Afghanistan, The War Without End

For several weeks I have carried the image of Brendan Marrocco, a young man of 23 years whose photograph appeared on the front page of The New York Times. It’s a strong image that sinks in, that hurts, and that remains recorded inside of a person and that, for me, has come to symbolize the never-ending wars, without victory, that the United States is carrying out in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the photo we are able to see his torso and his head. Nothing more, because this young man — admirably still enthusiastic with life and full of plans for the future — lost both his arms and his legs when a bomb exploded under the vehicle that he was driving on the outskirts of Baghdad, making himself the first U.S. soldier to survive after having lost four extremities.

He says he is feeling happy to be alive. Others haven’t had that luck: In Iraq, since the war started, almost 5,000 young U.S. soldiers have died, while in Afghanistan the figure passes 1,000, not including the tens of thousands of citizens of both countries that have died because of these conflicts.

Iraq is now the forgotten war. One speaks little of it, and the Pentagon has started the withdrawal. Opponents of [the war in] Afghanistan say it is “Obama’s war,” even when, in reality, George W. Bush initiated it with, according to the then-president, “the support of the entire world.”*

No one doubts that Bush exaggerated, but it’s also certain that his decision for attacking counted on great support inside and outside of his country, because it was in response to the terrorist attack on Washington and New York in 2001. A year later, then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld assured that they had just finished off the Taliban and Al-Qaida.

But here we are, almost a decade later, still without discernment nor even remotely an end to this “other war” that already has the doubtful distinction of being the longest armed conflict in the history of the United States — even longer than the Vietnam War.

But apart from its duration, Vietnam and Afghanistan have little in common. One was the result of politics trying to contain communism in the south of Asia; the other was the response to the only attack that the United States has suffered on its own land.

The United States was left defeated by Vietnam and never recuperated from the trauma. It was a war that terribly divided the country, bringing about passions and demonstrations never before seen here. Afghanistan, however, has received little public attention, but it’s starting to try the patience of this nation.

According to the latest polls, the majority of U.S. citizens don’t consider it worthwhile to continue fighting in Afghanistan, and two-thirds of the population think that eventually the Pentagon troops will retire without winning.

The White House, for its part, has said that it plans to begin a transition stage in July of 2011, when the Afghan government hopes to assume greater responsibility for security tasks. Nevertheless, many experts predict that the United States will still be in Afghanistan until 2020, and much longer.

The conflict in Afghanistan is equally unpopular in the rest of the world, insofar as countries that make up the so-called Coalition are starting to arrange their own withdrawals, showing the little confidence they have in the United States while bidding good riddance to this war, which has gone from bad to worse.

The Netherlands already announced that they will retire 2,000 soldiers at the end of this year; Canada will do it next summer; Poland leaves in 2012, while British Prime Minister David Cameron already said that he wants his troops on the way back to London before the next election in 2015.

In Washington, the Obama administration has declared that this is “a war of necessity” and has increased the number of soldiers that are fighting there, but it is a race against time, without even a remote way of knowing what the result of this strategy will be. What the experts give as a fact is that the war will continue — and very likely without winning by 2012, when the president would want to be re-elected.

When the first bombs fell over Kandahar, Barack Obama was an unknown senator in the state of Illinois, YouTube didn’t exist, nor did the iPhone, and neither had one U.S. soldier arrived in Iraq yet. Marrocco entered high school and dreamed of a long military career and of sports. Nine years of a war is a long time. 105 months are too many.

* Editor’s Note: This quote actually can be attributed to West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd in a September 20, 2002, speech to the U.S. Senate, when he indicated that the U.S. “must not act alone ... [and] must have the support of the world.”