Please Tell Me Again: Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Trump is lowering the troop count in Afghanistan, where 2,448 members of the U.S. military and Department of Defense civilians have died since 2001. But 2,000 will troops will remain, defending… what?

I’m reading a book — Roberts Ridge — about an attempt by US SEALS and Army Rangers to fulfill the military’s promise to never leave a comrade behind. A Ranger was stranded, alone, near the top of a 10,240-foot mountain in Afghanistan called Takur Ghar. The peak was being fiercely defended by Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

As I read the last few lines of a short (two-page) chapter near the end of the book, I teared up, in sorrow and in anger.

I paraphrase those two pages in the following four paragraphs.

Things were settling down within the Chapman home in Fayetteville, NC. Valerie had put the two young kids down, a job husband John ordinarily did when he was home. On this evening, he was still off, as an Army Ranger, on a mission.

The knock on the door came at 9:30 pm. Earlier, she’d seen a news report that several special forces troops had died in Afghanistan. Every such report put a ball in her stomach and a lump in her throat. She felt for the wives who, she assumed, had already been notified.

She looked out the window to see who’d come calling so late. She saw either the car or the two officers in dress blues.

“Of course,” she said, according to Roberts Ridge’ author Malcolm MacPherson.

John Chapman, Valerie’s husband, had died two days earlier on Takur Ghar

In addition to costing seven American lives — seven American lives — this mission saw the loss of two $30 million helicopters and a significant number of sophisticated tools and weapons.

Neil Roberts was dead before the attempt to rescue him got off the ground.

So, Why???

Tell me again, please, what in the name of Dilbert are we doing in Afghanistan?

I know the arguments about the Taliban and al Qaeda, how they want to return life in that country to something like it was five hundred or more years ago. Aside from being religious fanatics, they seek such a “simpler life” because they don’t like how politicians and “liberal policies” have made infidels of everyone but them.

As Rhett Butler so famously said in ‘Gone With The Wind’, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

58,200 GIs Were Lost in Vietnam

Back in the Vietnam war era, we were supposedly fighting in that country (losing more than 58,200 American troops in the process) to prevent our country from eventually being in harm’s way.

How could that happen? The much-touted ‘domino theory’ said that if one Southeast Asia country fell to Communism, others would too, eventually affecting countries linked, politically, to ours.

America formed alliances with several countries in that part of the world to help prevent them falling victim, as Vietnam had when US troops and support for South Vietnam were withdrawn, to Marxist influences and a Communist form of government.

Peaceful Alliances

Significantly, those alliances have not extended to sending troops to either Laos or Cambodia, the two ‘friendly’ nations bordering Vietnam. And of course, we also haven’t sent troops into China, Vietnam’s less-friendly neighbor.

Similarly, our relationships with and interests in countries surrounding Afghanistan — Pakistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and China — aren’t of a type necessitating military action in Afghanistan.

So, why are we there?

Joe Biden needs to address, and answer, that question. Soon. Or more American lives will be pointlessly lost there.