Who's War is it anyway?
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Shawangunk Journal
Bella Volchik
07/11/2010
As recently as last month, President Barrack Obama in his speech to West Point cadets was defending his escalation of the war in Afghanistan. He called for an "international order that can meet challenges of our generation" that ranges from nuclear proliferation to climate change.
"The war," said Obama, "began only because our own cities and civilians were attacked by violent extremists who plotted from that distant place, and it continues only because that plotting persists to this day."
Every reader of this newspaper is aware that 15 murderers who were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks were from Saudi Arabia. Everyone, at least the people I know, is aware that it was not Afghanistan who attacked the US.
The question therefore arises: how does it happen that the leader of one the most powerful country in the world can be so badly informed about events that affected every American?
Is it possible that someone in the Obama administration is misinforming the President?
Afghanistan has been invaded by foreigners for centuries. Throughout history, this land came under influence of many groups, from Kushans to the Iranians, to Greeks and the Mongols. The imperialistic invasions scarred Afghanistan's history. A kingdom of Afghanistan was founded in 1747, by a Pashtun named Ahmed Shah Durrani. Since then, with only very brief interruptions, the Pashtun tribes have produced every Afghan leader.
In the 19th Century, Great Britain made repeated attempts to bring Afghanistan under its control. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the people of Afghanistan fought against the British imperialists several times. So, clearly, Afghanistan has long experience of foreign invasion.
While Obama campaigned for the presidency on an anti-war platform in Iraq, it was his administration that called for a major escalation of military operations in Afghanistan. This included a troop surge and drone attacks over the border in Pakistan.
A few days ago I was approached by a friend and we talked about politics.
He said to me: "I voted for Obama."
I asked him: "Well, do you like what your new President is doing?"
He looked at me with the most honest eyes and said: "What IS he doing? And why are we in Afghanistan?"
Not one mainstream newspaper or television network is giving a half decent answer to this question. Sure, we all heard we are there to get Osama Bin Laden, and we are there, of course to spread democracy.
Hmm?Democracy? There are many countries that we have tried and failed to spread democracy too. Personally, I think Democracy must come from within. More than that, our American understanding of the word "democracy" is rather different from the meaning of the same word held around the world.
The meaning of democracy in the Muslim world is irrelevant. Muslim minds are often totally into their belonging to a tribe, and then their usually fanatical faith in their religion.
So, is it possible that our government is failing to understand the basic lessons of history and can't grasp the idea that it is not possible to teach warlords to like our idea of democracy?
And, of course, it's absolutely utopian to think we can teach them to stop growing opium.
Why are we spending a trillion dollars on this war? Why should we stay there and bleed and die in a foreign land?
There is a real reason why America is in Afghanistan. But first, let's see what this war has cost us: Back to back wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost the USA more than $1 trillion. These immense sums could have been spent on something else. For instance, $1trillion would have financed grants to all Americans attending college. It could provide renewable energy in 1,083,271,391 homes for a year, or every home in the country for more than 10 years, or it would pay 17,188,969 elementary school teachers for a year.
The wars have also cost the lives of 5,500 US service personnel with more than 4,400 dying in Iraq. Additionally, the servicemen and women wounded in these two operations run into the tens-of-thousands. A bill for supplementary grants of $37 billion for both wars in addition to $136.8 billion allocated for the current financial year is now pending with the Congress.
The bottom line is that military spending is destroying our economy. The report from the National Priorities Project provides a summary of research that supports the contention that we need to get out of Afghanistan now and concentrate on domestic needs.
It is a fact that investing in the military produces fewer jobs than cutting taxes, while cutting taxes produces fewer jobs then investing public dollars in healthcare, education, mass transit or construction of homes and infrastructure. In fact, investing public dollars in education and mass transit produces more than twice as many jobs as investing in the military.
And can this war be won? Are we fighting terrorists, or are we fighting Islam? If the latter, then it is unrealistic to expect much success. There are 1.57 billion Muslims in the world. The word "defeat" is not known to them, just like the word democracy.
We are no longer popular around the world, but it is not American people that are disliked by the world community, it's the imperialistic attitude of our government. The only way to turn things around and rebuild our image in the world community is to immediately withdraw and stop trying to be the world's policeman and concentrate on domestic issues.
So what are the real excuses for continuing this war? There are corporations in our country which openly lobby for more dollars to be invested in the war. War is always about money invested and enormous profits from these investments. President Dwight Eisenhower, who believed in a strong military, warned the US about just this in his farewell address to the nation in 1961.
"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes," he said.
And the war is also a business. In January 2010, the Congressional Research Service reported that there are at least 55,000 private armed security contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and maybe many more ? as many as 70,000 ? in Afghanistan alone. But much bigger money is available to defense contractors. In 2008 alone, the top ten defense contractors received nearly $150 billion in federal contracts. These corporations spent millions to lobby for billions more in federal funds and hired ex-military leaders and ex-officials to help them profit off war.
When you look at the big defense contractors and all the other big corporations that profit from it, it is clear that Afghanistan is about gas, minerals, drugs, weapons and profits.
Those profits come at our expense.
So check history again, please. Remember the collapse of the Soviet Union? What exactly brought them down? The exaltation and feeding of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy.
And now, reckless military expansion has become the American norm. We must remember, every moment of every day that we are in a state of war. It affects every family, every individual. We must know that the decisions Washington makes, especially the one to expand the war in Afghanistan, will lead us to the same fate as the Soviet Union, the fate of self-inflicted fatality.
