A thousand cuts in Afghanistan

I recieved a message this morning from my sister-in-law telling me that my brother was safe in Afghanistan and was not among the dead or wounded (it was a different section). When I recieved the message, I had not heard anything about what had happened there as I had literally just woken up. I've since learned what has happened, and while I am (naturally) relieved for my brother, I'm angry about what happened.

For those unaware, an Afghan soldier who had enlisted six years ago opened fire on Australian forces after a routine parade at about 3pm AEST (8.30am local Afghan time). He killed three soldiers, a captain, a lance corporal and a corporal, as well as an interpreter. Seven other Australian soldiers were injured, as well as two other interpreters and two other Afghan soldiers. Of the wounded, one is in a life-threatening condition and is to be evacuated to Germany, while four have serious injuries and two have minor injuries. The level of injury sustained by the other four is not known. The Australian and the Herald have more information.

First of all, I'd like to note something about the coverage of this event. It has placed a very distant second to the industrial dispute within Qantas. Certainly, that's important, but does it really need to occupy fifteen minutes of ABC News and the entire afternoon coverage on Sky? Are we so vacuous as a society that we view the loss of money, plays at politics and an ultimately mild inconvenience as more important a story than the betrayal and murder of our soldiers by an erstwhile ally?

Well, apparently, we are, but I digress somewhat.

I might also jog your memory - this is not the first time that this has happened. You may recall Lance-Corporal Andrew Jones who was shot by an Afghan soldier, who fled and was later killed by the Americans, but his is not the only case, and Australia is not the only nation whose soldiers have been betrayed. The Americans and the Italians suffered an attack with one fatality in 2009 (an American). The British have suffered five dead at the hands of a policeman (see previous article) as well as three Gurkhas in 2009 and 2010 respectively. Two civilian trainers from America were gunned down last year, and there have been additional reports of marines being shot from November last year.

One doesn't need to be Sherlock Holmes in order to see that there's a problem here. The Afghan soldiers and police have repeatedly turned rogue. These people aren't sent in as agents of the Taliban. They defect ideologically to the Taliban, and then enact the ideas of the Taliban. The Taliban certainly doesn't spare them praise when it comes to such betrayal.

So we have this repeated occurance taking place, that Coalition troops have been murdered by Afghans trained as soldiers who have essentially become Taliban agents. We then have repeated apologies and investigations, and then we continue to work with them. Oh, sure, it's only one or two soldiers in each incident. But ten incidents is a section, a fifty easily makes a troop, and a hundred a company. This is death by a thousand cuts, and we keep letting them cut us, and we present them our wrists too.

The incidents above are the ones I easily found on the Herald's website. I don't know if that's the full extent of the problem or if it's even larger than those disparate news reports might suggest. However, I must say that the Armed services of all the Coalition countries are being phenomenally stupid in the fact that they can't remember a simple statement - fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.

We are refusing to see that there is a serious loyalty issue as far as the Afghan armed services are concerned. We refuse to fully consider the how and the why of this descent into madness on the part of those traitors, and we refuse to take proper and effective preventative measures about this issue, like complete segregation. What good is training people who end up becoming your enemies, and not only that, but gain an advantage of surprise with which to attack us?

Our reasons for being there grow ever more fatuous by the day. We're trying to stop it from being a terrorist hub? Well what about Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Iran and Yemen? We're trying to build a pluralistic democracy? Then explain why there are no churches left in Afghanistan, and the election of Islamic supremacist parties in Tunisia and their rise and rise in Egypt and Libya. It just doesn't add up.

We're spending our blood and treasure to build something that the locals (or at least those who matter) don't want and won't stand to have. They won't let our ideals and charity stand in the way of their power, and they will keep on betraying us, attacking us and otherwise draining us. Their country is broken - that is beyond dispute. But they don't want to fix it, and will not accept our attempts to force a fix on them. That is an insult to their pride and their sense of self-superiority.

So I say we bring the troops home now. The waste of our blood and treasure has gone on long enough. Let's keep the money and the men at home.

As for dealing with terrorists... well, I've been drafting and redrafting this for a while, so I'm just going to say it - if they bomb us, I say we bomb them back. Oh yes, I know all that stuff about turning the other cheek and an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. They're noble sentiments (even if the former is completely wrong when viewed in its original context), but not ones being played with here. Enough about "making peace". You can't have peace without justice, and there's not justice in what we're doing. Let them first learn the consequences for being unjust, and then, maybe, we might be able to reconsider.

And now as I step off my fiery horse of rage, I ask you to pray for the souls of the dead soldiers and the health of those still alive. And pray also for peace. Coming from someone who just said "bomb them", I know that sounds rich, but peace requires justice, and justice requires consequence, and the consequences here are not understood.