COMMENTARY | If a likely way to repeat history is to ignore it, then certainly the best way to repeat history is to know nothing at all about it. Increasingly, another name for a person who knows nothing of history is “the average American.”
Since nobody will learn the following facts in any of America’s high schools, the 41 percent of Americans who still support the war in Afghanistan should be force-fed these lessons soon after graduation:
– In 329 B.C., Alexander the Great sent his armies into present-day Afghanistan. He lost a large number of men in the mountains, and it was one of his few military defeats.
– In 1219 A.D., Genghis Khan took over the region, but he found it impossible to hold and soon he was forced to withdraw.
– The British first invaded Afghanistan in 1841. Their thorough defeat was an international humiliation.
– The Persians invaded in 1856 but were forced out the following year.
– The British invaded again in 1878-80. Not only did they fail to colonize the country, but British POWs were routinely castrated by Afghan women.
– In 1979, the USSR invaded and spent 10 years trying to transform the country into a Soviet republic. This failure, widely viewed as “Russia’s Vietnam,” was a contributing factor in the fall of the Soviet Union.
The truth is that Afghanistan’s mountains and valleys, like those of Switzerland, render the country topographically resistant to conquest.
Given all of these facts, we could say that the premise of our military involvement in Afghanistan is absurd, except that none of our leaders, Democratic or Republican, has bothered to offer a premise for continuing the war. When the only possible rationale for a war is absurd, yet no rationale has been given, you have a war that is doubly absurd.
At the beginning of the war, of course, it had a dual rationale: to overthrow the Taliban and to capture Osama Bin Laden. The Taliban were overthrown in 2001. Bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011. He was killed in Pakistan, which means that not a single one of our 90,000 troops serving in Afghanistan had anything to do with bringing him to justice.
So — why are we still in Afghanistan?
The question resonates because of the costs: 1,801 American soldiers killed, over 10,000 wounded, and nearly 400 billion dollars spent.
And there are terrible social costs when our veterans return home. According to CBS News, 6000 veterans from all U.S. wars commit suicide each year. That’s 115 a week, or 16 a day, or one every ninety minutes. The military tries to hide these numbers by reporting only on active-duty suicides.
Thousands of those who do not kill themselves suffer from PTSD, brain trauma, physical wounds, blindness, and missing limbs. Overburdened, the Veterans’ Administration has a difficult time assisting all of these people in need.
In weighing these costs, it’s helpful to consider that the United States took only three years and nine months to emerge victorious in multiple theaters of World War II. Since that time, we have spent a decade losing in Vietnam, eight years losing in Iraq, and another decade losing in Afghanistan. Who benefits from all of this waste?
The reason we fight protracted wars that we cannot win is that this is an excellent way for the military industrial complex to live off the U.S. taxpayer, while warping the shape of our democracy and society. President Eisenhower warned us about this in 1961, in his farewell address to the nation:
“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. We should take nothing for granted.”
Unfortunately for a majority of Americans, the same ignorance that separates them from the history of Afghanistan prevents them from hearing — or even knowing about — Eisenhower’s warning. And so his nightmare has become our world, and young Americans must be shot and blown-up in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan, for the sole purpose of transferring wealth from average citizens to the businessmen of war.