While the world and a substantial portion of the American public believe that the ten year long Vietnam war was a mistake in terms of the humanitarian disaster, President Bush recently seems to have used every rhetoric possible to turn history on its head. In likening the war in Iraq to Vietnam, at a National Convention recently, he chose to justify the continuance in Iraq arguing that the US withdrawal from Vietnam had actually emboldened American enemies around the globe; further stating that present-day terrorists like bin Laden found inspiration from the anti-war public opinion in the country at the time, very conveniently forgetting that it was the American administration that gave them the weapons that they wield today.
The skeletons just refuse to stop tumbling from the cupboards at an almost orchestrated regularity as it has been a month of one report after the other each giving more clarity to a war that has gone horribly wrong both in Iraq and Afghanistan. And the latest in line was the admission of the death of Pat Tillman, the National Football League hero who was heralded as a martyr to his family and American citizens – the poster boy for the American presence in Afghanistan – only to discover that he was yet another victim of friendly fire.
Even as the foreign troops struggle on a daily basis, the efforts in the establishment of a stable government and rule of law seem to be taking a beating everyday. The suicide attacks show no signs of subsiding and civilian deaths in either country do not even make it to the front pages anymore despite the enormity of the numbers.
Giving further credence to America’s Afghan quagmire are the recent comments of a British commander claiming that it is the US Special Forces’ military approach in Helmand – their reliance and use of excessive fire power – that has led to most of the civilian deaths in the area even jeopardising the British-led mission there, especially since only small groups of insurgents remain.
Last November, air-strikes killed 31 nomads west of Kandahar and another 57 villagers in western Afghanistan in April, many of them women and children. Hence, such missions have been counterproductive with even the locals now turning against the forces.
And exacerbating the situation for the administration have been the tremendous increase in suicides within the armed forces with 2006 registering the highest rate in 26 years – 17.3 per 100,000. And according to a military report more than a quarter did so while serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The issue of weapons floating around since the Soviet war is another contentious issue for the US troops in dealing with the insurgents with the possibility that insurgents might get their hands on MANPADS (Man-portable air defence systems). And the most prominent is the Stinger missile, especially since many of these missiles, provided by the Americans to be used by the Mujahideen against the Soviets, were unaccounted for. Moreover there are Russian-built, surface-to-air missiles in the grey markets along the volatile Pak-Afghan border in the mountainous weapons bazaars that could prove disastrous in the wrong hands.
With the interception of a SAM-7 among the arms confiscated along the Iran border in April, speculation on the source was rife. Apparently, the American administration did come to a verdict, reflected in the decision to set up missile systems in the continent to counter the Iranian threats and their more recent threats to declare the Iran Revolutionary Guards a terrorist organisation.
The American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have left the administration with little option but to look for means to justify their continuous military actions and in this continuous damage control effort by the spin doctors they seemed to have lost sight of the daily toll ticker. Till July 2007 over eight lakh people had been killed, and 1.5 million seriously injured in Afghanistan and Iraq and these figures are about 277 times the number killed in the shocking September 11 attacks. By any standards retribution is long over and this is genocide.