TheTimesTribune.com, Corbin, KY

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August 25, 2010

To exterminate a nation

The Times-Tribune

CORBIN — Dr. Benjamin Spock said many years ago that the only way we could win in Vietnam was to exterminate a nation. Possible. However, it certainly seems true about the war in Afghanistan. We compare it to Iraq where we have claimed victory, but the situation is different. The population there of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds enabled us to form or purchase an alliance with some of them. And it is probably that when we finally withdraw our forces, if we ever do, the present government will be replaced with one that is unfriendly to us.

In Afghanistan, the people we are fighting are of a common cultural heritage, and their main reason for fighting us is that “we are there.” Additionally, a good general would never pick such a battlefield where the enemy can attack us from ambush and hid in population areas where the rules of engagement prevent us from shooting back.

Presumably, that would be the reason why none of the countries which have warred with Afghanistan over the past thousand years have prevailed. Unfortunately, our generals have not been given much choice by the politicians who manage them. Osama bin Laden said years ago that it was good to have us over there because it was so much easier to kill us.

After 9/11, we deployed a few hundred military personnel to Afghanistan. Their job was to ally with the “northern alliance” against the Taliban and coordinate targeting for U.S. air strikes. Within two months, we had won at that, and the anti-terrorist message was well understood throughout the world, as demonstrated when Libya gave up its nuclear weapons program. At that point, we should have left Afghanistan. But we stayed. Was it to give a democratic government to a tribal people who didn’t understand democracy and didn’t want it? Or was it to expand the American empire?

Bottom line. The trillion dollar cost of our mid-east military operations is a major factor in our current path to national bankruptcy, together with the trillions spent and committed by the present administration on socialist projects in federalizing major parts of our economy. We also have a major morale problem where some two thirds of our people want us out of these wars in which we have no security interest.

Our forces have had a very high rate of serious injury including train trauma from roadside bombs, which the Veterans Administration estimates in the tens of thousands.

We also have a very high rate of suicide among military personnel. Perhaps this relates to the frequent re-deployment of the same military units to the mid-east, but also to the fact that our reason for being there is political, not national security. Our people understand, but those in government who call themselves public servants apparently do not.

While our economic and military strength has been substantially reduced by the mid-east wars, Russia and China which still seek to dominate the world in a communist police state, will no longer still see us as a credible adversary. Our politicians should change their outlook from the next five minutes to the foreseeable future and know that the world will realize that our terminating these useless wars is not a matter of losing them because we still have the capability (which we would never use) to “exterminate a nation.”

President Coolidge said, “Perhaps the most important accomplishment of my administration has been minding my own business.” And president John Quincy Adams said, “It is not our nation’s role to go about the worlds in search of nations to destroy.”

Col. Harold V. Walsh, USAF, Ret.

New Haven, Ky.

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