A friend asked the other day whether American soldiers were still dying in Afghanistan.
Shamefully, I didn’t know.
The responsibility of citizens in a democracy is to keep up on issues and participate in decision-making and there’s no government function more important than deciding to kill people, our people or ones from elsewhere.
So why didn’t I know? Because I know few soldiers. The reason I know few soldiers is the abolition of the draft, which at one time kept our nation honest about its war-making.
One of the concealed lessons of Vietnam was that you can’t ask mommas for their babies unless you have a damned good reason for going to war. Because they love their children, Americans resisted wars for centuries.
War resistance ended Vietnam and ended the draft and left us with a nameless, volunteer army that allows our politicians to wage war endlessly without most of us making much fuss. War is a bloodless affair to those who aren’t fighting it or don’t have kin fighting it.
Morally, that’s a crime. But the volunteer army is also a political problem because it creates a disconnect between us and the wars we wage.
As citizens, we make war every day. We pay for it. We tacitly condone it. We accept the cost of ravaging other nations and wracking the bodies and minds of thousands of young citizens who return from fighting with lifetimes of new problems.
Our nation has been at war in Afghanistan for 18 years now, longer than durations of World War I, World War II and the Korean War combined. As many as 100,000 U.S. soldiers have been deployed there and 2,300 have died, but the war continues.
Consider this dispatch from the Wall Street Journal:
“On July 22, 2018, direct talks between the U.S. and the Taliban resume, in what appears to be a tacit recognition on both sides that a military victory isn’t possible. Four years of secret diplomacy during the Obama administration aimed at reaching a political settlement to end the Afghan war, or at least reduce its violence, had collapsed in 2013… With each side pursuing a “fight-and-talk” strategy, violence escalates throughout the rest of 2018 and into 2019, as both sides escalate military pressure to gain leverage at the negotiating table.”
To anyone vaguely familiar with the Vietnam War, this paragraph rings tragically familiar. The U.S. and Vietnam governments talked peace for years while Americans and Vietnamese died in rice paddies and cities.
A full withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan is scheduled for May 1, but the Biden administration says meeting that deadline will depend on the murderous Taliban reducing their attacks. Afghanistan’s government is perhaps marginally less corrupt than the one it replaced in 2014.
How to define stability in the Islamic republic of Afghanistan is anyone and everyone’s guess. In modern times, its national government has bounced between monarchy, theocracy, dictatorship and a pro-Communist state. War-loving Afghanis defeated Soviet Russia and so many other attempts at outside rule that the nation is known as the “Graveyard of Empires.”
You wouldn’t risk the life of your son or daughter for stability in Afghanistan, and you don’t have to.
If you did, the U.S. would have been out of Afghanistan a long time ago. This is why we must bring back the draft.