I have become a veritable Cassandra with my warnings about the folly of America’s involvement in Afghanistan. Instead of wondering why I keep beating this dead horse, however, my only wonder is why more people aren’t doing the same.
After all, the killing of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan is even more senseless than the killing of Trayvon Martin in Florida. Yet, where the latter has incited national outrage, the former has been blithely tolerated or simply ignored.
Of course, some might soothe their conscience by thinking that soldiers assumed the risk of getting killed when they signed up. All the same, I have written numerous commentaries showing just cause why there should be more people in the streets protesting against this war than there were protesting against the war in Vietnam. Indeed, nothing suggests that the war in Afghanistan is being waged in a parallel universe quite like more people protesting the killing of Trayvon than those protesting the killing of thousands of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan … for no good cause.
Hell, even the recent spate of them being killed by the Afghans they’re supposedly training to kill Taliban fighters has done nothing to incite national outrage.
Meanwhile, TIME magazine ran a cover two years ago featuring a women with her nose cut off with the caption, “What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan?” But the irony seemed completely lost on those pointing to this cover as justification for continued U.S. involvement there that far too many Afghan women could answer this question by saying, “the same things that are happening now.”
Well, perhaps the latest report on the way women are being treated under the U.S.-supported Karzai government will be the spark that gets people protesting in the streets. Not least because everyone from former first lady Laura Bush to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has cited the liberation of Afghan women as justification for this otherwise unwinnable war.
The report said that the government of President Hamid Karzai had failed to fulfil its obligations under international human rights laws. ‘It is shocking that 10 years after the overthrow of the Taliban, women and girls are still imprisoned for running away from domestic violence or forced marriage,’ said Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth.
(BBC, March 28, 2012)
Frankly, this only reinforces my abiding view that the invasion of Afghanistan to impose democracy is every bit the march of folly the invasion of Iraq to find WMDs turned out to be….
I have fairly well established in commentaries dating back to October 2006 that nobody has been and remains a more ardent supporter of Barack Obama than I. This is why it pains me to assert that his decision to escalate this war will prove as grave a military blunder as George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq.
(“U.S. Soldiers No More Trustworthy than Taliban Fighters,” The iPINIONS Journal, March 19, 2012)
So where’s the outrage?
Related commentaries:
U.S. soldiers no more trustworthy…
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