Endless.

President Obama is committing another 17,000 soldiers to the war in Afghanistan, we learned this week. Characterized even by liberals as "the good war" some time back, our occupation of that sorry place has begun its eighth year. That's reaching Iran/Iraq war duration, and lord knows that conflict went on way too long. Only 18% of Afghans are in favor of this escalation, along with 34% of Americans (predictably higher, since we're not the ones being surged upon). So why the hell are we still in Afghanistan, anyway? I've heard a lot of arguments, but none seem all that convincing, frankly - no more so than the ones I heard back when Bush decided post 9/11 to descend upon the basket case his predecessors left behind years earlier, after bankrolling fanatics like Gulbeddin Hekmatyar and their terror-league allies for a decade or more. In 2001, Bush Jr. traded one set of war lords for another. What's Obama's plan?

I think before we as an imperial nation (don't fight it - that's what we are) can make that decision, we need to get used to the notion that we have no right to be there in the first place, and that occupying that country does not make us safer. Yes, yes... Osama Bin Laden lived there when 9/11 took place, but the essential planning and preparation for that hideous crime occurred not in the mountains of Afghanistan but in Germany and the United States. To this day, our government still doesn't understand the nature of these decentralized terror groups. Our C.I.A. brags about killing senior leadership and decapitating the organization, as if Al Qaeda were organized like General Motors. It's not. Preventing 9/11-type attacks is going to take something other than an endless supply of drone-fired missiles. For one thing, it will require more creative thinking at home with respect to prevention. Those fuckers used our own ramshackle air transportation system and our own lax building standards against us on that fateful day. My guess is that they'll try to do the same again - identify a weakness and drive a metaphorical (or not) truck bomb through it. Just the other day, I heard the owner of nuclear power plants in my part of New York State complaining about NRC requirements for hardening new reactors against plane-crash attacks. Then there's food safety. Yikes.

There is also the supply side of the equation to consider. We've got to stop making more terrorists. The Iraq war has created four million refugees - more than two million of them are stuck in squalid quarters in Jordan and Syria. Most will never see their homes again, since their neighborhoods were ethnically cleansed. That mass of dispossessed people provides fertile ground for future extremist attacks against us and anyone allied with us. They and the millions of Palestinians still rotting in refugee camps are understandably angry with the Middle East order we worked so hard to build. I'm not talking about the fantasy Middle East George Bush used to wax poetic about - I mean the actual one we've invested in over the past sixty years, through our deep involvement in regional affairs, our support for despotic regimes, our bankrolling of Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and adventures in Lebanon. For so many, we have been the enemy for many years - Bush merely sealed the deal. What we do from this point forward is crucial to any chance for peace in this already bloody century.

The best way to be safe is not to incentivize violence against yourself. Sending more troops, more drones, and more bombs is exactly the wrong way to go about it.

luv u,

jp