A US Army sergeant pulled the trigger that killed a number of Afghans including women and children. According to media, he has served 3 tours of duty in Iraq before being shipped to Afghanistan for more combat operations. He is said to be married and the father of two children of his own and in my opinion he is also the victim of a civilian leadership that has no understanding of the use and misuse of military power. President Obama who has never served in a uniform is surrounded by 4 star generals who advise him that the war in Afghanistan is winnable (some even wrote the military manual in counter insurgency) and the progress is constantly being made, just like they did for years in Iraq. (Just look at how things are in Iraq now.) They insisted that a surge in military power would be enough to bring the final conclusive victory. Those who expressed their disagreement with the civilian leadership (remember Admiral Fallon and Gen. McChrystal?) were retired and sent home in order to eliminate dissent.
It is understandable that primary motivation of our military top brass during relative calmness of peace times is to secure funds necessary to maintain combat readiness for future conflicts but a President should be able to tell the difference between the concepts of liberation and occupation, a conventional war between regular armies and an insurgency operation against a resistance by civilians. (Apparently, being the President of Harvard Law Review does not give someone this insight.) For this reason alone, I believe it is in the best interest of our national dialog to bring the military draft back so each and every one of our young men and women will have a chance to serve in military in order to understand how a military organization works and what are the limitations of military power as well as developing a sense of self discipline in addition to gaining a global perspective by going locations around the world and by being exposed to other cultures. (Rightly or wrongly, I believe that if V.P. Cheney has not resisted to being drafted, his opinions about the war in Iraq would have been somewhat different after a tour in Viet Nam. I also believe that if President Obama has ever been in uniform, his understanding of military would have been somewhat different.)
Although it has been generally accepted that the civilian rule over military is the political norm to be followed, a lack of understanding by civilian leadership about the inner workings of a military organization often leads to the events like the one happened in Afghanistan. A political leadership whose main concern has always been political gains and control of political power by going to great lengths in order to preserve status quo can invent concepts such as “War on Terror”, “Enemy Combatants”, “Secret Prisons”, “Executions without due Legal Process” , “Indefinite Detention without Charge”, “Drone Warfare and Strikes” and can re-invent torture against clearly written articles and accepted norms of International Laws and Agreements.
For a man who was perpetually engaged in combat away from his family and children during most of his military career, it is unavoidable that the realization of being caught in a never ending military quagmire where you can not tell the difference between the enemy in civilian clothes and the innocent civilians as well as the friendly Afghan soldier and the Afghan in uniform waiting for the opportunity to shoot at you will eventually catches up with you and I suspect this is what happened to this young man. It is possible that in a final desperate moment, he convinced himself that the only way he was going to escape from the hell he was so desperately trapped in was to take this drastic action. I believe that he is as much as a victim of a morally corrupt civilian rule as he is the vicious criminal involved in a massacre. But as always, the civilian leadership will ignore the part of his story that favors him and stick with the part that condemns him in order to exonerate the political process.
No doubt, there will be those who will try to sugar coat and distort the facts in order to defend our good name as a nation. We will hear statements like “He had previous brain trauma” or “He is a member of a troubled military unit”. Those statements will make us feel better as Americans but will not change the facts that there are bigger issues here for all of us to consider and try to understand.
Iraq experience proves beyond any reasonable doubt that military power can change regimes but can not change cultures. Nation building is nothing more than a hoax invented by corrupt politicians looking for ways to fulfill the pockets of their special interests buddies. Then there are those who believe that there is a military solution to every political problem overseas (a Navy pilot turned politician comes to mind) as well as those who have dual national interests at the highest levels of our government including the Senate. And yet we, as the people, need to finally understand and accept that terrorism is a reactive cultural phenomenon and can not be defeated by guns, missiles and drones and yet it can be defeated by other means. 10 years of inconclusive fighting in Afghanistan should be enough to prove the validity of this postulation for all current and future leaders.
May God bless America and our men and women in uniform..
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