If you're like me, at some point in the past few years you've had the conversation about why there are so many dead bodies -- fake dead bodies -- on television.
We have dead bodies lying on slabs in the morgue on most of the "Law & Order" franchises -- and there are three of them, plus endless reruns. We have three "CSI" (Crime Scene Investigation) franchises, one each in Las Vegas, Miami and New York. We have two naval crime shows, although only one has an autopsy component. And only one has Mark Harmon, which is reason enough for watching.
Five months ago, shortly after the Pakistani government had
begun a military offensive against suspected Taliban fighters in the
northernmost area of the country, we arrived in Islamabad, the capital, as part of a small
delegation organized by Voices for Creative Nonviolence (www.vcnv.org). Our
initial travel plans had focused on learning more about civilian suffering
caused by U.S.
drone attacks.
Almost eight years after choosing Hamid Karzai to head the Afghan
government, Uncle Sam would like to give him a pink slip. But it’s
not easy. And the grim fiasco of Afghanistan’s last election is
shadowing the next.
Another display of electioneering and voting has been ordered up from
Washington. But after a chemical mix has blown a hole through the
roof -- with all the elements for massive fraud still in place --
what’s the point of throwing together the same ingredients?
Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined – yet the mutterings from the marble halls of Washington DC suggest he may order a troop escalation.
The pictures are too gruesome to show. The charred bodies lie under
a makeshift shroud. Someone near the camera holds up an identity card -
giving one corpse a name, a history, a dignity that's now been stolen.
Is it too early -- or already too late -- to begin drawing lessons from "the Long War"? That phrase,
coined in 2002 and, by 2005, being championed by Centcom Commander General John Abizaid, was
meant to be a catchier name for George W.
Eight years. We’ve been in Afghanistan longer than any other war in American history. The party of the president who invaded Afghanistan has been repudiated at the polls. Yet we still haven’t altered the flawed strategy that allowed uneducated tribesmen with outdated weapons to defeat us year after year.
We haven’t learned a thing.
As the Obama administration dithers over what to do for the best in Afghanistan, neighbouring Pakistan is paying an increasingly heavy price. Like a spate of previous Taliban attacks in recent days, today's
mayhem in Lahore underscored fears that the principal consequence of Washington's Afghan paralysis, albeit unintended, is the further destabilisation of the Pakistani state.
Pakistanis might be forgiven for wondering whether, with friends like these in Washington, who needs enemies?
Late last month,
five U.S. troops died within 24 hours in southern Afghanistan. Taliban
militants have killed more Americans and other troops deployed by NATO this
year than in any of the previous years since President Bush ordered the
invasion in 2001.
Will President
Obama supplement the 21,000 soldiers sent to Afghanistan during the summer? If
he heeds the experience of the Vietnam War, he'll find a gracious way to leave
the place and save his presidency.
Dianne Feinstein is a fairly typical Democratic Senator from a solidly blue state. In 2002,
she voted to authorize the attack on Iraq. Throughout the Bush years, she repeatedly
stood with the GOP to fund the war without the conditions and timetables sought by some of her fellow Democrats.
