The War Piece to End All War Pieces
Or How to Fight a War of Ultimate Repetitiousness
By Tom Engelhardt
Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I’m
going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the
Afghan War (America’s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing
about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the
U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched the
unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become TomDispatch. Given the website’s continuing focus on America’s forever wars (a phrase I first used in 2010), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?
So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition begin!
Here, for instance, is what I wrote
about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when
the U.S. Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself
and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding.
And that would be just one of eight U.S. wedding strikes I toted up
by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen,
that killed almost 300 potential revelers. “We have become a nation of
wedding crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under
false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused
to go home.”
Here’s what I wrote
about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of “a war gone
to hell”: “While Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind
of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure,
or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the
mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years
(not to say much of the last three decades), we've been pouring billions
of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black
hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own
creation.”
Here’s what I wrote
in 2010, thinking about how “forever war” had entered the bloodstream
of the twenty-first-century U.S. military (in a passage in which you’ll
notice a name that became more familiar in the Trump era): “And let’s
not leave out the Army’s incessant planning for the distant future
embodied in a recently published report, ‘Operating Concept, 2016-2028,’
overseen by Brigadier General H.R. McMaster, a senior adviser to Gen.
David Petraeus. It opts to ditch ‘Buck Rogers’ visions of futuristic
war, and instead to imagine counterinsurgency operations, grimly
referred to as ‘wars of exhaustion,’ in one, two, many Afghanistans to
the distant horizon.”
Here’s what I wrote
in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war in
American history: “Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the
Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been
left in the dust. In fact, if you hadn’t noticed -- and weirdly enough
no one has -- that former war finally seems to have all but vanished.”
Here’s what I wrote
in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the
preceding years, gone into Afghan “roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and
a $43 million gas station” built in the middle of nowhere, rather than
into this country: “Clearly, Washington had gone to war like a drunk on a
bender, while the domestic infrastructure began to fray. At $109
billion by 2014, the American reconstruction program in Afghanistan was
already, in today's dollars, larger than the Marshall Plan (which helped
put all of devastated Western Europe back on its feet after World War
II) and still the country was a shambles.”
And here’s what I wrote
last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there:
“Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan
and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command,
but whether it can get out in time. If not, the Russians, the Chinese,
the Iranians, the Indians, who exactly will ride to our rescue? Perhaps
it would be more prudent to stop hanging out in graveyards. They are,
after all, meant for burials, not resurrections.”
And that’s just to dip a toe into my writings on America’s all-time most never-ending war.
Click here to read more of this dispatch. https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/16/war-piece-end-all-war-pieces
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