Letter 2 America for April 8, 2014

Dear America,

The first good news of the war there came out of Afghanistan this past weekend.  After thirteen years of American investment of blood and a trillion dollars...after thirteen years of watching the American mission that ostensibly justified that expenditure of life and treasure in what ever- increasingly seemed a futile and misguided effort to bring modernity and civility to a nation that had never known it, a glimmer of the twenty first century shone through thru the blood and tears. The Afghan people went to the polls in the millions to vote in defiance of vile threats from a willing and brutal cult that takes its inspiration from life as it was lived in the seventh century.  Despite the threats of the Taliban and the efforts to influence the outcome of a venal, egotistical president, the populace went to the poles in record numbers not only to vote in defiance of the threats of the Taliban, but also in a manner contrary to the wishes of the only "democratically elected" president they have ever known.  While there have been some accusation of vote fraud, they have been few and minor compared to the last election, and the two candidates who seem to be destined to come out of it with substantial leads over the other candidates do not include the kleptocratic president's hand picked successor.  Those two candidates, one of them an outspoken critic of the incumbent, will vie in a run-off election to choose the next president, and regardless of who wins that run-off, this election is a victory for the Afghan people and a defeat for the inhumanly brutal theocratic autocracy that governed when the United States, having had its demand for the head of Osama bin Laden in 2001 ignored, invaded.  Over the past decade and more, the mission that started it all--the capture of bin Laden--faded into oblivion and our purpose in being across the world in a place that didn't seem to welcome us in any fashion became nebulous at best.  The Bush administration was big on "nation building," but while democracy may have been the ostensible form of the governance we installed in Afghanistan, the country remained little more than a feudal society ruled by war lords and corrupt bureaucrats affecting western airs.  Afghan President Karzai's brother was indicted for massive bank fraud, only to have the investigation of his thievery openly quashed by the unapologetic president.  Billions of dollars have disappeared into a system of bribery and outright theft that has passed for the Afghan government, and now, President Hamid Karzai has taken to condemning the American war effort for the collateral damage its war effort has caused, including the tragic loss of civilian Afghan lives, as if the Americans who virtually ceded his office to him were the progenitors of the misfortune that the war has become.   The lives lost were beginning to look like a perverse waste just a week ago as Karzai's new palatial estate neared completion just next door to the current presidential palace...an overt reminder that Karzai intended to function with impunity as the father of the country when his successor took office.

But it appears now that the status quo will not prevail after the election is complete.  At least one of the candidates in the run-off to come--there will be a run-off unless one of them wins more than 50% of the vote--was an open adversary of forces maintaining that corrupt state of affairs, and the effect of the Taliban's imprecations on the Afghan people seems to be on the wane.  Those two phenomena have been the missing ingredients in the effort to bring Afghanistan into the twenty-first century politically and socially, but the Afghan people seem now to have said "enough" to both the oppression of an atavistic theocracy and the greed of the first generation of Afghan erstwhile democrats.  It is the willingness of the people of any nation to accept less than civil liberty that makes repression possible, and the Afghan people have committed to shrugging off that kind of apathy...that understandable submission to fear.  It is wholly commendable, and the next Nobel Peace Prize should go to all of those who went to the polls and voted...especially the women, who have been subjected to attempted assassination for wanting to go to school and "honor killing" when they have happened to fall in love with someone from the wrong village.  The Afghan people are still a long way from the modernity that passes for evolution in the rest of the world, but they have taken a giant step forward, and they are to be commended for both their courage and their resolve.  The next steps will be no less of a slog, but it seems at least plausible that the people of Afghanistan will take them, and that is not a good thing just for them.

Thousands of American lives have been lost and mangled in the transmogrified search for Osama bin Laden.  Bin Laden has been found and dispatched, but the residuum of the mission, to the extent that it was ever defined, was the creation of a modern, democratic nation in the stead of the brutal theocracy constituted by the rule of the Taliban, which continues to fight the prospect of the war's intended outcome with the same indiscriminate inhumanity that led to its decision to harbor the murderer of a few thousand American civilians on September 11, 2001.  The "War on Terror" was created in response, and instead of labeling the al Qaeda perpetrators as the criminal deviants that they were, their cause, and the Taliban's for that matter, were elevated to those of a wartime enemy nation...a mistake in my opinion in both the political and the moral sense.  But be that as it may, thousands of Americans have lost their lives in the fray and it was beginning to look like it was all for naught.  The war in Iraq seems to have left behind a simmering battle between religious sects that shows no sign of abatement...much less resolution...this century, and until last weekend, it appeared that once American troops departed at the end of this year, Afghanistan would recede from incipient modern democracy and revert to the agglomeration of fiefdoms that it was not so long ago.  All we would have been left with was the question of why we bothered to expend so much in so futile a cause.  But now, that question may be obviated by the election results in Afghanistan, and for that, we can all be thankful if it materializes into the advancement of Afghan society in what now portends to be a substantial way.  Perhaps now all of the dead, including our own, can rest in peace after all.

Your friend,

Mike