Have you ever thought about just how strange this country’s version of normal truly is? Let me make my point with a single, hardly noticed Washington Post news story that’s been on my mind for a while. It represents the sort of reporting that, in our world, zips by with next to no reaction, despite the true weirdness buried in it.
Even though we’re flooded with new information about Afghanistan — leaks, Rolling Stone features, et al — without the military draft, we have no hard incentive to enhance our knowledge.
It’s up to us to ensure that, in the wake of WikiLeaks, the war doesn’t last four more years like Vietnam did after the release of the Pentagon.
Is Wikileaker SPC. Bradley Manning the next Daniel Ellsberg?
The Ides of Berlusconi approach for Italy.
There are moments that define a war. Just such a one occurred on June 21, when Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke and U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry helicoptered into Marjah for a photo op with the locals. It was to be a capstone event, the fruit of a four-month counterinsurgency offensive by Marines, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, and the newly minted Afghan National Army (ANA) to drive the Taliban out of the area and bring in good government.
The infamous torture photos from Abu Ghraib were first released to the public in 2003. The horrific images of prisoners hog-tied and beaten naked, leashed like dogs with bags over their heads, and posed in forced sexual positions — all with grinning U.S soldiers in the background — rode with us on the morning commute, made their way onto our computers at lunchtime, and sat with us during the six o’clock news. The pictures were a challenge as well as a revelation. As editors Melissa Kwasny and M.L Smoker write in their introduction of I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights: “We suddenly seem[ed] to be asked to decide to what extent we will stand up and speak out for human rights.”
Our intervention in Afghanistan should evoke a national soul-searching, as we thought we did after Vietnam.
In December, when Obama decided (for the second time in 2009) to add tens of thousands of additional American forces to the war, he also slapped an 18-month deadline on the military to turn the situation around and begin handing security over to the bedraggled Afghan National Army and police. Speaking to the nation from West Point, Obama said that he’d ordered American forces to start withdrawing from Afghanistan at that time.
Nearly a week after the abrupt departure of Washington’s top commander in Afghanistan, United States strategy for reversing the flood of bad news that has been recently pouring out of that strife-torn country remains as unclear as ever.