Afghanistan and Memorial Day

The occupation of Afghhanistan has come at high cost for the United States. In the decade of U.S. presence casualties physical and psychological were plentiful. reportedly morale is at its lowest level in six year. Maybe the Pentagon's choice to send openly gay troops will cheer them up.

I was surprised in reading an article this morning-I believe it was in the Anchorage Daily News, about the nature of the Afghanistan millitary venture. About 50% of the soldiers/marines said they had killed someone, and two thirds said they had been within a 100 yards of an i.e.d. explosion going office. The article was on the subject of depression amongst the troops.

Some believe that depression is a biological build-up of some sort of proteins in lipids that eventually could be remedied. Yet depression may be a rational reaction to bad outlook in physical location and circumstance. it may be that depression was a natural stimulus to make an individual walk away from a bad area in search ofa more cheerful circumstance. Perhaps all troops leaving Afghanistan should be required to serve six months at some large military post in Florida with lots of golfing, swimming and fishing before being released to regular service or home.

There are several reasons for soldiers serving extended and recurrent duty in Afghanistan. For one thing, there seems to be little purpose to the occupation. It is possible to invade a nation and take it for one's own side. It is far more difficult to force people to conform to particular behavior or even worse, to convert to an alien religion or secular behavior and moral structure. U.S. efforts to change Afghanistan for a decade into something palatable to policy planners has all the earmarks of cluster confusion with dubious prospects for working.

In the United States the bottom ten percent of society seem to be increasingly written off. The Democratic Party is a party for the middle class amongst whom the word poor is politically incorrect. Even the Obama medical plan is unreasonably designed to be fairly ineffective for the poor. Veterans too have long range pros[pects for less than optimal medical services. The bottom ten percent also has lots of veterans and perhaps more in the future as they find work difficult, and perhaps selling phone service or mortages difficult to adjust too.

Serving in Afghanistan for several years in a mission with bad fundamental political logic is costly to taxpayers and citizens in several ways. Neither does Afghanistan have much oil-nor has Syria-so its more difficult to find a corrupt leader to put in office who can buy off long range support with a trophic relationship to the natural resource. Afghanistan has poppies for a natural resource and that creates a different kind of corruption.

Osama Bin Ladin recently killed in Pakistan provides and opportunity for America to draw down military forces. Pakistan evidently had some elements keeping the Os on a short leash able spent his life as he was old and 9-11 a decade gone. Moslem terrorism may perhaps be wanted tobe regarded as a youth movement.

Depression amidst military forces with an uncertain role not comparable to something more cheerful like the western front of world war one where in it was possible to have complete victory (although politicians allowed an armistace and something less than complete victory leading as Patton and others were concerned about in a German willingness to continue war later). Few wars may cause soldiers to be cheerful though, yet if moral is to be good there should be some reasonable objective for its prosecution instead of no certain direction or goal.

Defending U.S. borders with no errors or illegal aliens making it through-a good foreign intelligence human services sectors, a fine counter-terrorist black op force-these seem more reasonable methods to develop effective counter-terrorist planetarey operations rather than masses of conventional troops deployments.

The United States might be a better moral leader through fully employing it's own citizens and transitioning to an ecologically effective, renewable and low-wastage economic policy that could create knowledge about how to effectively manage economic and natural resources instead of wasting them. America's global corporatist leadership tends to concentrate wealth and create a far from optimal employment security prospect for Americans and people of nations in which they do business.

The poor abroad and in the United States a find they are the last to receive, if ever, competent medical service, shelter and food. That is a perpetually reinforced aspect of an aloof political economy driving the U.S.A. to participate in the creation of a new world order of networks and authoritarianism. Few individuals will find it possible to opt out of the new world order. Democracy by the mob-a mob of networks controlled by circumstantial preferred network organization, will draw in oil producing nations, former communist nations and nominal democracies alike. Where depressed soldiers find a lot to be cheerful about in contemporary U.S. foreign policy I don't know. I admire them for trying to think about the political world while participating in' the great game' that some believe is a way of defending U.S. interests.

I am fairly skeptical about the policy of the Bush II and Obama administration being the best worldline to find U.S. national security in (comparing it to quantum mechanics). Maybe American polticians just aren't very bright. That is surprising and disappointing. Nixon at least hired an intelligent Secretary of State-as did Regan. Perhaps its time to restore that position so that the job is led by someone making the policy up effectively while the President works on the U.S. economy.