by John Kendall Hawkins
On TV, it's Saigon all over again.
You see them pleading, help me!, take me with you to a better place. Kids we've regaled with ironical Che tee shirts and stonewashed Levi jeans, some of them the offspring of soldiers mixing with the local women, whom the GIs promised to set free with equality and Western style lovin'. Some of them will return to America with the soldiers, make it out alive with tales of Tali terror, bless their lucky stars and stripes. Local channels will air stories of their plight and desperation and of American heroism. The Last Desperate Hours. Another Noble Cause. Their children will be given preferential tick boxes when they apply to colleges (you know, like Elizabeth Warren, from the Cherokee nation). We won't begrudge, publicly.
In communities across America, veterans of various wars fought in the last few decades will come together to talk and bring along their 'trophy' wives-- frauleins, girls from Krakow, girls rescued from melancholy Korea, girls raised from the dust of Somalia, girls from basket-case Bosnia, mail-order girls from Russia (I just threw that in), burka-less girls from Afghanistan, looking like peace-pipe squaws from the Indian Wars. None of this is a reflection on the soldiers or the girls. We bring our Who We Are with us to foreign lands, wed to our Why We Fight-- our bravado (even from punks escaping dead-end lives), our materialism (uniforms to die for), our color-blind TVs (to watch our timeless culture preen), our Idealism (lefty 'progressive' talk, gagged and tied up, but still handsome, like rappin' Warren Beatty in Bulworth), and, yes, the charm of our expressive freedoms.
It's a package deal of values, a dropped pallet of the neoliberal/neoconservative American Dream lifestyle that we crow about on the MSM (and search for all our lives back home), that we plop in the center of someone else's culture like an outpost in Sioux country, and, as then, we tame by handing out rifles, whiskey, false-comfort blankets, and empty blusterous promises of Good Will from F Troop types. If we make it that far as a species, we will drop such pallet packages on the Moon, Mars, and every other goddamned exoplanet out there in the galaxy, and beyond, that we want to colonize and begin economic-growth operations on. But it's all empty. Like space itself.
The longest war in American history was, like Vietnam, no Noble Cause. Both Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers about the futility of the Vietnam War put the lie to that, and Wikileaks' Afghan War Diary, 2004-2010, have testified against the nobility and dignity of the doings in 'Ghan. The ignoble developments in 'Nam were known before Ellsberg's leaks, even if largely symbolically. As Robert Dallek put in his Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961-1973:
...Johnson found it difficult to sustain his rationality in dealing with war critics. During a private conversation with some reporters who pressed him to explain why we were in Vietnam, Johnson lost his patience. According to Arthur Goldberg, "LBJ unzipped his fly, drew out his substantial organ, and declared, 'This is why!'"
We've yet to have that moment from a standing president with regards to Afghanistan.
Joe Biden's bromides just won't cut it, and nobody wants him to stand up and unzip and show us his corn pop, and tell his tale of the world as a swimming pool that America's lifeguard at and how armed blackfellas or Russians or Black Russians, who won't wear caps, will be confronted with a length of chain that will trigger them. Nevertheless, we should be thankful he's largely ended the goddamned thing, leaving behind soldiers of fortune who won't leave until flies are strutting across Taliban eyeballs, and who we're all too glad to see elsewhere.
As more than one pundit has noted in the now-distant past, the occupation of Afghanistan, following the chase-out of Osama bin Laden, allegedly through caves of Tora Bora (remember that whopper?) and into Pakistan, was about oil, gas, and rare minerals. Nobody, but the package soldiers (see above), gave a sh*t about the people of Afghanistan, and they still don't, minus those who were affected by the American Dreamsters Union who occupied and dropped down wads of pallet cash there for 20 years. (There are neighborhoods in America that could use a pallet drop or two.)
Commonly known as the Graveyard of Empires, American hubris, or just plain psychopathology (Rumsfeld, Cheney), drove the notion that the Exceptionalists could do what's never been done before -- manhandle the tribals (I guess we didn't learn anything from 'Nam or Little Big Horn) and tip-toe away with their Nibelungen gold and leave them debt slaves, like back at home. But to expend exorbitant piles of cash on a war in Asia required a real big Talk Up, because nobody gives a sh*t about the Afghans, in America. And who would risk their lives for the profits of oil, gas, and minerals?
America's longest war moved through seven administrations, from roughly 1979 through last week. It began with "'sucking the Soviets into a Vietnamese quagmire.'" and it ends with us yet again being hoisted on our own petards. 'Nam was supposedly a noble attempt to stop the domino effect of communism spreading throughout Asia. America lost the war in Vietnam and today there are Domino's Pizza joints in Hanoi. They deliver to the American Embassy. Likewise in Kabul. Try their Yak Special. Domino's effect will be in play long after departing soldiers are home and crying in their beers. Missing Okinawa already. It appears that Americans are not really good at fighting wars for the whims of capitalism, as opposed to evil, which they're great at. As with 'Nam vets, there have been an atrocious number of suicides among the troops. And the distant saga of Bowe Bergdahl seems now emblematic and a crucial moral crossroads.
Another thing that points to the real aim of the occupation of Afghanistan is the privatization of the war. Soldiers of fortune will now be brought in to protect the interests of Oil Men who still see big bucks to be extracted from the backward country (think: The Beverly Hillbillies, who sold their "bubbling crude" for a mil to oilers who made a bil. Remember the fellating banker, Mr. Drysdale?). A piece in Military Times puts such privatization into perspective:
In 2016, one in four U.S. personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan was a private contractor. This means that the war is already being outsourced, yet scholars, the media and the general public know almost nothing about it... Because contractors operate in the shadows, without effective public oversight, they allow policymakers to have their cake and eat it too - by appearing to withdraw, while keeping proxy forces in theater.
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