More Slightly Impersonal Writing

My day was fairly dull today, and so I'm going to take this opportunity to post about some of the things I spend time thinking about. Yesterday I was writing more about feminism, so today I think I'll go with the war in Afghanistan. So, it should be very obvious that I'm opposed to the war in Iraq. I'm also opposed to the war in Afghanistan, though. As such, Obama's decision to intensify the war in Afghanistan concerns me.

First, though, I'm going to go into my reasoning. Clearly, my initial reason was that I'm essentially a pacifist. War is wrong: all it is is legalized murder. However, once I started learning about the war in Afghanistan in my NSL class and then researching it at home, I discovered that not only would the war in Afghanistan be morally wrong, but it would also be ineffective. It seems that our strategy is to storm into Afghanistan and kill all the terrorists. That's absurd, however. I mean, first of all it would be very, very difficult to even FIND all of them, what with the treacherous terrain and all. But it is also very counterproductive.

You see, the main reason that these people get away with terrorism is that many of the Afghani people support them. Basically, Afghanistan was a mess after various wars and the Taliban provided order and stability. The other way the Taliban get support is by setting themselves up as the positive alternative to the evil Western nations, particularly the US. And it works. The US is extremely easy to demonize. So, really, if we go in and start killing people, more people will become terrorists.

Another reason people turn to terrorism is that Afghanistan's economy is a mess. The main ways of getting any money are basically selling illegal drugs and terrorism. Naturally, starting a war wouldn't help their economy too much. What they need are things like schools, food, and a better economy. Not war. By going to war, we worsen the problem, and our own image, to the extent that it isn't already as bad as it could possibly be.

Even from a purely selfish standpoint it's stupid. Our own country's economy is such a wreck that we really don't need to go into more debt by starting pointless, counterproductive wars. So the war is very, very stupid.

One thing that perplexes me, though, is why on earth Obama supports the war. I mean, if it were Bush I would understand just to attribute it to stupidity. But Obama's smart. He's really smart. So why doesn't he get it?

Since I'm sure I've left things out, most notably the region's history (I'm not too great with world history, but hopefully I'll improve), I'm going to leave some lovely little links! And that was accidental alliteration. Really.

Rethink Afghanistan
http://www.peaceactionwest.org/
http://getafghanistanright.com/