Four Thousand Days
Afghanistan, God & War
How does God feel about war?
Cliff Leitch’s Christian Bible Reference site offers these
notes: Despite the immense evil of war, Jesus said it is
inevitable that wars will continue until He returns (Mark
13:7-8), and He did not oppose earthly governments or their
right to maintain armies (Matthew 8:5-10). Other New Testament
passages accept the necessity of maintaining armies and the
worthiness of military occupations (Luke 3:14, Acts 10:1-6)
Clearly, the Christian ideal is total elimination of war and
brotherly love among all people. However, in this imperfect
world, war may be forced on those who do not desire it. St.
Augustine (354 - 430) and St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) are
primarily responsible for formulating the theory of the Just War
which has remained the majority Christian approach to war to
this day.
For eight very long years George W. Bush, appointed U.S.
President in 2000 and (barely) elected in 2004, enjoyed the
strong support of Christian conservatives who not only endorsed
the president’s tragic, clearly misguided and pointless
diversion into Iraq but aggressively saber-rattled on the
president’s behalf for what amounted to a “Christian” crusade
against Islam—a Holy War. The face of Christianity, so dominated
in the 90’s by double-chinned southern evangelists, was a
politically hawkish, pro-gun, pro-death sentence, anti-abortion,
anti-gay (and, by inference, anti-civil rights and
anti-free-speech) “Leave-It-To-Beaver-trip-back-to-the-‘50s”
ignorance now personified by the astonishingly vapid Sarah Palin
and those who don’t merely follow but worship this clueless
woman whose George W. Bush-esque anti-intellectualism is an
affront and stumbling block to women’s’ movements everywhere.
Palin’s defense of her own vapidity, making a virtue out of
intellectual laziness, is actually an escalation of the Bush
Slacker Doctrine that plunged this nation into multiple wars and
economic ruin, yet a great many conservative Americans flock to
her, turning their brains, I suppose, to “neutral” as they make
excuses for and defend Palin’s fingernails-on-a-chalkboard
eighth-grader’s comprehension of vital national issues.
I don’t understand these people. I am slow to call them stupid—I
don’t think that’s it. I think they are romanticists, longing
for the postwar, pre-civil rights era of the early 1950’s. Such
romanticism misses the point that this era, so beloved by
worshippers of Ronald Reagan (who, I am sure, would have
despised Palin as a caricature of his values and a greedy
opportunist who co-opted what Reagan surely considered to be a
sacred doctrine for brazenly political purposes), would never
have allowed a woman to gain such national stature, let alone be
elected president.
This was the era of blacks staying in their place. Of Jim Crowe and Joe McCarthy. This was the era of the Domino Theory, which had America fighting a police action in Korea and embracing a dictator in Indochina. It was a dangerous world of George W. Bush-esque simplistic idealism, Idealism which often ignored more stark global realities. For most Americans the postwar era was one of peace and prosperity, a world without worries or concerns. It is this era many conservatives hearken back to in our present-day political environment. Slogans like “Take Our Country Back” typically invoke a domestic sensibility mirroring the decade following the end of the second World War. This time period was the last time the idealized America—the dominant and prosperous white culture, the heroic military—went unchallenged. The stalemated Korean Conflict (1953) and the dawning of the African American Civil Rights movement (1955) called attention to America’s ideological deficits. The conservative political movement, idealized in modern times by Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich’s “Contract With America,” the contemporary Tea Party and similar movements, commonly rely upon a romanticized view of the pre-Vietnam, pre-civil rights postwar decade as their ideal America. For many if not most nonwhites, the shrillness of the conservative call to “Take Our Country Back,” sans any repudiation of the shameful and oppressive practices of that day, evokes a shudder at the thought of what they want to take the country back to.
The Forgotten War: U.S. Soldiers with Alpha Company, 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regimen rest next to a canal during a patrol in Badula Qulp, Helmand province, Afghanistan, Feb. 17, 2010, during Operation Helmand Spider.
Playing To Win
In 2001, the war in Afghanistan had a clear and simple
objective: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, degrade or destroy
his al Qaeda network’s ability to wage war against America.
Period. We knew where he was and we went to go get him. We knew
where his network was and we went to go smash it. But, at
critical stages, astonishingly poor and wrongheaded decisions
were made. And, at a crucial moment, where we had bin Laden
cornered, our president seemed either unengaged in what was
happening, poorly uniformed about what was happening, or simply
incompetent as he turned the search for and arrest of Osama bin
Laden over to semi-literate, easily influenced Afghani
tribesmen, who, rather than turn bin Laden over to us, aided his
escape.
Perhaps the biggest failing of our former president was Mr.
Bush’s grade-school under-achiever’s grasp of global politics
and, yes, an apparent intellectual laziness (such as his failing
to read or act upon a security memo titled Bin Laden Determined
To Strike Within The US, which detailed al Qaeda’s 911 plans
weeks before the attack). Bush did not seem to understand how
much larger than life bin Laden would become and, thus, why
allowing him to escape was not just an American failure but a
global tragedy. Like Mercury escaping from a broken thermometer,
al Qaeda has spread and grown in influence and notoriety,
becoming the Islamic boogeyman troubling people worldwide and
threatening global peace. My best understanding is Mr. Bush used
Afghani tribal leaders to arrest bin Laden because he did not
want to upset local Afghan leadership or offend Muslims. A
notion that did not take into consideration how offended those
same people might be if we ended up stuck in Afghanistan for
more than a decade. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan is an
ongoing offense to Muslims, even as it draws global attention to
how weak and corrupt the Afghanistan national government is.
There is little doubt, from any credible political analyst,
that, despite our murky stated objectives in the region, that no
mater what we do or how long we stay the outcome will be
ultimately the same: the corrupt Afghanistan government will
ultimately make a deal with the very insurgents we’re shedding
blood to defeat. It’s really only a matter of when, a sad and
useless game we are playing because we are not playing to win.
The truth is, we never have played to win in the region. No
nation has successfully won a land war in that region in over a
thousand years. When the Soviets invaded in 1979, we laughed at
them. We armed and trained the insurgents against their Soviet
aggressors. These are the very same people who bombed and
ultimately destroyed the World Trade Center and who have sparked
a worldwide Islamic jihad against the U.S. President Bush should
have known that. Should have known nation-building in the region
is, ultimately, a waste of time. Get bin Laden and prevent the
massive spread of anti-U.S. sentiment in the Muslim world.
Whatever hatred we may have encountered from a brief incursion
has been made exponentially worse by our fruitless and pointless
efforts in the region, and our ridiculous defense of Hamid
Karzai, a man the extremists would and likely should hang from
the nearest street lamp. Karzai, who brazenly stole the election
in 2009, knows full well that, absent the umbrella of U.S.
protection, he is a dead man. Which is why he has openly
threatened to forge an alliance with the Taliban—the very people
our sons and daughters are shedding blood to defeat. Karzai is
an arrogant, corrupt little man who continues to utter anti-U.S.
rhetoric, while current U.S. President Barack Obama is forced,
politically, to make excuses for him. Our relationship with this
man is an affront to our very principles as a nation and Obama
knows it. His discomfort is visible as he stands there mouthing
accolades and defending this petty little man and the useless,
sad quagmire the U.S. is in over there. Which is, precisely, the
mistake a previous U.S. president made.
Backing The Wrong Horse:
Our relationship with this man is an
affront to our very principles as a nation.
Repeating History
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s embrace of Vietnamese
President Ngo Dinh Diem in the fall of 1955 likely marked the
end of America’s postwar age of innocence. Diem’s election was
widely suspected to have been rigged and Diem himself widely
believed to be corrupt, but Washington believed it had no better
choices. America’s support of Diem led to our involvement in the
Vietnam War and, in turn, led many Americans to question
America’s leadership and motives while tarnishing the wholesome
image of the all-American G.I. These political and military
patterns are eerily mirrored today with President Barack Obama’s
embrace of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai, whose reelection
is widely suspected to have been rigged and Karzai himself
widely believed to be corrupt. U.S. involvement in Afghanistan
is, as Vietnam was, an undeclared war of extended duration with
uncertain military objectives and eroding popular support.
Former commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan Lt.
General Stanley McChrystal wanted to play to win. McChrystal,
who was ostensibly fired by President Barack Obama for
insubordination, showed disdain for the Obama Administration and
the president himself based upon the general’s firm grasp of the
reality of the Afghan enterprise. McChrystal and many other
military experts acknowledge that, historically, handcuffing the
military in order to appease corrupt leaders like Diem and
Karzai have achieved absolutely nothing. McChrystal was
presiding over a disorganized mess whose objectives were vague
at best. Every military commander ever asked about this war has
said virtually the same thing: we are not playing to win. We are
putting U.S. servicemen and women in harm’s way with no clear,
achievable military objective and no exit strategy. To play to
win, we need 300—400,000 troops over there and an armada of
aircraft and naval vessels. The country is too vast, the enemy
too ancient and entrenched, for a war of economy. You can’t
fight a war while trying not to offend anybody. Obama seems
determined not to offend Afghans in specific if not Muslims in
general, while trying to codify war hawk and dove politicians
and get Democrats reelected in November. He is failing at all of
those objectives. Everybody hates this war: those who believe in
it, those who do not. There is no winning, here. There is no
goal to achieve. There is only an open sore being made much
worse, and the inevitable collapse of that region into tribal
extremism which will absolutely continue to threaten the U.S.
So why does Obama simply repeat history? Has he, like Bush,
dozed off in social studies class? I don’t think so. I believe
our president is under tremendous pressure by the military and
intelligence communities to keep the wheels spinning over there.
The Domino Theory was a foreign policy theory during the 1950s
to 1980s, promoted at times by the government of the United
States, that speculated that if one land in a region came under
the influence of communism, then the surrounding countries would
follow in a domino effect. The domino effect suggests that some
change, small in itself, will cause a similar change nearby,
which then will cause another similar change, and so on in
linear sequence, by analogy to a falling row of dominoes
standing on end. The domino theory was used by successive United
States administrations during the Cold War to justify the need
for American intervention around the world.
Referring to communism in Indochina, U.S. President Dwight D.
Eisenhower put the theory into words during an April 7, 1954
news conference: “Finally, you have broader considerations that
might follow what you would call the "falling domino" principle.
You have a row of dominoes set up, you knock over the first one,
and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it
will go over very quickly. So you could have a beginning of a
disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”
[Wikipedia]
Like Vietnam, Afghanistan is a war based on paranoia. This war
really isn’t about Afghanistan so much as it is about Pakistan
and, ultimately, India. Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Keeping
nuclear weapons out of the hands of violent religious extremists
is, likely, America’s top national security priority. It is only
in that context that any of this makes any sense. The thought
is, abandoning Afghanistan will lead, inevitably, to the
collapse of that region into tribal religious extremists who
will then set their sights on neighboring Pakistan and her
nuclear arsenal. Which can and will lead to two things: (1)
violent Muslim extremists getting their hands no nuclear weapons
or (2) Pakistan using those weapons to defend themselves against
the insurgents. What will surely happen, should Pakistan fall to
religious terrorists is (3) India will invade Pakistan and/or
unleash its own nuclear arsenal in a preemptive war to defend
its Hindu nation against Muslim extremists.
Backing The Wrong Horse: Corrupt, unreliable, playing both ends against the middle.
The Scary Things
This is, most likely, the hell Mr. Obama is struggling to
prevent even as both friend and foe hurl rocks at him for his
handling of this war. Just as I’ve long suspected (and been
proved correct), that President Bush certainly knew more than
the public did about his motives and objectives in his own war
plans, from what I can tell of Barack Obama, he’d like to bring
our U.S. forces home tomorrow. He may have intended to do
precisely that, until we won the presidency and received the
in-depth security briefings that now likely keep him up at
nights. He knows something or many things we, the American
public, do not. Because Obama seems like a guy who despises war
and wants to bring the boys (and gals) home. But he can’t. which
ought to give us all pause about what scary things the president
knows that we don’t. The mere fact we have a guy like Obama
defending a guy like Karzai ought to curl our hair. Instead, we
call the president names and criticize and scramble to vote in
new people who—once they get inside and get the kind of
briefings not available to those not inside—will convert to
doing the same kinds of things we object to. There’s a reason
for that.
Was the Vietnam-era Domino Theory simple paranoia? I don’t know.
I was five years old, playing with Lego’s. Loved the Lego’s. Is
the 2010 Domino Theory paranoia? Probably. But the 2010 version
is much scarier and poses a much more direct threat to U.S.
national security. Even the most benign version of the 2010
theory ends with millions of dead people and a nuclear winter.
None of which makes the Afghan war winnable or even a good idea,
but it at least explains that look on the president’s face when
he is forced to defend it.
Christopher J. Priest
October 2000
18 July 2010
editor@praisenet.org
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