3,341. - Democratic Underground

Robb

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Sat Nov-27-10 08:13 PM
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3,341.

"Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God." -- Matthew 5:9

This week we will pass a milestone in Afghanistan, perhaps significant, perhaps not, as with all milestones.

It will be on Tuesday (bad math from the AP notwithstanding) we will have had soldiers in that country precisely as long as the Soviets did:

3,341 days.

An anniversary invites reflection, and a grim one such as this is no different. By the numbers, of course, the chasm that separates the two conflicts is vast by every other measure. This speaks to the weakness of numbers. To wit:

We will likely top 1,500 U.S. military fatalities in AfPak by the end of the year. That's one soldier killed every 2.2 days since we began. Soviet fatality rates were appreciably higher, some 14,000 KIA by the end of their war -- 4.2 soldiers killed every day. We are not, of course, finished yet.

The monetary cost of the war in Afghanistan has reached almost $7 billion per month for us -- about what the Soviets spent in a year fighting mujahideen.**

The take-away the numbers offer: we're spending money faster, and dying slower, than the Soviets did.

But numbers carry only so far; anecdote picks up the slack. It is nearly impossible now, after so long, to find people in this country whose lives have not been adversely affected by this war. Some Christmases ago, I learned the excruciating details surrounding the death of an old friend. The peculiar physics of love and hate can make one's blood boil and frost from visiting the same horror; but I, like most of us, now sit safely surrounded by asphalt, two oceans, and 5,000 ICBMs. Quite safe in my righteousness.

Not so in P2K (Paktia, Paktika, Khost), Helmand, Faryab, Farah, Logar. You cannot live normally under fear of sudden death. Anyone who has lived in a war zone can attest, normalcy does not return until years after the rational reasons for that fear go away.

It is the height of conceit, and in full flight from the facts, that those of us who have lost friends and family feel in any way unique in this regard, any more. Particularly as Americans. Any desire for justice in the name of our own dead pales, shatteringly, in comparison to what is felt on the ground in this conflict.

So 3,341 days later, despite myself, I have to measure Afghanistan by that metric. The first lesson of conflict resolution is, if you have been affected by the conflict, to ignore your heart -- because in its darkest places, it wants nothing less than the death of everyone who killed yours. Recognizing (and acting upon the realization) that violence begets violence is a luxury afforded chiefly to those unaffected by violence -- and cliché thought it is, to find the real heroes of civilization it is necessary only to look for those few who successfully transcend the cycle.

I do not know who those heroes will be with respect to Afghanistan and Pakistan. I have no capacity even to imagine them. I know it will not be people like me, who cheer quietly at every UAV strike, grimly satisfied with the result, and rationalize civilian death with precisely the same mental gymnastics that allowed my friend to be brutalized and killed by once-devout men.

Precisely the same. Our differences are utterly obscured by our similarities. It is people like me who fire rifles into the air to celebrate blown-up NATO outposts. It is people like me who celebrate the death of the enemy as if it were a way forward.

It is not.

Murderous hearts on all sides must begin to make overtures. 3,341 days on, it is even clear to people like me that it will not be whether we stay or go, the acts of bombs or soldiers or sanctions that will ultimately bring peace to this scarred part of the world. It will be brought only by the appearance of conflict participants who can actually turn the other cheek -- an increasingly rare breed in a region in its Nth iteration of violence and desperation.

Blessed are the peacemakers. In memory of my innocence, I eagerly, hopefully await them, ignoring the darkest places of my heart that doubt they even exist.

**It's wrong to talk about money and the Soviet war without mentioning us; some estimates (cough) put US spending in Afghanistan at some $60 million per month near the end there. Funding the mujahideen. We all know how well that worked out. Credit where due to Reagan for winning short-term strategies that fucked everything up in the long term. You want a metaphor for the 1980s, it's this.