As a member of Veterans For Peace, I gave a speech last week to the Minnesota Society of Friends (Quakers) about my experience while I was deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 and my take on our plans to send another 30,000 of my former brothers in arms into the ravages of that country.
Follow me below the fold for the text of my speech, including my thoughts (which, essentially amount to a rant) of the way forward in Afghanistan and what we've accomplished (and what we haven't accomplished) there.
First of all, allow me to thank you for offering me the honor of coming here to speak to you today. I hope that you will find what I have to say enlightening and informative. I was asked to address my experience in Afghanistan but, given that, as you shall see, my experience there was fairly mundane, I would also like to address some history and my reasons for believing that our policy in Afghanistan is and has been horribly flawed.
To quote a favorite author of mine,
There is a legend in the region of Punjab about a thief who broke into a farm and stole 200 onions. But before he could make his escape, he was caught by the farmer and led before the judge.
The magistrate passed sentence: the payment of 10 gold pieces. But the thief alleged that the fine was too high so the judge offered him 2 alternatives: to be whipped 20 times, or eat the 200 onions. The thief chose to eat the 200 onions. When he had eaten 25 onions, his eyes were already filled with tears and his stomach was burning up like the fires of hell. Since there were still 175 to go and he knew he would never bear this punishment, he begged to be thrashed 20 times.
The judge agreed but when the whip tore into his back for just the 10th time, he implored for the punishment to be stopped, for he could not stand the pain. His wish was granted but the thief still had to pay the 10 pieces of gold.
"If you had accepted the fine, you would have avoided eating the onions and wouldn’t have suffered the whip", said the judge, "But you preferred the more difficult path, not understanding that, when you have done wrong, it is better to pay up quickly and forget the matter."
This is a lesson that we have never learned in Afghanistan. We have paid over and over again for the same set of mistakes and, sadly, continue to do so today.
I was deployed to Afghanistan in the spring of 2002 to load and unload planes. Overall it was much like most of the other trips I took for the Air Force. We weren’t allowed to leave the base due to the gunfire and bombs we could hear in the distance nearly every day so my daily life consisted of 12 hours of work, going to the gym and watching movies; rinse, lather, repeat. We worked hard, predominantly downloading construction equipment to assist in the hardening of the base. Hauling 25 pound chains and pushing 1000 pound generators in the rain is not exactly fun but, it wasn’t the most awful trip I’d been on in my tenure in the Air Force. At the outset, morale was pretty good. We were led to believe that our mission there was about assisting in getting the perpetrators of 9/11. As the saying goes, there are no politics in a foxhole and there was very little discussion about the politics of our position there but, I had some reservations almost from the beginning. Being a student of history, I knew a little about how we and other nations had conducted them selves in Afghanistan in the past and had begun to have severe reservations about the whole idea of the US military fighting a "war on terror".
Afghanistan is a breathtaking place filled with some of the most treacherous terrain on the planet. Sweeping farmland and arid deserts nuzzle up to craggy rough-hewn mountains that are filled with elaborate systems of caves that have been used as shelter by the local population for thousands of years. All of the major ways in or out of the country pass through terrain that is only passable for small portions of the year and, therefore, keeping a major force supplied there is a logistical nightmare. This lesson is one that has been learned the hard way by countless invaders throughout Afghanistan’s long and colorful history. Being cargo specialists in the Air Force, this was apparent to most of us on our team almost immediately. We did as we were told though, kept our heads down, our mouths shut and downloaded the equipment. At the early portion of our trip, there were very few American forces in country yet, although more than most people were aware of. We didn’t see too many humvees or modes of troop transport coming off the planes we were working but, we all knew that would likely change. Ironically, it didn’t change.
We didn’t have much interaction with the locals except for a few who worked as translators and other support personnel on the base. Those that I did interact with struck me as straightforward and plain spoken though. I’m the type of person who doesn’t like to go anywhere where I don’t know anything about the people or the culture so I did some reading before I went and have done quite a lot more in the intervening years. The population of Afghanistan is very ethnically diverse but is primarily made up of a few predominant sects with slightly different beliefs. The largest of these is the Pashtun. Characterized by their dedication to an ancient code of honor called Pashtunwali, they are fiercely loyal, very nationalistic and comprise most of the Afghan population, including the Taliban. All of the varying sects, however, tend to be devoted bordering on fanatical to whatever their belief system happens to be and daily life there is very much like it was hundreds of years ago.
Afghanistan has a rich and very colorful history peppered with periods of foreign imperialism intruding on their various internal conflicts. Sadly, however, they haven’t known peace or tranquility for much of their history. The most important fact that I will impart to you today is this: in the recorded history of the region we now know as Afghanistan, no foreign military force, has ever won a military engagement there. I wont get into the argument or semantics of whether or not anyone can really "win" a military engagement or not but, suffice it to say, that no foreign fighting force has ever controlled a peaceful Afghanistan. Alexander the Great came closer than anyone else when he waged a campaign in the mid 4th century B.C. He controlled the territory for 3 long years while waging a very costly and bloody conflict with a Bactrian warlord known as Oxyartes. Although he technically controlled the area, his time there was marked by fierce fighting, riots and general strikes within the populace. In the end, however, it proved too costly. He lost thousands of men, a great deal of his wealth and he had to marry his way out of the conflict, taking Oxyartes’ daughter Roxanne as his wife. In the early 1800s, it was Britain and Russia who were vying for control of Afghanistan. Neither ended up controlling the region but it cost them both, particularly Britain, rather dearly in both casualties and money. In 1979 though, the floodgates, so to speak, opened for US involvement in Afghanistan and we’ve bungled the operation ever since.
On Christmas Eve of 1979, the Soviet Union deployed the 40th Army regiment to Afghanistan at the request of the, then, Marxist Government of Afghanistan. An Islamist rebel group calling themselves the Mujahedeen had been fighting skirmishes with Government forces and gaining popularity amongst the population. The hawks in the US administration viewed this situation as an opportunity to further their long stated aims of stamping out the evils of Communism around the world. As has happened with American foreign policy many times though, we got into bed with a villain just as bad, if not worse, than the one we were allegedly attempting to stop. Six months before the Soviets entered Kabul, on the advice of his National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter committed CIA assistance to the mujahedeen. This assistance included money, weapons, and probably most influentially, training in munitions and guerilla tactics. One of the mujahedeen leaders we trained was a disaffected yet wealthy young Saudi named Osama Bin Laden. We taught them how to make rudimentary bombs and how to wage a guerilla war but, after a few years, we decided that the money we were spending there could be better spent elsewhere so we abandoned them to their own devices. In 1988, when the Soviet Army withdrew from Afghanistan, Bin Laden is rumored to have said, "Look what we can do with only some guns and a few copies of the Quran. We can defeat a superpower." In retrospect, I’m not so sure he was talking about Russia.
Even knowing all of this, I initially convinced myself that we were there to do the right thing. As the weeks wore on and we began to hear rumblings from home about shifting focus to Iraq though, I began to question the rationale for our being there. After all, we had, in all probability, created the threat we were there to face (as we had created every other threat we have had to face in the last 50 years) and were contemplating letting them get away with their crimes. It began to become apparent that we were, perhaps, just there so the politicians back in Washington could sell the American peo8ple on war in general and war in Iraq in particular.
My disillusion continued to grow until, by the time we left to return to our base, I was speaking fairly openly about my questions regarding the policy being undertaken in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Unfortunately, my opinions have been born out by fact and yet, we keep sending more of my former brothers in arms into a meat grinder. There has to be a better way.
In 8 years of prosecuting the war in Afghanistan, we, the United States tax payers have spent $234 Billion dollars and Congress continues to allot billions more of our money to fund our efforts there. What are our efforts there really purchasing though?
Is our money feeding the hungry there? According to UNICEF, 48 percent of Afghani children will die before they reach the age of 5. Afghanistan has the second highest infant mortality rate and the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. Many children are so hungry that they don’t even have the strength to cry.
Is our money putting the populace of Afghanistan to work? Current figures estimate that unemployment amongst Afghani men ranges between 35 and 40% across the country. We have spent billions of dollars on reconstruction projects with companies like Kellogg Brown and Root. Not only do they not use local craftsmen or workers to complete these projects but, many times, they don’t even complete the projects and bill us for them anyways. KBR has been investigated dozens of times for fraud, waste and abuse and yet, we keep giving them no-bid contracts. These facts are not lost on the population of Afghanistan. The Taliban pays 3 times what the Afghani military (which we assist in funding) does. It’s not tough to figure out why the young men of Afghanistan are turning to the Taliban, and against us, in rapidly increasing numbers.
To put the math into perspective, we will spend in excess of $25 billion dollars in Afghanistan this year. For an additional $9 billion, we could provide universal single-payer health care to every man woman and child in this country for the year. According to a recent Harvard University study, more than 40,000 Americans die every year because they lack health insurance. In other words, according to our government, it’s more important to take 500 to 1000 Afghani lives than it is to save almost 40,000 American lives.
And what of the loss of life? Can we really be led to believe that an additional 30,000 troops will solve the problems in Afghanistan presented by our bumbling of the first 8 years of the conflict? Will all those deaths, particularly the deaths of Afghani civilians make us safer? Is it more or less likely that there will be Afghani enmity and animosity towards us because there are 30,000 more occupying troops walking their streets? How about the 40% increase in "private security contractors" who have a history of shooting first and not asking any questions at all? To quote President Jimmy Carter, "It’s difficult to win the hearts and minds of a people when you’re killing their children."
Can we really expect this strategy to be taken seriously when the Government we put in place there is one of the most corrupt and ineffective Governments on the planet? When, according to foreign diplomats, we’re strong-arming our allies into committing more troops and money to the conflict?
There has to be a better way!
In my humble opinion, if we were to spend half the money that we are spending on the war effort altruistically, that is, building schools, providing food and medical care, and showing the people of the nation of Afghanistan that they don’t have to live under the specter of war and strife, there would be no more reason to combat terrorism against American interests because undertaking terrorism against American targets would become increasingly unpopular.
Once again, I thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today and I would be happy to answer any questions you may have.