapter, and the feeling that this was the last time in my life when I would not know how the story ended – that those 10 years of long waiting had been brought at last to their consummation.

I was the same age as Harry when I turned the first page in the first book of the series. I did not know yet where I would go to high school; much less did I imagine myself preparing to bid a fond goodbye to Princeton. Now that I am graduating, the multimedia empire that J.K. Rowling inspired is reaching a sort of conclusion of its own: the release of the final feature film. For the first time in a long time, I will be spending my summer in America, at home in New York. I have every intention of lining up at midnight to watch the last battle between the boy wizard and the Dark Lord. And I know now how the story ends.