Tomgram: Stephanie Savell, The Saddest Story of All
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Today’s piece by Stephanie Savell, co-director of the invaluable Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute, goes hand-in-hand with the release of a new report by that very group, "The Human and Financial Costs of the Explosive Remnants of War in Afghanistan.” You can read the report itself by clicking here. Tom]
Just in case you hadn’t heard the good news, the last man from the president’s foreign policy “team” still standing, Trump whispererSecretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust. Bolton, who was axed or resigned, depending on who’s telling the tale, can now write his memoirs (Wars I Meant to, But Never Got to, Fight), while raising money for Republican congressional candidates who are eager to start yet more conflicts across the planet.
Even before the abrupt cancellation of, and imbroglio about, Trump’s invitation to Taliban leaders to visit Camp David, which evidently precipitated Bolton’s hasty departure, Pompeo had some genuinely good news to offer Americans about their 18-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not that it’s over, of course, not yet, but that we’ve essentially won anyway! (Feel free to start chanting “USA! USA!” now.) Or rather, to quote the secretary of state, we “delivered” big time in that country and so have been highly “successful” in our mission there! As he put it in early September, “If you go back and look at the days following 9/11, the objectives set out were pretty clear: to go defeat al-Qaeda, the group that had launched the attack on the United States of America from Afghanistan. And today, al-Qaeda... doesn’t even amount to a shadow of its former self in Afghanistan.”
So victory at last, not just over John Bolton but over al-Qaeda, too! Forget that al-Qaeda offshoots have sprouted and thrived from Africa to Syria, Yemen to Afghanistan in the course of the never-ending wars that began with the Afghan invasion. Forget as well that the American war there, particularly in the air, intensified in recent months amid peace talks -- above all, the war of bombast in which Pompeo (like the president) recently bragged that we were hitting the Taliban big time, even as Trump declared peace talks with that movement's leaders "dead."
“In just the last 10 days alone,” Pompeo said proudly, with an evident urge to revive the Vietnam-era body count, “we've killed over 1,000 Taliban.” Such bragging aside, the Afghan War is not only the longest in our history and getting longer by the day, but obviously a lost war as well. And while the president is still pondering the withdrawal of about 5,000 American troops from Afghanistan (putting U.S. forces more or less back where they were when his generals convinced him to send in 4,000 troops in mid-2017), military figures, active and retired, continue to promote an American presence there into eternity and the media continues to raise fears of a “premature” withdrawal from that country. All of this may seem perfectly normal in the age of Trump, but looked at another way, as TomDispatch regular Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, does today, it also couldn’t be sadder. In part, this is because, given the ordnance the U.S. has already expended in that country, the war there may never end for many Afghans. But let Savell explain. Tom
Just in case you hadn’t heard the good news, the last man from the president’s foreign policy “team” still standing, Trump whispererSecretary of State Mike Pompeo, recently left National Security Advisor John Bolton in the dust. Bolton, who was axed or resigned, depending on who’s telling the tale, can now write his memoirs (Wars I Meant to, But Never Got to, Fight), while raising money for Republican congressional candidates who are eager to start yet more conflicts across the planet.
Even before the abrupt cancellation of, and imbroglio about, Trump’s invitation to Taliban leaders to visit Camp David, which evidently precipitated Bolton’s hasty departure, Pompeo had some genuinely good news to offer Americans about their 18-year-old war in Afghanistan. Not that it’s over, of course, not yet, but that we’ve essentially won anyway! (Feel free to start chanting “USA! USA!” now.) Or rather, to quote the secretary of state, we “delivered” big time in that country and so have been highly “successful” in our mission there! As he put it in early September, “If you go back and look at the days following 9/11, the objectives set out were pretty clear: to go defeat al-Qaeda, the group that had launched the attack on the United States of America from Afghanistan. And today, al-Qaeda... doesn’t even amount to a shadow of its former self in Afghanistan.”
So victory at last, not just over John Bolton but over al-Qaeda, too! Forget that al-Qaeda offshoots have sprouted and thrived from Africa to Syria, Yemen to Afghanistan in the course of the never-ending wars that began with the Afghan invasion. Forget as well that the American war there, particularly in the air, intensified in recent months amid peace talks -- above all, the war of bombast in which Pompeo (like the president) recently bragged that we were hitting the Taliban big time, even as Trump declared peace talks with that movement's leaders "dead."
“In just the last 10 days alone,” Pompeo said proudly, with an evident urge to revive the Vietnam-era body count, “we've killed over 1,000 Taliban.” Such bragging aside, the Afghan War is not only the longest in our history and getting longer by the day, but obviously a lost war as well. And while the president is still pondering the withdrawal of about 5,000 American troops from Afghanistan (putting U.S. forces more or less back where they were when his generals convinced him to send in 4,000 troops in mid-2017), military figures, active and retired, continue to promote an American presence there into eternity and the media continues to raise fears of a “premature” withdrawal from that country. All of this may seem perfectly normal in the age of Trump, but looked at another way, as TomDispatch regular Stephanie Savell, co-director of the Costs of War Project, does today, it also couldn’t be sadder. In part, this is because, given the ordnance the U.S. has already expended in that country, the war there may never end for many Afghans. But let Savell explain. Tom
The Imperial Debris of War
Why Ending the Afghan War Won’t End the Killing
By Stephanie Savell
I’ve never been to Afghanistan, but I am the mother of two young children. So when I imagine what life must be like there after 18 years of war, my mind conjures up the children most vividly -- the ones who have been affected by the conflict -- and their parents. I think of the 12-year-old boy who was carrying water to a military checkpoint in a remote part of that country, earning pennies to help sustain his family, whose legs were blown off by a landmine. Or the group of children at a wedding party, playing behind the house where the ceremony was taking place. One of them picked up an unexploded shell, fired from a helicopter, that hadn’t detonated in battle. It blew up, killing two children, Basit and Haroon, and wounding 12 others. What must it be like to care for a five year old -- the age of my oldest child -- who is maimed and who needs to learn how to walk, play, and live again with ill-fitting prosthetics?
A major legacy of the U.S. war on terror in Afghanistan, which began in October 2001 and shows little sign of actually ending anytime soon, will be the “explosive remnants of war” -- a term for all the landmines and unexploded bombs and other weaponry that have been left behind in the earth. This debris of America’s endless war, still piling up, is devastating in many ways. It makes it so much harder for an agricultural population to sustain itself on the land. It wreaks havoc on Afghans’ emotional wellbeing and sense of security. And it poses special hazards for children, who are regularly injured and killed by the left-behind explosives of an already devastating war as they play, herd livestock, or collect water and firewood.
Given the expected drawdown of American troops in Afghanistan -- despite the recent breakdown in peace negotiations with the Taliban, President Trump continues to indicate that he may pursue such a path -- and the possibility of an official end to the U.S. war there, this topic is both pressing and relevant to public debate in America. Offering aid and reparations for the horrific ongoing costs of explosive military waste should be a priority on Washington’s future agenda.
Click here to read more of this dispatch.
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