Compound wreckage: American troops can't stop what they started in Iraq, and can control Afghanistan even less. Here, an Iraqi man walks by what's left of the Ministry of Justice in Baghdad after Sunday's bombing. (Muhannad Fala'ah/Getty Images)
In Iraq, it's twin bombings that massacre some 155 people and shred 500 others, dozens of them children, again putting in question whether Iraq can mend past the wreck it's been since the 2003 American invasion--and whether President Obama can afford to keep his promise of withdrawing all U.S. troops by the end of September 2010.
In Afghanistan, it's 16 Americans getting killed in three days, 14 of them in separate helicopter crashes and two in separate attacks on the ground. The killings again put in question whether Obama can afford to give in to Gen. Stanley McChrystal's demands for 40,000 more troops in a theater of war growing more absurd by the day. Or do the killings make McChrystal's demands that much more convincing?
It depends which side of the argument you choose. There's enough blood to make the case either way, if politicizing the mayhem is your preference. The greater mistake is to analyze those bombings and killings through an American prism--to make them, in other words, America-centric. They're not.
Sixteen Americans were killed in Afghanistan in the past three days, but the reality remains that 10 to 20 times as many Afghans than coalition troops are getting killed in Afghanistan every month, rarely eliciting so much as a second thought in the western press. The killing of Americans in larger numbers only briefly (and disproportionately) refocuses attention on Afghanistan as an American dilemma when the dilemma Afghans face is more serious and without viable solutions, though reducing the American and western boot-print on the country may well be one of the more viable ones. Yes, it's regrettable that Americans are getting killed in Afghanistan. But it's no more, and strictly by cold numbers it's far less, regrettable than the devastation and bloodletting Afghans themselves are suffering every day. There isn't, at last check, a difference between Afghan and American blood: it's equally human, equally valuable, equally mourned. So why the front-page wailing over a particularly heavy day's toll for Americans, but routine silence when Afghans are the ones getting clobbered? Whose perspective is skewed?
And if the American perspective is so easily skewed, isn't McChrystal's? Isn't Obama's, regardless of the decision they reach on additional troops? Isn't that decision being made from inaccurate, hubristic assumptions that the United States can, let alone should, be the arbitrator of Afghanistan's fate--this, after eight years of equally fklawed assumptions that should have taught the United States better?
As for Iraq, the reaction to those bombings among ruight-thinking Americans is equally distasteful--the reflex-like assumption that because bombs are exploding in Iraq, Iraqi security is unraveling and American troops are the only stopgap. "None of this is good news for President Obama," Kenneth M. Pollack of the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy writes today. "He cannot pull American troops out of Iraq only to have the place collapse back into civil war and he has stated that he will not do so. For that reason, he can't refuse a request from PM Maliki to return the U.S. troops to Baghdad."
Of course he can. Of course he must. These aren't America's wars. They never were. The mistake was to start them. The folly is to fuel them, as McChrystal's hubris and Pollack-like assumptions do. And the insult, to Iraq's and to Afghanistan's people, is to react as the American press and its right-thinkers have over the past couple of days, with fat headlines and false sorrow over blood spilled that, for Afghans and Iraqis, has been life (and death) as they've known it for the better part of the decade, compliments, in too large a part, to the United States.
See Also:
- Bloodshot: Afghan Quagmire
- Bloody Times in Afghanistan
- Gen. McChrystal's MacArthur Act
- Dick Cheney Goes Taliban on Obama's Afpak
- Nothing "Residual" About 50000 Troops in Iraq
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