(TEXAS) – This month it was announced that U.S. casualties in Operation Enduring Freedom – the Orwellian name the Pentagon has given to our decade-long occupation of Afghanistan – exceeded 2,000 fatalities. Day-by-day, deaths dribble in as the United States and its NATO allies attempt to pacify the country so the corrupt, allegedly “democratic” government of Hamid Karzai can take over running Afghanistan.
It is a joke of course, but no one is laughing. Especially not the family of Sgt. 1st Class Barett W. McNabb, 33, of Chino Valley, Ariz. as they have been recently informed that Barrett was blown to bits by an improved explosive device in Khakrez, Afghanistan on June 12. He died because, for some reason, that dusty village in Kandahar province was deemed worthy of taking and holding by his superiors.
Nor is it funny for the family of Pfc. Nathan P. Davis, 20, of Yucaipa, Calif. Like Sgt. McNabb, young Davis was blown to smithereens by an IED, only this time he was in a vehicle near the equally crucial metropolis of Tore Obeh, in Khowst province. Pfc. Davis’ superiors must have thought Tore Obeh was worth dying for – or at least worth Davis dying for. Davis died on June 9.
The wretched war in Afghanistan is also certainly no laughing matter for the hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians caught in the crossfire. Terrorized by the Taliban resistance on the one hand or drone-bombed and terrorized by pro-Karzai thugs on the other – the United Nations estimates that nearly five children a day are killed or maimed by the war going on there.
The list of those not laughing at the tragic farce for what passes for a war in Afghanistan could go on, but it would merely belabor the point. One death is a tragedy but, as Stalin famously quipped, a million are a statistic. After a certain point the names, dates and specific context of how and why a soldier or civilian died becomes worse than pointless – it becomes a distraction to comprehending the absurdity of the situation there. This war, despite the human suffering caused by it, will no doubt be remembered by future historians as a black comedy affair of the highest order.
To understand why, consider the reason the U.S. invaded that sorry country in the first place. Osama Bin Laden and his merry crew of al-Qaida tricksters had brought down the twin towers in New York, leading then-U.S. president George W. Bush, the famed ‘decider,” to promise to bring Bin Laden to justice, dead or alive.
All went according to plan, for time. Al-Qaida was routed, the Taliban regime that sheltered him was toppled, and it seemed only a matter of time before Bin Laden himself was brought to justice. But then, mere months after the campaign began, other priorities arose and troops and resources were shifted to invade Iraq, which became another bungled catastrophe. Osama went from being public enemy number one, whom President Bush declared would be brought down no matter what, to someone he “rarely thought about.” Saddam and his oil and nonexistent nuclear weapons were the devil du jour, you see.
Which, again, would have been great grist for comedy if the situation in Afghanistan had not almost immediately began to fall apart. The Taliban regrouped and the U.S. and its allies have been fighting a deadly guerrilla war ever since. Years went by and the long, dreary battle continued because, somewhere on that porous, mountainous, relevant-only-to-cartographers border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the man who killed nearly 3,000 Americans and, worse, embarrassed our nation and scared the hell out of us, was allegedly hiding.
But he wasn’t hiding there. Turns out that Bin Laden was comfortably ensconced just outside the principal military city of our good ally, Pakistan. He was hiding in a villa in what many analysts called the Pakistani “West Point,” quite some distance away from the Afghan-Pakistani border. Furthermore, an occupying army wasn’t even needed to “smoke him out” in the way President Bush imagined, just some good old-fashioned intelligence work and the bravery of a Navy special-forces team.
The hilarity continues once one understands the full backstory however. Al-Qaida and Bin Laden were in Afghanistan to begin with because they had fled Sudan. Their half-baked schemes to assassinate Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, who was subsequently ousted from powers some years later by peaceful popular protest, led to pressure being put on Khartoum to oust al-Qaida from its territory. Having no power, less money and having utterly failed to bring Islamic Revolution to the heart of the Arab Middle East, Bin Laden and al-Qaida fled with their tail between their legs to Afghanistan. There, they regrouped and came up with a new plan. Instead of attacking local regimes, al-Qaida’s new focus would be on attacking the United States – the “far enemy” that was much more politically safe to attack than the folks at home.
Afghanistan only became a place of refuge though because it, too, had been stage for a previous tragedy and had then been forgotten about by the folks who largely caused it. Guess who those folks were? Broken, forgotten and under the rule of the Pakistani-influenced Taliban, Osama set up shop in the last, lonely backwater of Islamic revolution that would still take him. The rest, as they say, is history.
So, to recap, the United States has lost over 2,000 killed in a country that we invaded because it was so broken by our previous inept negligence that the man responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks was able to flee there after failing everywhere else. After successfully invading that country, we could have caught the man but didn’t because we invaded another country to take out another man who we thought was connected to the first but wasn’t and who we thought had nuclear weapons but didn’t. After many years, we eventually caught the first man when we discovered he was not hiding in the country we invaded but was, in fact, right under the noses of one of our major regional allies. Now that the man is dead, we’re still in the country he wasn’t in and only was once in because he had failed everywhere else due to the instability and “terrorism” created there by our decades-long occupation of said country.
A famous wag once opined that history repeats, first as tragedy and then as farce, but America, as usual, has gone one better. We’ve combined the two in one fantastic, absurdist package worthy of an existentialist novel. Having waited to find Osama, Davis and McNabb, it seems, are dead.