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.

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/