On this day, November 11th, I think it's worth noting that we're not just losing a war in Iraq thanks to
President Bush's King George's mismanagement and incompetence.
We're also losing the war in Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan?" I hear you saying. "Are you feeling okay, Paul? We won in Afghanistan! We swept the Taliban from power and they've installed a vaguely democratic government there!"
Well, yes. And no.
You see, the Taliban continues fighting us; we've had 179 coalition military memberskilled in Afghanistan this year, the worst year yet (and we've still got a month and a half to go). The United States has lost 91 lives in Afghanistan in 2006.
One of the web sites that I have in my Blogroll is written by a guy named Michael Yon. He's an unabashedly pro-military guy, but not one that does it at the expense of losing his thinking abilities. A couple of years ago, Yon decided to go off and really see the war first-hand, to cover it as a journalist; but not as one working for anyone other than himself.
It's interesting, because he's on the verge of a new frontier of journalism- true independent media. Yon was an ex-Army guy who just wanted to see, and write about, what was really happening. Here's a passage from his web site:
But what spurred me to drop what I was doing, get on a plane and fly halfway around the world, to a war zone, was a growing sense that what I was seeing reported on television, as well as in newspapers and magazines, was inconsistent with the reality my friends were describing. I wanted to see the truth, first hand, for myself.
And what I saw changed how I thought about this war. The "truth" of this experience is too complex to capture in a body count or a thirty-second sound byte. It's chaotic, dynamic and evolving. It's unwieldy, wasteful and we have made mistakes. It's a struggle of epic proportions that ultimately relies on the strength of a people about whom most Americans seem to know very little.
So he flew off around the world, equipped with his own bulletproof armor and a camera and a computer, and he wrote about Iraq. His dispatches are tremendous, because he was truly "embedded" with the troops, going out daily with them, living with them, eating, showering, shitting, you name it- all directly with the guys doing the work on the ground.
Basically, he's supported by his readers. He doesn't work for a news organization, he doesn't depend on an editor to tell him what they want him to write about. He brings the truth as he sees it, from a perspective that none of us are able to get ourselves or through the mega-corporation media that passes itself off as "journalism" today.
Ironically enough, this fiercely maintained independence has gotten him to a point where his stuff is now in demand from that same megacorp media. He occasionally sells pieces to the big guys. One thing that I find interesting is that at first, they simply stole from him. This picturewas stolen by a huge publishing conglomerate and used to sell a crappy magazine (they put it on their cover).
(I'd post the picture here instead of linking to it, but the guy is rightfully upset about people stealing his work. Click on that link and look at that photo; it's an American soldier carrying a dead child and it's extremely powerful, because it shows both war- he has a gun slung around him- and anguish.)
Anyway, getting back towards what I was writing about, it became obvious to Mr Yon some time ago that we were in trouble in Afghanistan. He had decided to travel there and cover that war in addition to covering Iraq. The problem is simple- we didn't put enough resources in to ensure victory. From one of Yon's posts:
America faces an historic first of losing two wars simultaneously; and for largely the same reasons of not investing enough resources and not insisting that civilian leadership attend to the right indicators. In both theatres, the warning signs have been apparent for years, and a growing chorus of caution has been sounding throughout 2006.
Sound familiar? TheRumsfeld Doctrine is showing itself to be a failure. The problem is that while it might defeat the enemy militarily, it doesn't replace the civilian leadership with a functioning, healthy nation.
Perhaps to blame it all on Rumsfeld is unfair; after all, he's primarily concerned with the war itself and defeating the military. The Defense Department used to be called the United States Department of War, after all.
No, the blame for losing the peace, so to speak, must be laid at the feet of President Bush King George and his band of morons.
What Yon was noticing in Afghanistan was that opium poppy growth had exploded again, and that we weren't doing anything about it. He started writing about it and this year wrote a series of tremendous posts (what he calls "dispatches") detailing how this was working out for us.
Back in May, Yon wrote...
In fact, the media is not up-playing the danger in Afghanistan but seems to be grossly missing it. Unfortunately, I predict NATO and other forces will lose increasing numbers of soldiers in Afghanistan. The place is bad. Really bad. And it's getting worse.
In April, he wrote
I am in Afghanistan--how many people even remember we are fighting here?--surrounded by massive amounts of poppy fields. This heroin and terrorist factory called Afghanistan needs to be addressed.
The point here is that the fact that Afghanistan is in trouble has been available for some time- we've just ignored it. The problem is that we've gotten to a point where we believe our own mythology too much- the myth that says "the best thing that can happent to a nation is to lose a war to the United States."
That used to be true- when we were willing to sacrifice and pony up the money (and manpower) needed to truly rebuild a nation. We are no longer that way. We aren't even willing to pony up the dough we need to cover our own debts for our OWN nation, or so it would seem if we are to judge by the amount of deficit spending we keep racking up.
And so we're not just losing the war in Iraq, the not-a-civil-war that has obviously been going on for some time. We're also losing the war in Afghanistan, which is turning back into a narco-terror-state, a place where we think we're in control because we have the cities but the countryside is a different story, full of opium poppies and with the Taliban taxing the local farmers and rebuilding their armament and power.
This is what Bush has wrought. We didn't fully win the first (and much more important war) that we needed to win before moving on to the next war. There was no true urgency to going into Iraq; we tilted the evidence to get ourselves and others believing that the Iraqis had WMD, but they didn't. We didn't put enough time, money, and people into Afghanistan.
What do we do now? Personally, I guess I'm a hopeless idealistic; I think the United States has the capability of winning BOTH wars. But it would require far more than we're willing, as a nation, to spend. We'd need to raise taxes and probably start a draft to raise up a big enough military to support both Iraq and Afghanistan for a long, long time.
What's the alternative? I'm not honestly all that sure... I just know it's a sad time for a lot of the people of the world.