Al Qaeda has left Afghanistan. But we are staying. Now what?

I worked hard to get President Obama elected. I am active in Democratic Party politics here in Northern Virginia and in all honesty I had known that he supported escalating the war in Afghanistan when he was a candidate. He told us that on several occasions. Any Democrat that tells you he did not know was either asleep during the campaign or simply was not listening to the man.

However, in my inexplicable naivete, I must have assumed that once he realized that the bulk of National Democrats did not agree with his stand on that war, he would change his position. He did not. We are sending kids over to that country to kill and be killed as I write this. That fact really bothers me.

It is hard to explain how I feel. It isn’t betrayal. It is more like emotional exhaustion. Once the war casualties start coming home with horrendous wounds and injuries both mental and physical, I am going to start feeling helpless. It is always like that with me.

You see these kids in restaurants all the time around here. Sometimes their wounds can be so severe that the sight of these young injured servicemen takes one’s breath away. I am trying to steel myself for what is to come. It is never pretty.

Just as I knew that it would, the Democratic Party is slowly coming around to embracing the President’s Afghan War agenda largely because it senses that it has no choice. He is their man and they must get in line. What a shame.

I still find it hard to reconcile some facts in my own mind. Qaeda is no longer a viable force in Afghanistan. They have been driven out except about a hundred of them according to our own intelligence agencies. So now, our focus is switching to "the Taliban" which seems to be a catch all phrase for super-fundamentalist Muslims in Afghanistan and Pakistan that oppose our presence and see us as a military occupier.

To make a long story short, I am not buying into the President’s reasoning here. I don’t see the Taliban as a threat to our national security in any real way and Qaeda will always be a threat anywhere they are and now, they are mostly based in North Africa and Yemen. So why are we sending 30,000 troopers and marines to Afghanistan? Oil and gas exploration protection ? Mineral rights exploration protection? To stop the Russians and Chinese from establishing a presence in oil rich western and central Asia? I think the latter is probably closest to the truth.

So once again for the umpteenth time, the armed forces of the United States are being used as muscle for American business concerns in which perhaps twenty thousand Americans will make millions over the next two decades in western Asia and hundreds of thousands of Americans will make mashed potatoes out of their lives. That is, those who are lucky enough to live through the debacle that is to come. The combat will be brutal.

No one, NO ONE, has ever subdued Afghanistan. Those who know about such things tell us that it would be easier to nail a lump of tapioca pudding to the dining room wall than it will be to subdue insurgents hiding and fighting in the mountains and desert wastelands of Afghanistan. And all the while American blood and young American lives, not to mention Afghani and Pakistani lives will be crushed so that the Patricians who are so insistent that this nightmare go forward can make even more money than God.

I wonder how many of them are willing to send family members into combat to secure these ill-gotten gains?

This really hurts. I am all talked out and nobody is listening. Death and brutal life-changing injuries for these young people are headed our way in the most cruel fashion possible for reasons that have to do with making Big Money even bigger in this country.  And that is just fine with virtually anybody in power in this country.

I pray for the dead that will be coming home in boxes if they are lucky enough to get home, even that way.

CWO3 Tom Barnes, USCG (Ret.)