John Yemma: After Afghanistan: Will Americans Forget It?

John Yemma is the editor of The Christian Science Monitor.

Newspaper editors once had a name for complicated dispatches from the far reaches of the globe. They would glare from under their eyeshades and harrumph about “Afghanistanisms.”

What they meant was that a newspaper should serve its local community first and foremost, not wring its hands about tribal intrigue in a remote and mystifying land.

They had a point. From politics to charity to the environment, it’s usually best to pay attention to the home front first. To fixate on the far-away and ignore the up-close and personal is to be like dear Mrs. Jellyby in Charles Dickens’s novel “Bleak House.” She fretted about the natives of Borrioboola while neglecting her own needy family.

But it’s no small irony that terror attacks plotted in Afghanistan and carried out almost 10 years ago triggered a response that turned a word once synonymous with obscurity into an urgent reality for Americans, Europeans, and others who previously hadn’t given it a second thought....