Afghanican’t

This Memorial Day, let’s pay respect to our honored dead by not needlessly adding to their number.

Bin Laden is finally KIA and the Taliban have been chased back into the hills. That’s the game, isn’t it? It’s what we went to Afghanistan to do, as I recall the rhetoric from the time. 9/11 has been avenged as best as it can be, and the government that harbored the terrorists has gone from being the ruling authority to just another bunch of criminal creeps on the lam, killing their fellow citizens indiscriminately in the name of god.

This is absolutely as good as we are going to get it in Afghanistan.

You know what the long-term prospects for that entire part of the world are?

Diddley-squat.

Islam’s internecine squabbles make Ireland’s decades of Catholic/Protestant bloodshed look like A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. They’ve been at war with themselves for millenia, not decades. As sure as I’m sitting here, if they had had access to nuclear weapons a thousand years ago, they would have blown themselves to Kingdom Come loooooong before now.

As it is, now it’s only a question of when, not if. The best we can hope for is to not be downwind on that terrible day.

And since there’s nothing we can do to avert it, whether we have boots on the ground there or not, I say let’s not hang around just to add to the body count.

Look, I’m in favor of the U.S. having a thriving military presence the world over. This world is a dangerous fucking place. People from east to west and top to bottom like power and they like killing each other. It’s only smart to have an American military presence in the general vicinity of likely global hotspots, to help keep the local shitheads in line (I’m looking at you, crazy North Korea guy).

To cover our own asses and see to our own interests.

I don’t think we should be the policemen of the world, but I definitely think we ought to have some of our cops on hand when shit pops off; a limited force with an intelligence-heavy mission tasked to preserve American democracy, not export it.

And we are doing nothing to preserve our domestic security (or export it) by being in Afghanistan anymore. On the contrary, now that our mission objectives have been achieved and we don’t get out, we play more and more into the jihadists’ storyline of us coming as Crusaders to conquer. One needn’t be a terrorist sympathizer to look at circumstances as they currently exist and come to the same conclusion.

Plus, I have a dog in this hunt. My only nephew is a Marine, scheduled to be rotated back over there sometime later this year. Whether or not we stay in Afghanistan is more than an academic exercise to me, or a philosophical gambit. I watched this kid grow up, uncled the hell out of as best I could from a couple states away and I’ll be damned if I want to see his future pissed away because we haven’t figured out an exit strategy yet.

Bush got us in—and should have gotten us out years ago, granted—but now it’s fully on Obama. I can’t imagine what further objective he expects to achieve by not fulfilling his campaign pledge to get us the hell out of there. If it helps the President make up his mind, I myself would be willing to give him a Mulligan on his Guantanamo campaign promise in exchange for keeping this one...

The time to step up is now, Mr. Obama. Killing bin Laden was well and good, but it was side-work; your main gig is to keep us safe at home, and our continuing presence in Afghanistan is compromising that prime objective more with every day it continues.