So let’s talk about war. It’s a common word, found around the house. People have been at war ever since there were people. Sometimes it was just a rock fight, sometimes a full-scale nuclear barbacue. Looking at the human races history of warlike behavior we are forced to admit that as a species, we are just too dumb to settle our scores without a club in our hands. There are always a couple of wars going on someplace in the world. Never in my lifetime has there been a time when that was not true.
As a country we fit right in with the model. America can’t help but get into wars. We claim we are a peaceful nation but we spend more on our military budget than any other ten nations combined. The thought behind this is supposed to be that keeping prepared keeps us at peace but that just ain’t so. As soon as some country looks cross-eyed at us we start waving the flag at them and if they don’t lay down on their backs with their feet in the air and cry uncle we start shooting.
We actually did have a good reason for getting into WWII but since then, reasons for being in a war have been pretty hard to come by. Let’s see: Korea? Well, the Communists were going to overrun Southeast Asia if we didn’t defend the 59th parallel. Yeah, right. The cold war showed us just how imposing the communist threat was. So we killed a lot of our kids and a dozen years later we were sticking our noses into Vietnam for the same reason. Somehow we figured we could stop communism if we killed a lot of tough little rice farmers. That didn’t work out too well either. What it did accomplish was to split our country into two hostile camps. That probably wasn’t a good thing because it has been that way ever since. Vietnam was the reason the right and left separated; stopped being two political philosophies and became two fanatical ideologies bent on each other’s destruction.
I’m not even going to count the little dustup in the Caribbean. That wasn’t really a war. We already had more people vacationing there then they had troops. So we move on to Desert Storm where we defended little Kuwait against the marauders from Iraq. Of course we were fighting against our own weapons because we had given them to Saddam Hussein so he could hold off Iran. We have a very impressive history of giving weapons to people who then use them against us. Which brings us to Afghanistan, where all the ordinance we gave the Afghans to fight the Russians is now turned on us. I know, I skipped Iraq but somehow the thought scanned better if I went from our weapons to Afghanistan.
So how is it that we are still fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. How is it that a country, which has serious economic problems is wasting an outrageous amount of its money on two unnecessary wars. As of end of business today we will have spent $736,142,335,000.00 on the war in Iraq and $286, 453,395,000.00 on the war in Afghanistan. That’s over $1.05 trillion bucks gang. That’s a lot of health care, a lot of jobs, a lot of education, a lot of the debt reduced, a lot of everything. So what did we get for our $1.05 trillion, besides a lot of American kids in body bags?
Well, let’s see. We didn’t get the oil from Iraq, which no matter what Cheney tells us is the real reason we went to war there. We went to war in Iraq against a man who had been our ally, who was fighting us with weapons we had supplied him and still we won in two weeks. So how come eight years later we’re still fighting? How come eight years after Bush dressed up in his Little Soldier suit and declared mission accomplished we are till losing our sons and daughters in a country that has nothing but hatred to offer us? And they do hate us and they have good reason to. We are occupying their country.
I have no idea what we thought we were going to get from Afghanistan. We invaded a country the size of California that has never had anything roughly approximating a functioning central government because there were camps in it, where Al Queda was operating. Would anyone in Afghanistan have really cared if we’d just bombed the shit out of those camps and kept our troops home? Are the Afghani’s better off because we have kept a war going in their country for nine years instead of just blowing up a few hundred buildings in 2001? The Afghans actually liked us once. We helped them chase out the Russians and now they’re using the weapons we gave them to shoot down Russian helicopters to shoot down our helicopters.
The US military did a survey of Afghan people about a year ago. With a 10% literacy rate, most of the people interviewed didn’t know they lived in Afghanistan. These are simple people who live in small, segregated areas without education, without communication and without much of what makes up modern existence. If we feed them and give them schools they like us. If we shoot at them while we’re fighting an unsuccessful war with the Taliban they don’t like us. It’s a pretty logical situation. I imagine most of us would feel the same way if the Mexicans invaded and took back Texas.. Well, maybe not.
So what are we still doing in these two countries? What do we hope to achieve by staying? Both Bush’s and Obama’s governments have spoken ad nauseum about leaving stable governments in both countries. Really? That’ll be a first. The only stable government that Iraq has had was a dictatorship and Afghanistan has never had any kind of government at all, at least in the sense we understand it, that is, a constitutional body that actually has control of the whole country. Afghanistan is a series of small tribal areas governed by local chieftains and tied together by ethnic affiliations. Fifty percent of the country is Pashtun of which half are Taliban. The other half of the population is split between Tajiks, Hazara and Uzbeks and they hate each other almost as much as they hate the Pashtuns.
The Afghan government, such as it is, is run by a thief named Karzai who must have one hell of a Swiss bank account by now. Even the Pashtuns, his own people don’t like or trust him. The same can be said for the leaders of Pakistan and Iraq. This is an area of the world that has been renowned for centuries for double dealing, dishonesty and back stabbing and yet we go into it like widows to a con artist, our hand extended, full of money, thinking we are going to buy the loyalty of people who if they don’t hate us at the very least distain us. I don’t know why, but this country has never learned that you can’t buy friends. All you can buy is cooperation, and that lasts only as long as the money holds out.
Along with the trillion plus cost of military action we have pumped billions in aid into Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Even the most naïve child knows that most of that money went into the pockets of thieving local politicians. The objects of that charity, the poor and starving have never seen a penny of what we have given to their leaders and so they hate us even more.
One of the main reasons we are still fighting in both those countries are the lobbyists working for our war supply industry. To twist an old phrase, there’s no business like war business. Guns are expensive but they get ten times more expensive when they are being sold to the US armed forces. Two small examples are the Browning M2, 50 caliber machine gun which should sell for about $1,200.00 but for which the military pays $14,002.00 and the M4OAI sniper rifle which sells to the military for $2,105.00 and the equivalent of which, the Remington 700 sells to you or me for $700.00. If you’re selling to the military you just don’t want the war to be over.
Of course, the main reason that we don’t just drop everything and come home is the old argument that if we do that, the people who fought with us would be massacred by the Taliban or whoever we have been fighting. The fact of the matter is, that to some extent, this will happen whether we wait for a stable government or not. It’s the way things have always been done in these countries.
There was a heartrending picture of a beautiful young woman with her nose cut off on the cover of last week’s Time Magazine. This, the argument went, is what will happen if we leave these poor people to the Taliban. The reality is that this has been happening in that country for centuries. It’s the kind of thing that will happen wherever religious fanaticism is allowed to prosper and it has been prospering in Afghanistan since time began. We will not stop this kind of barbarism by keeping troops in Afghanistan. India has supposedly been a civilized country for years but is still victim to this kind of religious barbarism as has been seen lately in a couple of horrendous incidents. Even if we get rid of the Taliban, which we won’t, there will still be religious leaders in these countries who solidify their power bases by condoning or even ordering fanatical, sub-human behavior like the disfiguring of that young woman. It has nothing to do with our presence in Afghanistan.
The biggest joke of all is our laughable attempt to fashion a fighting force of Afghan nationals. We’re trying to teach these guys to march while most of them can shoot the eye out of a flying pigeon at fifty yards. These people have been fighting each other since before the U.S. existed. They’re very good at it. All they need is motivation and backing us up is not part of their motivational credo. They know that as soon as we leave, no matter when that is, deals will be made, alliances will be forged and the power struggle will go on. It’s why Karzai is talking to the Taliban even as he takes money and troops from us. We can see in Iraq that even before we have left the locals are getting ready to deal and fight their way into accommodations that will make some strong and rich and others poor and dead. The peoples of this area speak of honor but that only has to do with who’s looking cross eyed at their women. Their word is less than useless and there is no concept of honorable politics. Not that we’re so politically honorable ourselves.
So what should we do? We should get out, as soon as it is physically possible. The different factions in Iraq will have the same fights if we leave tomorrow as they will have if we leave in two years. They have already shown us that. We just don’t want to believe it because it will hurt our egos. Somehow we can’t accept the fact that the rest of the world can get along without us. If we leave Afghanistan tomorrow the Taliban will not overrun the country. They will retain the same territory they have now and maybe a little more but those Tajiks, Uzbeks and Harzara who are against the Taliban will keep them at bay much as they did before we landed in their country. And as far as Al Queda, who are supposed to be the reason we are in Afghanistan, they will stay in Pakistan a long as they are comfortable there and when they’re not they will move someplace else like Indonesia where they are right now setting up camps.
And not only should we pull our troops out of these countries, we should also pull out our money. Instead of giving the governments of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan billions of dollars that we need here, we should give significant amounts of those dollars to established charitable organizations to go into those countries and actually achieve the goals we intended that money to achieve. For a fraction of what we give to Karzai we could build all the schools and hospitals that his country needs and still have the bulk of the money left over for our own mounting needs. Give the money to CARE or a guy like George Mortensen who has established 145 schools in Afghanistan while we are trying to blow the country up.
Right now the single largest expenditure of the US government is military spending at 26.5% of income. This is followed by health costs at 20.1% and debt service at 13.6%. These three categories account for 60% of our spending. Education accounts for 2%. This is ridiculous.
Two quotes from Nicholas Kristof:
“In the presidential campaign, Mr. Obama promised to invest in a global education fund. … he is (now) spending enough every five weeks in Afghanistan to ensure that practically every child on our planet gets a primary education.”
“We won our nations independence for $2.4 billion in today’s money… we now fritter away that amount every nine days in Afghanistan.”
And one from Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates;
“Is it a dire threat that by 2020 the United States will have only 20 times more advanced stealth fighters than China?”
Why is it that everyone except the government seems to see the futility of our two wars and the money we spend on them. Our country used to be very macho about winning wars. Then came Korea where we wouldn’t admit to losing a war that seemed to come out a tie. This was followed by Vietnam where we were so worried about losing that we hung around until we were run out of the country. It would be a terrible shame if we let that happen again.