Monday, October 12, 2009 4:02 PM CDT
COLUMN: Thoughts, fears on our soon-to-be longest war
By HERB MEEKER, Staff Writer
hmeeker@jg-tc.com
Earlier this week my wife asked me when I was going to take off my “Support Our Troops” wrist band.
With our nephew Daren back home for a month now from Afghanistan the timing seemed right. But I might wait before I put the stretched-out camouflaged piece of rubber into my keepsake collection.
There are still plenty of our troops worldwide in harm’s way these days, especially in Afghanistan. And my mind has been bombarded in recent weeks with thoughts on a war that seems to have no end.
Just a few hours before I was asked about the wrist band I listened to Jack Keane talk calmly but firmly on PBS about General Stanley McChrystal’s call for 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan. If Keane’s name doesn’t sound familiar then you might consider his role as a retired general helping push through the troop surge in Iraq nearly three years ago.
In “The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008,” Pulitzer-winning journalist Thomas Ricks tells how Keane and a handful of others helped Petraeus and others re-direct the war in Iraq away from near-disaster. Today any withdrawal proposal from Iraq is not considered a sign of defeat but a realization that the situation there has turned for the better.
So when Keane talks I listen. And Keane made it clear a surge in Afghanistan might work better than depending mainly on missile-studded drone aircraft. Protecting the Afghans from the terror of the Taliban insurgents is as vital as the efforts to shield the Iraqi population from the al-Qaida terror tactics in Iraq. Keane emphasized the Taliban resurgence is the key fight in Afghanistan now.
But the question is who are the Taliban today? Some of them might be the same people who helped us win in Afghanistan eight years ago. New York Times war correspondent Dexter Filkins in his book “The Forever War” has a compelling passage on the fluidity of loyalty among Afghan warriors — I call it the Fantasy Football theory of war.
“War in Afghanistan often seemed like a game of pickup basketball, a contest among friends, a tournament where you never knew which team you’d be on when the next game got under way. Shirts today, skins tomorrow,” Filkins wrote. “On Tuesday, you might be part of a fearsome Taliban regiment, running into a minefield. And on Wednesday you might be manning a checkpoint for some gang of the Northern Alliance. By Thursday, you might be back with the Talibs again, holding up your Kalashnikov and promising to wage jihad forever.”
But now many credible accounts, including an excellent Newsweek piece offering an oral history of the war in Afghanistan from Taliban fighters stretching from 2001 to today, indicate the Taliban are surging, especially in the countryside. It’s a reminder of another war that Americans would rather forget: Vietnam.
George F. Will compared today’s Washington debate on Afghanistan to a similar one on the rush of troop commitments to Vietnam in 1966. Some asked then if Vietnam was worth a full-bore war on the chessboard of the Cold War, and they weren’t just shaggy, draft-card burners, either. In his column, Will quoted from diplomat and historian George F. Kennan’s testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the Beltway’s winter of discontent in 1966:
“This is not only not our business, but I don’t think we can do it successfully.”
The history of the Vietnam War is a quagmire of what-ifs, just as Afghanistan over the centuries has been called the graveyard of empires, stretching back to Alexander the Great. But Will cited one statistic that caught my attention: When Kennan spoke the United States military had only suffered a little more than 3,000 of the eventual 58,220 casualties from that war. Will seemed to ask if we be might be making the same mistake by enlarging our troop commitment to Afghanistan.
Still this war is about terror. Reading about Taliban fighters recounting the killings of their fellow villagers for being loyal to the American “invaders” can be shocking and infuriating. It reminded me of an account in “A Savage War of Peace: Algeria 1954-1962” (A classic history by Alistair Horne that President George W. Bush was urged to read during the darkest days of the Iraq War) of Muslim teenagers telling why they chose a 13-year-old European friend in Algeria for a brutal murder during the rebellion against French colonial rule.
“We weren’t a bit cross with him. Every Thursday we used to go and play with catapults together, on the hill above the village. He was a good friend of ours. . ., ” one of the young murderers said of their unsuspecting colonial victim.
European troops and diplomats are not colonizers in Afghanistan, merely agents of nation building. But some American troops think of their allies as disinterested bystanders in warfare. My nephew told me of a special forces soldier wearing a custom-made patch firing a salvo at the resolve of the International Security Assistance Force through a scathing acronym: “I Suck At Fighting.”
But my brother-in-law Tim, a husband and father of three, will be headed into harm’s way soon to help train some East Europeans into better soldiers. So I have a good reason to keep wearing the wrist band even after Afghanistan becomes America’s longest war early next year.
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Harry Potter wrote on Oct 12, 2009 9:38 AM: