Diamond-Cut Life

If you’re like me, it’s easy to pay almost no heed to the war in Afghanistan that started in retaliation for the 9-11 attacks of 2001. But with the eight-year anniversary a few days away, I’m going to look at it. This war is being fought allegedly to protect me, and also you, if you’re in the U.S. as I am. It’s gone on longer than our involvement in World Wars I and II combined, and it deserves our clear eyes and critical thinking.

Bob Herbert wrote in the New York Times yesterday that President Obama should get us out of Afghanistan, rather than escalate and prolong the war as he is doing. Let me voice three reasons I’m convinced Mr. Herbert is right, and then tell how the war in Afghanistan relates to the diamond-cut life.

1.) This war continually kills civilians, which is morally wrong. You don’t have to be religious (though I happen to be) to find it morally wrong. The most recent instance was in a context of NATO commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal having announced just in June he would be working to curb civilian casualties. The fact that euphemistically-termed civilian casualties and collateral damage (think: women and children charred beyond recognition) are a part of every war is a good reason to never go to war in the first place, not a rationale to keep pursuing this war.

2.) I feel more endangered by this war than I feel protected by it. If the average Afghani did not resent or hate the U.S. in 2001, he or she probably does now. This fuels terrorism. We can’t blame hatred just on fundamentalist or Taliban propaganda; we also have our own actions — an eight-year war — to blame. On September 11, 2001, we were the aggrieved party. In the eight years since, our military hammer has made Afghanistan the aggrieved party, with the Taliban alive and well despite being out of official power. Terrorists, the ones we’re so afraid of, are by definition people without official power, at any rate. So show me: How does this war protect you or me?

3.) The war in Afghanistan has cost (wasted) billions of dollars and thousands of lives. (I count Afghani lives here along with American lives, all human lives equally.) Those billions could be invested instead in life-giving economic development and health care, in either or both countries. But war is addictive, as author Chris Hedges has pointed out, a closed-loop system with its own twisted, self-justifying economy of death and profit. We need to break the addictive cycle, not perpetuate it.

4.) We will never win this war. I list this reason last for a reason: I don’t see “we can win” as an acceptable reason for war in the first place. As a stand-alone, the we-can-win rationale is just bully thinking, tantamount to the biggest kid in fourth grade shoving a smaller kid around because he can get away with it. But given that every war seeks to improve a bad situation, the ‘we can win’ rationale concerning Afghanistan is flat wrong. As with our hubris-driven war in Vietnam, the enemy are guerrillas who make themselves invisible and can survive forever, while the government we’re defending is corrupt and ultimately indefensible. The will of the U.S.  cannot prevail in Afghanistan, which brings me to my last point.

My theme here at Diamond-Cut Life is more joy and less consumption. More joy for who? Human beings, not just Americans. And less consumption for who? Those who have lots more than they need for quality of life, my belief being that everyone deserves a decent quality of life. How does all this relate to our war in Afghanistan? As with victims of violent crimes, people living in war zones are thrown so far back into just struggling to survive that any quality of life, shot at joy and happiness is shot out of the water. And the billions of dollars spent on destruction instead of investment in jobs and public health is the worst kind of consumption imaginable. It’s an anti-life brand of consumption.

I dare to think things shouldn’t be like this, that with our human power of choice we can do better than this. We need a pro-life ethic of consumption, one that rejects war, supports quality of life for all human beings, and the possibility of happiness. On the anniversary of 9-11, let’s think clearly about the war in Afghanistan that we allowed 9-11 to trigger, and tell President Obama that his continued war-path contains no victorious end-point, but is only a closed-loop, deathly ellipsis which itself needs to end.

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