This time the story out of Afghanistan was about the murder of innocents by an American soldier.
This time it was the Panjwai district in southern Afghanistan and one of ours with a gun, an Army sergeant, going from house to house until 16 were dead, some of them women, more of them children.
So it wasn’t some of our servicemen urinating on corpses or the burning of a Koran or retaliation from the Afghans about the Koran. This was one more moment of madness in Kandahar Province of a country the United States should have left long ago.
President Obama has the U.S. ending its combat role in Afghanistan in 2013, when the fact is it should end now. There is no victory in sight, no chance to defeat the Taliban, no reason to continue to engage in a fragile and contentious alliance with a regional thug like Hamid Karzai, no rational explanation of why we continue to send our best soldiers into a war they have no chance to win if we stay in the hills of Afghanistan forever.
Of all the disappointments of the Obama administration, real and imagined, all the supposed failures against which the Republicans candidates continue to bang away and about which the tinhorn, bullhorn patriots of the media continue to scream, here is the one most real:
That Obama sent 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan when the ones he had there, including the ones who have died there since his own surge, should have been on their way home.
Ten years into this, we are supposed to believe that things will somehow be better in one more year, that we can find some way to claim victory, or honor, when both are impossible in Afghanistan.
You know who made the most sense about Afghanistan on Sunday, after the world found out about the killings in Panjwai? Newt Gingrich, is who. And Gingrich has always been one of those big American politicians who loves to talk about war but had other things to do when asked to fight one in Vietnam.
There Gingrich was on “Face the Nation” with Bob Schieffer saying that it is time for the United States to get out of Afghanistan.
“We have to reassess the entire region,” Gingrich said. “We need to understand that our being in the middle of countries like Afghanistan is probably counterproductive.”
Now you put obvious common sense like that against threats now being leveled against Iran by Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney, who still run ahead of Gingrich in the primary race. This is what Santorum — who kept voting for sending soldiers to Iraq until asked to leave the U.S. Senate by the voters of Pennsylvania — said about Iran last week:
“If (Iran does) not tear down those (nuclear) facilities, we will tear them down ourselves.”
Romney, not to be outdone by some wimp in an Ace Hardware sweater vest, says that he will “station aircraft carriers and warships at Iran’s door.”
The American military can’t win in Afghanistan and was never going to win, and now Santorum and Romney want to start fights with Iran and Syria. That isn’t merely part of the ongoing lunacy that we can either nation-build, or simply police, that part of the world. It is criminally irresponsible.
The financial cost of Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade has been staggering. But the loss of lives in those countries has been worse, and continued over the weekend. This time it was one of ours doing the shooting, and this time it wasn’t the symbolic murder of the Koran; it was terrible and real, women and children among the dead in the killing field known as Kandahar Province.
There were pictures of an old man and a small boy, still wrapped in bedquilts. Both shot in the head. And a little girl believed to be about 2 in a red dress. Shot in the head.
Of course, our country and its policies are not to be blamed for this kind of tragedy; this is something happening across the world that is as terrible as someone walking into an Ohio school or across a college campus and opening fire. But this is still today’s tragedy in Afghanistan. There will be another one next week, and next month, and next year until we are out of there for good.
“Our security is at stake,” President Obama said in his big West Point speech in December 2009, announcing that he would eventually amp up this country's military presence in Afghanistan to 100,000.
It is what we are always told when we send more of our troops to that part of the world, that if we don’t do it, the next step will be Al Qaeda or the Taliban making a move on Cincinnati.
Another moment of madness in Afghanistan this weekend. But that is not the real madness. The real madness is that we’re still there.
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