Let’s Make It A New Years Resolution To Get The Hell Out Of Afghanistan

“Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake …,
Whose blood will spill, whose heart will break,
Who’ll be the last to die for a mistake.”

– from a 2007 song ‘Last To Die’ by Bruce Springsteen on the continued engagement of our young people in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

A Commentary by Doug Draper

If you’ve been listening to some of the recent news wrap-ups on the year that has just passed by, you may have heard that 2010 was the bloodiest year yet for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

In 2010,  a total of 703 American, Canadian and other NATO soldiers paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, and why?

Why are we still there, a total of 10 years and many thousands of lost NATO forces and Afghani lives later?

Don’t know how many remember, but this so-called war was  initially  supposed to be about hunting down and capturing Osama bin Laden (remember him) and his Al Qaeda operatives and their Taliban embedders in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon.

Well by almost all accounts bin Laden, if he is still alive, is hiding out in Pakistan now, and so are many of his insurgents orchestrating assaults across the Pakistan/Afghani border against our NATO troops. So why in hell are we still placing our young people in harms way in Afghanistan? To protect that country’s  poppy crops?

And why aren’t hundreds of thousands of us in Canada and the United States marching in the streets, as previous generations did during the Vietnam War era, demanding that our governments get our young people out of Afghanistan? How many more of our yong people have to die over there, and for what reason?

Some suggest we remain in Afghanistan for humanitarian reasons  –  to democratize a country that has had no notion of anything resembling Jeffersonian democracy for at least a thousand years, and probably never will have during our lifetime.

Some argue we should continue spilling our blood their for women’s rights. But why then only fight a war for women’s rights here when there are so many other countries in this world where where women are still being stoned and flogged and having pieces of their vaginas cut out for expressing their rights? Should we launch military actions in those countries too?

What if maybe,  just maybe,  we found some other way of dealing with these  human rights issues, like boycotting products from countries that are involved in these life-and-death conflicts.  How sick I feel when I pick up a garment of clothing in one of our stores in Canada, while our young people are dying there, and it says ‘Made In Pakistan.’  Why not just approach the retailier and tell them we won’t shop in their stores if they continue selling products made in a country that is aiding and abetting in killing our young people.

Sad to say, Canada and the United States still host embassies for Afghanistan and Pakistan in our countries. Our governments still engage in trade with these corrupt countries. We should be urging our governments to close these embassies and cut off trade with these countries until they stop killing our our children.

These  countries, as they are currently governed,  are not worthy of our respect, let alone the blood of our young people.

For your information, here is a great column from this past summer from one of the fine columnists from The New York Times.

August 30, 2010
We Owe the Troops an Exit
By BOB HERBERT
At least 14 American soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan over the past few days.
We learned on Saturday that our so-called partner in this forlorn war, Hamid Karzai, fired a top prosecutor who had insisted on, gasp, fighting the corruption that runs like a crippling disease through his country.
Time magazine tells us that stressed-out, depressed and despondent soldiers are seeking help for their mental difficulties at a rate that is overwhelming the capacity of available professionals. What we are doing to these troops who have been serving tour after tour in Afghanistan and Iraq is unconscionable.
Time described the mental-health issue as “the U.S. Army’s third front,” with the reporter, Mark Thompson, writing: “While its combat troops fight two wars, its mental-health professionals are waging a battle to save soldiers’ sanity when they come back, one that will cost billions long after combat ends in Baghdad and Kabul.”
In addition to the terrible physical toll, the ultimate economic costs of these two wars, as the Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and his colleague Linda Bilmes have pointed out, will run to more than $3 trillion.
I get a headache when I hear supporters of this endless warfare complaining about the federal budget deficits. They’re like arsonists complaining about the smell of smoke in the neighborhood.
There is no silver lining to this nearly decade-old war in Afghanistan. Poll after poll has shown that it no longer has the support of most Americans. And yet we fight on, feeding troops into the meat-grinder year after tragic year — to what end?
“Clearly, the final chapters of this particular endeavor are very much yet to be written,” said Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, during a BBC interview over the weekend. He sounded as if those chapters would not be written any time soon.
In a reference to President Obama’s assertion that U.S. troops would begin to withdraw from Afghanistan next July, General Petraeus told the interviewer: “That’s a date when a process begins, nothing more, nothing less. It’s not the date when the American forces begin an exodus and look for the exit and the light to turn off on the way out of the room.”
A lot of Americans who had listened to the president thought it was, in fact, a date when the American forces would begin an exodus. The general seems to have heard something quite different.
In truth, it’s not at all clear how President Obama really feels about the awesome responsibilities involved in waging war, and that’s a problem. The Times’s Peter Baker wrote a compelling and in many ways troubling article recently about the steep learning curve that Mr. Obama, with no previous military background, has had to negotiate as a wartime commander in chief.
Quoting an unnamed adviser to the president, Mr. Baker wrote that Mr. Obama sees the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as “problems that need managing” while he pursues his mission of transforming the nation. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, speaking on the record, said, “He’s got a very full plate of very big issues, and I think he does not want to create the impression that he’s so preoccupied with these two wars that he’s not addressing the domestic issues that are uppermost in people’s minds.”
Wars are not problems that need managing, which suggests that they will always be with us. They are catastrophes that need to be brought to an end as quickly as possible. Wars consume lives by the thousands (in Iraq, by the scores of thousands) and sometimes, as in World War II, by the millions. The goal when fighting any war should be peace, not a permanent simmer of nonstop maiming and killing. Wars are meant to be won — if they have to be fought at all — not endlessly looked after.
One of the reasons we’re in this state of nonstop warfare is the fact that so few Americans have had any personal stake in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There is no draft and no direct financial hardship resulting from the wars. So we keep shipping other people’s children off to combat as if they were some sort of commodity, like coal or wheat, with no real regard for the terrible price so many have to pay, physically and psychologically.
Not only is this tragic, it is profoundly disrespectful. These are real men and women, courageous and mostly uncomplaining human beings, that we are sending into the war zones, and we owe them our most careful attention. Above all, we owe them an end to two wars that have gone on much too long.

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