RE-POSTED: The end of this endless war

Here in La Conner, every week, every day, we are paying taxes to the federal government. Nationwide, $974 billion is going to the military this year.

That is the treasure we dribbled out into the ground for two decades in Afghanistan. President Joe Biden rightfully called it our longest war, but it is only our latest war. If it becomes our last war, it might be from a combination of citizen exhaustion with patriotic fantasies of saving the world and disbelief in the fantastical rhetoric – lies – of politicians that evil doers out there are threatening our way of life.

How is it that the most powerful military in the world, funded by the greatest country in the world, loses wars to peasant armies in distant lands, when our forces are so technologically superior and so well trained and equipped? This is a familiar story in the 76 years since World War II ended. U.S. armed forces have overwhelming military might, but in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, even Lebanon, our men and women – and our tax dollars – get bogged down for years, until the fight is to withdraw with some semblance of honor.

Consider that wars are lost to either overwhelming superior force, as Germany and Japan against the allies in World War II, or because the masses of people do not believe in fighting, as with the South Vietnamese or Afghanis in the countryside now. All the money in the U.S. Treasury – too much which goes to corrupt foreign leadership and not local people – cannot win a war the masses of people do not believe in and do not support.

There was never a day during the Vietnam War when the South Vietnamese government was not labeled corrupt. Every news story had the phrase “the corrupt South Vietnamese government.” Likewise, our government props up so-called leaders that the Afghani people do not rally around and do not defend.

Our best and brightest civilian and military leaders put in power people to whom they can dictate. But these are dictators and not leaders of their people. People will not support, much less follow, so-called governments whose chief success is telling American diplomats what the Americans want to hear.

This fall or early next year news footage will likely show an eerily familiar montage of soldiers, police, interpreters and politicians stripping off uniforms and desperately trying to leave Afghanistan ahead of the Taliban takeover. Thousands – probably tens or even hundreds of thousands – of local people will be in danger and lose their lives. These everyday allies believed in a better life for themselves and their country. Alas, they were stuck between the extremes of religious and tribal forces on one side and an inept elite whose chief success was doing the American and allies bidding.

Here at home, local people – us – too often ignore our inept elites, listening for what we want to hear and are neither engaged nor questioning where our tax dollars go, whether to Afghanistan, Boeing, the United Nations or CIA clandestine operations. Until common citizens here hold our leaders accountable, the world’s only hope may be the U.S. military’s generals insisting on saying no, that wars cannot be won, that the missions are impossible.

Only we can insist that wars not be fought at all.