According to defense officials, military
charges will be filed today against Staff Sergeant
Robert Bales. Bales will be charged with leaving his base near
Kandahar in the dead of the night, and massacring sixteen Afghani
inhabitants of two nearby villages before putting several bodies to
the torch. Among the casualties of Bales’ alleged shooting spree
were three women and nine children.
The motive is unclear, although the most popular theory
suggests that Bales is suffering from post-traumatic stress
disorder — plagued by a head injury he sustained while serving in
Iraq. He was currently deployed on his fourth tour of duty, and
reportedly struggling from financial strains at home and the
emotional tax of 37-odd months away from his wife and children. At
any rate, it doesn’t take a psychiatrist to guess why he may have
snapped.
That doesn’t excuse the crime, nor change the fact that
this somber tale might have been avoided, but for the eleventh hour
of America’s reconstruction of the world’s oldest societal
insurgency. Quite the contrary. It should give pause to question
the costs and benefits of this decade long engagement.
Since Alexander marched his hoplites past the ancient
satraps of the Achaemenid Empire — noting, at the time,
that Afghanistan was “easy to march into but hard to march out of”
— distant empires have become stuck in the muck of this
troublesome, tribal country. History has shown that the Afghans
will spend the years absent foreign occupiers battling homegrown
dynstastic hopefuls. It’s an endless cycle and continuous reminder
that the popular cliché christening this “graveyard of empires”
holds true —this is no place to wage “nation-building” against an
ever-inhospitable host.
In his piece for the main site, posted Monday, Jed Babbin
recognizes the facts: we haven’t delivered the goods we
were selling, and our co-pilot on this flight of democratic fancy
remains Hamid Karzai — the illiberal and utterly corruptible Mayor
of Kabul.
I’d be interested to hear from readership if anyone can
explain to me why we’re still in Afghanistan? If victory implies a
stable, liberal democracy that’s consistently pro-American, then
we’re out of luck. Jed points to the failure of our
counter-insurgency strategy. He’s absolutely correct. You can’t win
that fight with drone attacks and dubious partnerships with local
warlords, who are equally impatient for us to head for the exit.
Such are the inconvenient details of a war gone on too
long.
Short an obscene ratio of counterinsurgents to civilians
(one we weren’t ready to commit on 9/12/01, let alone a decade
hence) American servicemen and women are easily vilified as heavily
armed occupiers, from an unpopular culture, who spend the majority
of their time behind fortified walls. Their time “in public” is
spent patrolling the streets, forced to depend upon translators to
corral the locals — always with best intentions — but operating
in a country where the enemy hides in plain sight. If we chose to
stay on, how can we expect these brave young soldiers and Marines
to win a war when their presence is the glue that binds the
insurgency together?
Enough already. For years, neoconservative agitators and
liberal imperialists have shouted down anyone who won’t ignore
ridiculous constitutional imperatives placed on distant cultures
they themselves don’t understand — all the while, foisting myths
of foreign allegiance to puppet regimes bought and paid for with
American tax dollars.
Last week, the foreign policy chatter on this blog was
firmly fixed on Iran’s rationality. Jim
suggested, most helpfully, that we should expect
our leaders to be the rational actors. I would ask that we demand
the same of them when it comes to Afghanistan.
Each new incident involving American soldiers and the
civilian population triggers very real, very public outrage. Our
troops are in an impossible position — and I’m not talking about
supply line headaches or the tempo of combat. Public unrest should
be anticipated as the logical byproduct of a ten year mission to
root out an un-uniformed foe from a civilian population. The war,
in essence, is a Pashtun insurgency drawing hardened fighters from
a pool of 15 million Pashtuns in Afghanistan and 25 million more in
Pakistan. Good luck winning those hearts and minds after beating
them bloody for the past decade.
Considering the conditions facing our servicemen and
women, I’m astounded more tragic incidents have not occurred. Yet
thanks to their efforts, al Qaeda is largely dismantled and what
remains of its human infrastructure has quit the field. At this
point, I’d prefer we concentrate on tracking them down, wherever
they may hide, to “terminate with extreme prejudice” whatever
remains of their hobbled organization. Concentrated raids against
al Qaeda operatives have proved far more effective and far less
costly when tallying up the blood and treasure spent
nation-building.
As such, I encourage President Obama to do what’s right:
recognize the reality of Robert Bales. We have pushed our fighting
men and women to the brink — and absent an attainable victory
scenario, they’ve more than earned the right to come home to their
families. They’ve done all we’ve asked of them and more. The
president should recognize this most recent tragedy for what it is,
salvage self-awareness, and take the opportunity to announce an
accelerated drawdown of American forces.
