A War Turns Into a Madhouse

By Charles P. Pierce, Esquire Magazine

13 March 12

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his weekend, everything about the United States policy in Afghanistan stopped making whatever sense it ever made in the first place.

An American soldier, Christ alone knows why, committed an act of terrorism against the Afghan people. According to reports, the soldier wandered off the base and into an Afghan village, where he systematically went door to door and murdered 16 people, including nine children. There are now the low, mumbling noises of regret from the U.S. government, and the general tone of the commentary in this country is to ponder deeply how this might affect the American "mission" in Afghanistan.

(Also, if I see one more headline calling this thing a "spree," I may be forced to regret my own career choice. A spree is when some drunken frat-boy shoots out the streetlights on campus. This was mass murder, no different from the mass murders committed by Richard Speck or Jeffrey Dahmer or William Calley. If the American press tries to soften the edges of what happened with euphemism, which is what I suspect is already underway, the American press is guilty of one more crime against truth.)

I honestly don't believe that anyone knows anymore what in hell we're supposed to be doing over there. The main stated goal of our military operations - the destruction of the Afghan-based al Qaeda, including the killing of Osama bin Laden - has been accomplished. You hear a lot of vague talk about making Afghanistan "safe" for the Afghan people, and about how we have to be sure that Hamid Karzai's government is secure, and about how we're training the Afghan military to perform that task because we can't allow the Taliban "to make a comeback." Even if you accept them as legitimate, and, in poll after poll, the American people keep saying they don't, how do the events of just the past two months render those goals anything but obviously futile? Our soldiers shoot up civilians. Afghan men in police and army uniforms shoot up our soldiers. After almost 11 years of our occupying a Muslim country, somebody in our military still is stupid enough to burn Korans in a garbage pit, or get photographed urinating on dead Afghans. More violence ensues. You'll pardon me if I start to believe that the whole place is simply turning from a war into a madhouse. Better empires than ours have gone crazy in Afghanistan. Now, apparently, it's our turn.

It is absent from our domestic politics, and particularly from the presidential contest, because the war has been made apart from our politics from the outset. The general investment in the war by the country as a whole has been minimal. It was born out of shock and anger and outrage after the 9/11 atrocities and then, almost as soon as it had begun, the Bush administration began its preparation for its war in Iraq, which necessarily included lying to the country about why we were starting up in another place when we'd just started in Afghanistan. Our strategy there hadn't yet been fully explained when the arrant nonsense about Iraq began to fly. Barack Obama's seminal foreign-policy credential was that he opposed the war in Iraq because the Iraq war was "wrong" while Afghanistan was the "right" one. What was supposed to be the ultimate goal of the "right" war never was explained properly. And so, now, 11 years on, popular opinion is still irrelevant to a discussion of Afghanistan policy because it was rendered irrelevant from the start, because the "debate" on launching the war was truncated by anger and blood-tipped revenge, and because the "debate" on continuing it was subsumed by the "debate" on Iraq, to which public opinion was equally irrelevant, but for different reasons. Of the several things on which Ron Paul is absolutely correct, this is the most important: In this republic, if the Congress completely abdicates its legitimate war powers, then the people have no voice that anyone making the war need take seriously.

Now, with Iraq winding down, we are faced as a country with what we have done in Afghanistan, and we have no real perspective on it because, absent the destruction of Afghan-based al Qaeda, which we've accomplished, there never was a plausible national interest in rotating so many of our soldiers in and out of one of the most historically volatile places on earth, and one uniquely hostile to a foreign military presence of any kind. It has taken its toll on the military, and on us.

It turns out that whatever lit this soldier's fuse may have started back here. This is the second atrocity against Afghan civilians committed by soldiers from this base in the last two years. (Why the first one wasn't signal enough that something had gone badly wrong at Joint Base Lewis McChord, I have no idea.) Soldiers from that base seem uniquely susceptible to rampages, both in Afghanistan, and back home:

Army Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs, of Billings, Mont., the highest ranking defendant, was sentenced to life in prison. At his seven-day court martial at Lewis-McChord, Gibbs acknowledged cutting fingers off corpses and yanking out a victim's tooth to keep as war trophies, "like keeping the antlers off a deer you'd shoot." There have been other episodes of violence involving the base's soldiers or former soldiers. A former soldier shot and injured a Salt Lake City police officer in 2010; he died when police returned fire. On Jan. 1, a 24-year-old Iraq war veteran shot and killed a Mount Rainier National Park ranger before succumbing to the cold and drowning in a creek.

There also were 12 suicides at this same base in the past year. I fear we are falling into a dreadful cycle here - of atrocity and revenge and retribution, as though there's any real difference between the three, and all in alleged service to a fanciful geopolitical goal far removed from some very dirty realities. Armies crack up in Afghanistan. Empires collapse there. It is time to get out, sooner rather than later. If you're not going to listen to Alexander The Great, who got took an arrow in the leg there and nearly died, who are you going to listen to?