The Practicing Progressive

The blogosphere has been all abuzz this past week over prominent conservative columnist George Will’s apparent defection to the dark side in calling for the rapid withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan. Most of Will’s chicken-hawk cohorts on the right are aghast at his chicken-hearted lean to the left. Putting aside their fanatical commitment to beat Barack Obama back into pre-Civil War submission, the crazies on the conservative fringe (and closer), find themselves aligned with the president on this particular issue which must have the parties on all sides questioning their sanity.

Personally, I find our military presence in Afghanistan confusing at best and filled with the kind of ambiguities that disallow the self-assured moral convictions that usually make producing a weekly op-ed column a piece of cake. Instead of certainty, and despite the President’s current policy, I confess to holding the same doubts many Americans share about the wisdom of continuing to sacrifice lives, both civilian and military, to a cause that appears to be less and less winnable.

Some of the same concerns that many of us shared over the war in Vietnam hold sway over our involvement in Afghanistan. Accounts differ as to civilian casualties during the Vietnam War, ranging from the hundreds of thousands to millions of lives lost, but our own cost in military lives is carved in marble on The Mall in Washington D.C.: 58,209.
As of today, over 700 US troops have died in Afghanistan since our 2001 invasion but that sad statistic grows daily and many of us remember how our limited involvement in Vietnam soon grew to awesome proportions.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a colonel in the Air Force reserves, declared after a brief tour of duty this week in Kabul, that Afghanistan “…is not Vietnam.” His intention, clearly, was to assuage the worries of more and more Americans. And in one very important sense he is absolutely right. Vietnam was different because Vietnam was not a religious war. We were not fighting wild-eyed religious fanatics in Southeast Asia but we most certainly are in Central Asia. The presumed Buddhism of the North Vietnamese doesn’t appear to have been instrumental in waging war against their fellow Buddhists in the South but Afghanistan is another story, a decidedly different story.

The Taliban is bent not just in controlling the government in Kabul but in perpetuating the eradication of all infidels both within its borders and without. The kind of fundamentalist and fanatical brand of Islam represented by the Taliban and others is not amenable to peaceful co-existence with either non-Muslims or modernity and that salient fact makes this war very different indeed.

Dying for one’s country is seen by most of the civilized world as both profoundly tragic and inspirationally noble. Surely such sacrifice emboldened the soldiers in Vietnam on both sides. But when one sees such a death as the passage to being in the presence of God with all the concurrent sensual pleasures grimly forfeited while on earth, we are faced with a very, very different enemy.
Religious fanatics of any stripe present a particular strategic conundrum. From the earliest of times, soldiers convinced of heavenly rewards for earthly errands make for formidable and sometimes unfathomable opponents. From the thousands of Crusaders promised eternal salvation by the Pope to the 19 heaven-bound Al-Qaeda terrorists of September 11, the religious rationale for waging war offers no room for negotiation. One does not, after all, compromise on the commands of God.

Unlike the neo-atheists of late who see the eradication of religion as the only reasonable option, many of us find ourselves in the morally confusing situation of knowing first-hand the value of healthy religion to a society. We have seen and even participated in the enormous social benefits that can come when people are inspired by a divinely ordained mandate, from local soup kitchens to global activism against AIDS. But when that mandate morphs into murderous marching orders, we are left wondering whether the spiritual assets outweigh the earthly liabilities.

The victors in Vietnam have spent the last few decades rebuilding and reconciling their country. Industry has established itself, tourism is growing and peace prevails over a country once rent asunder. If and when the bloodshed in Afghanistan comes to an end, whether it happens sooner or later, will the same hope-filled result occur?

When religious fanatics are part of the equation the answer is almost certainly no.