THE 'NECESSARY' AFGHANI WAR

Eleven months after our president has taken office, we finally hear that he has reached a decision on Afghanistan. Although we are not sure of its specifics yet, we are assured that “after eight years of an under-resourced war, Obama intends ‘to finish the job’”. (Economist, Nov. 28, 31). Obama has often contrasted the “unnecessary war” in Iraq to the “necessary war” in Afghanistan.

Maybe Afghanistan is necessary because the CIA is largely responsible for the funding of the radically Anti-Soviet jihad that took root in the 1980’s; fought and won by Islamic jihadists that were well funded and well informed via secret routines of the American, Pakistani, and Saudi clandestine diplomacy. Those who fought the Soviets, make up the same exact network of Afghan rebels, which we cannot seem to grasp hold of today in our fight for stability in the region. After 1979, when networks of stateless Islamic radicals began to form groups like Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda, American diplomats and CIA officials formed partnerships and alliances with these groups in an effort to establish a stronghold in the region thereby limiting the influence of the real “enemy”, the Soviet Union (Coll, Ghost Wars, 17). Why is this war so much more necessary when we merely seem to be fighting the very same networks of rebels we eagerly provided weaponry for when they were on our “side” during the cold war?

It seems that even the “necessary wars” come about from routinely meddling in conflict abroad. Conflict far removed from having anything to do with the preservation of liberty or representation of the common interests of us normal people back home… But we’re the reason for our military’s existence anyways.... right?...

When Hamilton was defending the ratification of our country’s constitution, he made some comments on “providing for the common defence”. He stated (along with some modern day translations), “All that kind of policy by which nations anticipate danger (i.e. unilateral warmongering), and meet the gathering storm (i.e. the storm of Arab tribal and/or religious warfare), must be abstained from, as contrary to the genuine maxims of free government (maxims like popular sovereignty, freedom of speech/opinion, or maybe balance of powers between the three branches and between state and federal governments?). We must expose our property and liberty to the mercy of foreign invaders… because we are afraid that rulers (Both Democrats and Republicans) might endanger that liberty, by an abuse of the means necessary to its preservation (We haven’t had any problems with the abuse of Executive powers within our country’s recent war history, have we?)” (Hamilton, Federalist 25). The idea of abstaining from the rooting of our military in the midst of the “storms” of other nations’ affairs sounds like an extreme idea right now. But the rhetoric of “victory in Afghanistan” necessitates the federal government’s presence (for an indefinite period of time) in the internal affairs of a foreign country. These preemptive defense tactics are thereby abusing the very domestic liberties that such rhetoric is claiming to preserve and further throughout the world, by leading to the usurpation of federal and executive powers (powers that were originally intended to depend on the will of the people). How did we come to a place in our government’s history where Hamiltion’s Federalist 25 sounds extreme or even radical?

-E.C.Soria