#176 Afghanistan: Obama's Big Mistake

I'll give credit to Fox News, usually a big Obama-booster, for pointing out that not once during Tuesday's AfPak-escalation speech did the President use any form of the word, "win"--because he's too smart for that. He might "succeed" in waging temporary war for 30 billion for 18 months and getting us out in, let's say (because he didn't), another 12. That's 30 months, to be conservative and kind. But what's really filling up these empty calender dates and monetary figures? Thousands upon thousands of human lives ... lost.

And not just Americans, of course. I should repeat the following facticity about our hapless Middle-East War with every post: we kill TWICE as many civilians, as "collateral damage," than the militants do in deliberate attacks. Wouldn't it have been interesting if Obama had aligned his cost-of-war-calculus with "actuarial" life-or-death outcomes. "Let's see," he might have said, "at the current rate: x-number of U.S. soldiers killed per day + xx wounded + xxx horribly mangled in body and soul PLUS xx enemy soldiers killed and wounded + xxx non-combatant civilians including kindly old men, pregnant women, and fresh-faced schoolkids = a total of umpteen whothehellknows thousands for 30 months." Ka-ching.

But Afghanistan will be "secure." There's the rub. Al Qaeda notwithstanding, the President's speech in no way convinced me that we should give a rat's ass if that corrupt quasi-nation is secure or not. Sorry, THE AFGHAN PEOPLE ARE JUST NOT WORTH IT. As I've said before, at least in Vietnam we were dying senselessly for a better class of human being. In order to be sure you'll read it, let me reproduce (just this once) an excerpt from an earlier post (DM #167). It emdodies all that's WRONG about these people, their country, and our sons and daughters giving up their lives for it. Headline:

Father murders university-student daughter for falling in love with British soldier; police release and congratulate him ...

According to the Guardian (UK) May 2008 article, the father, Abdel-Quader Ali, works as a government employee in Basra. He was not charged, but rather put on salaried leave because of "bad publicity." He is still a free man. Moreover, in an interview, he takes pride in an act that he says any Muslim would do, if he honored his religion. "God is blessing me for what I did," he says. "Death was the least she deserved." Actually she got more. Torture. Mr. Ali stomped, suffocated, and finally stabbed the 17-year-old to death. When her mother screamed in horror for the girl's brothers to save her ... they instead joined in the carnage. Says the father, "My sons were men enough to help me finish the life of someone who just brought shame to ours."
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