The war goes on and on, day after day, month after month, year after year, indefinitely with no end in sight.
For some reason, all sides have decided not to talk about the current wars. And it’s understandable. The vast majority is against the war and we all just want to bring the troops home. Every person who is killed dies honorably fighting and dying for his or her country, but still they die needlessly—for nothing. Years from now, we’ll point to the guy at the end of the bar, the one who just kind of hangs around the neighborhood and whisper, “He’s a vet, Afghanistan.”
We don’t discuss the reasons we invaded Iraq and Afghanistan because we now realize that they were all bogus. Every purported reason as been debunked and dismissed and every reason for staying is suspect. Our own military refuses to share with us the number of civilian and military casualties. They won’t tell us how many innocent people have been killed by American forces, our proxy armies and our mercenaries. Nobody has added up the cost of repairing the physical damage our armies have caused in both wars. The government refuses to admit how wide spread and insidious the corruption is among Americans from government officials to corporate chiefs to the contractor in the field. The American government continues to ignore the corruption and incompetence of our alleged allies. In Iraq, after months of bickering there is still no government. Our government refuses to recognize the reality that while we fight a worldwide drug war our allies in Afghanistan are raising poppies and selling heroine to finance their own private wars and to line their pockets.
Thankfully we don’t talk about victory. We haven’t even defined victory, we simply don’t have and never have had realistic goals that we have articulated and our willing to pursue. We don’t even have an agreed upon end plan—we don’t have a strategy for exiting either country. In Iraq, we claim we brought the troops home; when, in fact we plan to station 50,000 troops there indefinitely. In Afghanistan, we are still building up troop numbers as part of some mythical wonder weapon called the surge. The surge didn’t work in Iraq and it won’t work in Afghanistan. And sad to say, we have no exit strategy for Afghanistan.
The costs of these wars will destroy us. Nobody has added up the costs of both wars. The cost in human lives—not just our soldiers, but all the civilians in at least three countries, the cost to pursue the war, the cost to help rebuild the countries after the war (whatever that means), the cost to care for thousands of wounded GIs, some of them permanently, the cost to other countries to care for the refugees we’ve created, the cost to our reputation as a freedom and peace loving nation, the cost in interest payments on that part of the national debt which is war related.
The final macabre joke is that with more and more troops suffering from the affects of three and four rotations, their medical expenses rising, and suicides increasing daily, Secretary Gates has the audacity to say that we have to rein in military health care costs.
Conservative Americans like to erroneously claim that Ronald Reagan won the Cold War and brought about the Collapse of the Soviet Union. The reality is that the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan and the war’s financial and human costs had more to do with the collapse of the Soviet Union than our cowboy president did. Sadly, because we write our own fallacious version of history we can’t learn the obvious historical lessons. The Afghan people have defeated the Greeks, the English and the Russians among others. We should put aside our hubris and learn the obvious historical lessons and leave.
We need to study history a little bit more closely. Ask why we and our friends have been in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and ask what we and our allies have been trying to do in Asia since the days of East India Tea Company. The answers are shameful. And, and the answers will help explain why so many people dislike us and what we can do to repair the centuries of damage we’ve caused. Sadly, we have not learned enough from the War in the Pacific, the Korean War or the Vietnam War, but right now we must take the long look both backward and forward simultaneously and extract ourselves from these unjust and unwinnable wars and try to establish new relationships.
