When Katie, Brian and Charlie roll out their television cameras for the Nightly News this week and meet with Barack Obama, it will be encouraging if they ask one of the logical questions. Not only about Iran or the Israeli-Palestinian issue. But what, must be the reasoning behind his and John McCain’s belief that Afghanistan is worth fighting for now or ever? Oh please, Barack, do not be tempted to truck out the old Bush nonsense, linking it to the war on terror. As everyone knows by now, Afghanistan just happens to be the dope capital of the world. Its importance is that it is the source of more opium poppies than any other country on the planet. Eventually, tons of its deadly little flowers will end up feeding the heroin appetites everywhere, but; principally ours, the U.S.A. But we haven’t made a serious effort to wipe out the fields where the poppies are grown. Instead we play nice nice and pay off the Afghans who cultivate the opium.  Perhaps it would be a hopeless undertaking to do more anyway.  But then why are Barack and John McCain on the record, talking about placing America’s latest stack of chips on Afghanistan? The Russians failed before. So has every other large power before them tried to pacify the place. We presume Barack certainly will not try to find some flimsy excuse to justify another regional war. It’s unlikely the American people could stand for it.
My memory of what was once a strife-torn kingdom beseiged by warring tribes and ethnic conflict is some 50 years old when I got caught in a firefight between two rival warlords in the Khyber Pass. When I returned to Kabul and asked an American Embasssy officer why the U.S. was dumping $50 million worth of assistance on the Afghans, his answer then seems laughable now. It was, he said, for nation-building.
It is no laughing matter today. We are still hoping to build a democracy out of a patchwork of rival tribes and factions that have been warring for generations.Watching David Brancaccio’s fine PBS program, “NOW,” last Friday evening,  it was impossible to contain my anger, watching courageous young U.S. Marines doing battle, supposedly with the Taliban. There was no way of telling where the bad guys were because we never saw them on camera. It was like watching another one- dimensional war with the so-called insurgents in Iraq or, to date myself, the Vietcong in Vietnam.  But once again, having America’s young men risk their lives for as ill-defined a purpose as their comrades did in Falluja and other hellholes of Iraq. It makes me want to grit my teeth. I’ve seen too much of this nonsense in other parts of the world that strains the capacity of the Marine Corps to be combat ready when and if a real war is ever to be fought again. If Afghanistan the Taliban and Osama bin Laden are the targets to be dealt with, let’s finally get it done with by insisting that the Pakistanis clean up their neighborhood.  We’ve paid for the job many times over, having poured billions of dollars in military assistance to their chaotic country for decades during the Cold War and many more years since then.  The generals, from Musharraf on down, owe us big time.  Which brings me back to Barack Obama, John McCain and all the other people who are seemingly convinced of Afghanistan’s importance. Show us why it is.  The American people are wrestling with the price at the pump, rotten banks, vanishing homes, employment and the cost of getting sick, all of which that are of greater importance to them  than Afghanistan. It is too remote to even think about.
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[...] few days ago, I wrote critically about continuing U.S. support for Afghanistan that was being endorsed by both [...]