AMERICA'S WAR OF REVENGE IN AFGHANISTAN

Jonathan Steele, Ghosts of Afghanistan: The Haunted Battleground: Hard Truths and Foreign Myths (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2011) ("The principal ghost of Afghanistan are the dead on every side. In thirty-five years of unfinished civil war, made worse by foreign intervention, close to 15,000 Soviet dead, over 1,500 Americans, nearly 400 British and more than 500 from other counties. Above all, the lost sons and daughters of Afghanistan itself: some 20,000 troops, and as many as two million civilians." Id. at 14. "[A] central theme of this book is the similarity of the Soviet and U.S. interventions and the lessons that ought to be learned. Described as wars of necessity, they were really wars of choice. In each case the decision to invade was made on the grounds of protecting national security but with little thought of the consequences. Could non-Muslim outsiders expect support if they stayed for more than a few months in a country that had never welcomed foreign armies? Was there not a substantial risk that the mission would increase rather than lesson the dangers of terrorism." Id. at 15. "History gets telescoped in people's minds, and it is easy to forget that almost four weeks passed after the 9/11 attacks before the United States launched its air strikes on Afghanistan. The path to war was methodical. First, a fourteen-ship battle group was sent to the Persian Gulf. A hundred combat aircraft were readied. Targets for missile raids were prepared...." "Afghanistan's religious leaders met in Kabul on September and asked bin Laden to leave the country. Bin Laden ignored them. Had he not done so and had the Taliban offered proof he was gone from Afghanistan, Bush's reprisals might conceivably have been averted. An American attack might also not have occurred if the Taliban had detained bin Laden and handed him over, as Bush demanded. But this option was unlikely since Bush did nothing to make the Taliban position easier by sending proof or addressing them tin calm diplomatic language rather than with threats. With the White House, many senators and representatives and much of the media clamoring for revenge, the administration feared that to comply with Taliban requests for evidence of bin Laden's role would look weak. Bush's initial nervous reaction to being told of the attacks on the World Trade Center while he was visiting a primary school in Florida had already raised doubts over his leadership qualities. Rather than make a serious proposal for talks, Bush preferred to issue an ultimatum. It would be easier to justify a U.S. attack once it was rejected." Id. at 217-218. "Indeed, evidence emerge a few days after 9/11 that the Bush administration had warned the Taliban two months earlier that it might take military action to topple the regime unless they handed bin Laden over." Id. at 219, emphasis added. "The Afghan campaign was the first attempt by a Western state to achieve regime change in a poor country without losing the life of any of its own ground troops. It relied entirely on techniques of asymmetric warfare, massive and sustained bombing raids form the safety of the air as well as missile strikes from distant ships and submarines. Designed to terrorize and destroy an almost completely defenseless enemy, this new type of killing in which the attackers operated in a largely risk-free environment has a sanitized video-game quality, with warriors [?????] firing missiles from remote aircraft cockpits or sitting in front of screens in comfortable offices on the ground and using their computer mouse to direct a pilotless attack drone." Id. at 241-242. We Americans tend not to think very much about our wars, though we do stand up a "support" our troops. But we don't think much about whether we have good reasons for going to war, whether there are other options short of war, what the long-term consequences of the war will be, and whether it is really worthwhile. The war is Afghanistan should underscore that revenge is not a very good reason for war. As they say, revenge is the poor man's justice. It does not befit a nation such as the United States, unless, of course, by "poor" once means moral or intellectual poverty.).