Experiment/ Afghanistan

I haven't posted anything in quite a while, but now it's summer vacation so I figured I'd at least consider starting up again. However, I haven't really decided yet so it is entirely possible that this will be followed by another long period without updates. It is summer, though, so you never know. I could try to fill in the gap between my last post and this but I don't really want to and presumably things will come up naturally.

Well, I just wrote a letter to Obama about how we need to get out of Afghanistan (this issue has been bothering me for a while but the night before last I was particularly upset about it) and I'll stick it in the mail as soon as I can remember where I put those stamps... So the war in Afghanistan has really been bothering me. The whole argument for the war is that it's better than Iraq because they actually attacked us.

But does that really justify it? First of all, it was al Qaeda who attacked us, and we're in a war with Afghanistan not just al Qaeda. Moreover, we're not even sure al Qaeda is still in Afghanistan. But let's just say they are in Afghanistan. Does that give us a right to go in there and kill people? Moreover, if you look at the numbers, we've actually been responsible for more deaths in this war than were killed in 9/11. Ultimately, nothing can justify killing people in wars.

And how exactly is this war supposed to be a good thing? Supposedly, it's going to make the world safer by getting rid of "terrorists" (I put that in quotation marks because it seems to me that calling people terrorists is minimizing the role of environmental factors or at least muddling them up with personal factors), but is it really? Pretend, for a moment, that Iraq decides to retaliate for what we've done to their country by bringing in troops and killing people. Besides being horrified and condemning the action, what do you think people would do? If you didn't already hate Iraq, you probably would when they killed your family. And guess what? Now we've got a new terrorist. This is pretty much what is happening in Afghanistan or is at least likely to happen in the future.

And why is it that only US citizens have the right to safety? Clearly by our bringing troops to kill people and in some cases civilians into Afghanistan, we're making a lot of Afghanis less safe. So even if we were making things safe for us here, we don't have the right to do that if it comes at the expense of others' safety.

It's easy for us to say that this war is justified when all the killing and destruction is going on far away in Afghanistan. We don't have to deal with fearing for our safety, or the deaths of our friends and family, or fear for our own lives. We don't have to witness people being killed just because another country decides we're expendable. So it's very easy for us to just ignore the brutality and civilian deaths. But imagine for a moment that the war were going on here, in the US. Would it be okay then? Probably not. And if we really confront this reality, we must realize that it's not acceptable in Afghanistan, either. It shouldn't matter if you happen to live in a country that has been home to unsavory characters: killing is killing. And killing is wrong.