Afghanistan: A Veteran’s Perspective

 

E Battery Royal Horse Artillery escaping from the overwhelming Afghan attack at the Battle of Maiwand, from “Maiwand: Saving the Guns” by Richard Caton Woodville. In the public domain.

by Michael J. Corgan

I don’t consider myself a pacifist. I believe there will always be those who choose to resort to war for little or no good reason and others of us must deal with them. However, sometimes we ourselves are the ones who resort to war for little or no good reason.

Those of us who were in the military as a profession have a particular moral responsibility to speak out.

Like my longtime colleague Andy Bacevich, I am a service academy graduate. I served several tours in wars whose justification was uncertain at best. Like him I am concerned about our propensity to get into wars with no justification: Mexico in 1846, Spain in 1898, Woodrow Wilson’s 20th century Latin American invasions, Granada and Panama in 1982, Iraq in 2003, and others.

At the Naval War College in the late 1970s we began  studying Thucydides and Clausewitz to try to determine why we, a supposed 1st-rate military power, lost to North Vietnam, a supposed 4th-rate military power.

From Thucydides one learns how easily the arrogance of power leads to foolish and disastrous military adventures, in which many are killed for no worthy aim.

From Clausewitz a more important lesson, know when to quit–when you’re not going to ‘win’ and all you’re doing is killing people, however worthy the original reason.

What prompts my concern now is our war in Afghanistan, the longest war in our history. According to New York Times interviews with commanders there,  we are farther from ‘winning’ than ever.

According to international law, we probably had justification for going to war after the Al Qaeda attacks of 9/11 – that group operated with either the acquiescence of the Taliban or the inability of Taliban to prevent using their country as the operations base. But after 14 years, what is our justification for continuing this war that kills civilians without end?

Five hundred years ago, the Mongols couldn’t control the land; 200 years ago the British began their futile attempt to control it; in the last century the Russians also failed.  Now, in our arrogance we think we can create a stable country- though we come as foreigners, don’t speak any of the languages, and are infidels.

It isn’t working. and meanwhile people who want no part of either side are dying. There needs to be a solution to problems in that unhappy land but we and our war aren’t providing it even with all our incredible precision weapons and dropping of the largest conventional bomb ever.

The only right thing to do is to extract ourselves and admit the final answer, if there is one, will be attained by those who live there. The moral imperative is that we must go home.

 

THE UNITED STATES OF AMNESIA, Part 1

American military intervention since 1950. Author: Andrew0921. In the public domain.

by Stefan Schindler

America has the largest empire in world history, guarded by a thousand military bases around the world; yet most Americans don’t know there is such a thing as the American empire, even though they’re paying for it.  Most Americans don’t know that dismantling the empire would be the single most important step toward world peace and the solving of our ever deepening federal deficit and domestic financial crisis.

Gore Vidal coined the phrase “The United States of Amnesia.”  Of course, citizens can’t forget what they never knew.  Here are some facts to compensate for the American system of compulsory miseducation, political disinformation, and mainstream news media distortion:

1 – If U.S. naval commander Commodore Perry had not sailed his warships into Tokyo harbor in 1853, forcing Japan to end two centuries of international isolation, Japan could not have industrialized so quickly as to invade China in 1936, bomb Pearl Harbor a few years later, and launch the Second World War in the Pacific.

2 – Mark Twain, witnessing America’s eight-year terror campaign against the people of the Philippines in the so-called “Spanish-American War,” declared: “America’s flag should be a skull and crossbones.”  During the Spanish-American war, America never went to war with Spain, but simply took for its own the former Spanish colonies of Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

3 – American troops invaded Russian in 1918 in an effort to reverse the Russian Revolution of 1917, which overthrew centuries of Tsarist dictatorship and economic apartheid.  American soldiers were ordered to side with the remnants of the Tsar’s army, thereby helping create and sustain a devastating Russian civil war, preventing Lenin from instituting democratic reforms, and giving rise to Stalin’s dictatorship.  Woodrow Wilson’s invasion of Russia sought to prevent the rise of “social democracy” as a political, egalitarian alternative to capitalism.  This agenda was furthered by Harry Truman, who, after WWII, demonized Russia to frighten the American people into paying for a monstrous and unnecessary war machine.

4 – President Truman created an unaccountable national security state in 1947, when he sanctioned a secret government in the form of the National Security Council and the Central Intelligence Agency.

Co-founder of The National Registry for Conscientious Objection, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, a recipient of The Boston Baha’i Peace Award, and a Trustee of The Life Experience School and Peace Abbey Foundation, Dr. Schindler received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston College, worked one summer in a nature preserve, lived in a Zen temple for a year, did the pilot’s voice in a claymation video of St. Exupery’s The Little Prince, acted in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” and performed as a musical poet in Philadelphia, Boston, and New York City.  He also wrote The Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Awards for Howard Zinn and John Lennon.  He is now semi-retired and living in Salem, Massachusetts.