Marching off to a bigger war
So, we’re off to a bigger war with Mr. Obama. Just got finished with Iraq and now we have decided Aghanistan just has to be won. The Vietnam experience (no, you can’t win their hearts and minds) and the Soviet experience in Afghanistan (no, you can’t win in that impossible terrain) seem to have no bearing on our decisions. Why is that? Why is there this relentlessness in the American psyche that says we absolutely have to shape the world to our liking? It is straightfowardly obvious to me that this escalation will only result in three things: more dead G.I.’s, angrier Afghans and an ever-more-dangerous, crumbling Pakistan.
I’ll quote from my good friend Matt Mabe’s blog (hereandfar.blogspot.com). He’s been there – several tours in Iraq already, and now right in the thick of it in Afghanistan — and he more than knows what the score is.
“Yet in Afghanistan, it’s different. Maybe it’s because I am here on the Army’s terms now, and not mine. And maybe it’s that eight years after arriving here, the United States has little to show for the loss of so much American blood and treasure. Whatever the reason, I can’t help but feel revulsion toward the whole society. I’ve come to resent the way many Afghan civilians make demands of us Americans with a confident air of entitlement. I feel sorry for the millions of enslaved women here whose status in society is one notch below livestock. (Chickens and goats roam the squalid streets unmolested, a freedom rarely extended to Pashtun women.) I’m uneasy when sex-starved Afghan soldiers make subtle overtures to me through gazing, lustful eyes, an occurrence whose frequency has surprised me.
“I recognize that Afghanistan, like most cultures, is not a monolith. I have met many good men here who in a different time and under different circumstances I might be happy to serve alongside. But it’s been eight years, almost a decade. At this moment, I simply can’t think of another society less worthy of our sacrifices.”
Kyle,
taking a line out of the Pete Seeger song “Where Have All the Flowers Gone’” the lyric “when will we ever learn” seems to have reverberated in my head for the last 9 years, and still continues.
Astonishingly, the men “controlling” the US now, were wintess
to the previous failure, but cannot seem to learn from their mistakes.
I sincerely believe Obama doesn’t want to make those same mistakes and thus his prolonged decision to make the next surge.
But after reading Matt Mabe’s first hand view of the situation,
I am deeply troubled and confused.