In this season of thanksgiving, you know what I’m thankful for? I’m thankful my cannon fodder-age son is not inclined to serve his country in Afghanistan. It must be the worst thing in the world to lose a child in a war of dubious necessity .
We say about the increasing numbers of casualties returning from that burgeoning war that they died defending us, our freedom, our way of life. ( It’s the least we can do, isn’t it?) But it would seem that there are few of us who actually believe that Afghanistan, any more than Iraq or Vietnam 40 years ago, has much of a connection to our own national security.
At best the war there is about helping people we don’t feel much connection with. But even granting the point that it’s a small world and we ought to try to help a troubled nation, it’s hard to believe that we are helping, to know what helping would even mean.
As with the other countries in which we have intervened, there’s a history and political process that’s hard to understand, including warlords, ancient conflicts, confusing religious sects. The talk is all of an “exit strategy”, a plan for turning the country over to its own leaders to keep it stable. But which leaders? As in previous such wars, we are currently defending a ruler whose legitimacy is already besmirched. It’s hard to feel confident who’s the good guy over there. Hard to know how to be the good guy in a country in which heroin is their big cash crop.
Bottomline: We should not be fighting any war about which there is so much confusion..
There’s the lesson of our own history. The fact is, it is impossible to imagine American history without the tragedy of the Civil War. It’s part of how we got from our slaveholding early days to now and while we can conjecture about how it might have gone differently, one thing we can’t imagine is some outside power intervening to smooth our passage through that rough patch.
Obama is said to be working on a whole new Afghanistan strategy soon to be unveiled. Most people expect it to be an explanation of why he will or will not commit more troops. He’s been a breath of fresh air in general and perhaps he can come up with a new perspective on continuing this war that will inspire us all. But it seems unlikely.
The truly history-making, innovative thing for him to do would be to change the course of American history by giving a speech that would, while announcing that we are pulling out, with regrets, inspire with a new sobriety, a new perspective on this sort of war of intervention we have been addicted to for the past half century. Not a new isolationism, but sober internationalism acknowledging our limits, the limits of the whole idea of intervention.
I read that the army is having a great recruiting period. Young people are signing up in droves because of the lack of jobs elsewhere in the current economy. What a terrible reason to fight a war. It should be against the law. Would-be recruits should be asking themselves: fatuous recruiting slogans aside, is the virtue of this war clear enough to risk getting maimed or killed in?
And parents: is this the sort of unambiguously necessary war you really feel OK sacrificing your child in? If not, isn’t it your duty to do your best to talk your kid out of it?
We should be applying this test: if a war isn’t clearly necessary enough to justify reinstituting a democratically applied draft, it isn’t good enough. If Afghanistan is a war we truly feel we must fight, we shouldn’t be fighting it with what amounts to a mercenary army.
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