Imagine: It is late at night. There is very little moonlight and a cold fall wind is blowing in from the north. You hear a dog bark, and then a scream. You rise out of bed to look out the window and see what appears to be a home robbery across the street. You are not in shape to go help due to a recent injury, but your teenage son is fit as a fiddle and can handle a gun. Should you send him over to help? Of course, your moral side says you should help a neighbor, but you fear for your son. The robbers have guns too and your son could die. Is the risk worth it?
Now imagine you are the leader of a free country. You’ve inherited a war wherein the original enemy is essentially defeated, but now face decisions of a humanitarian concern. Indeed, the former head of your CIA and current Secretary of Defense (let’s call him Leon Panetta) recently stated that America’s enemy du jour, Al Qaeda, has a key leadership of less than two dozen people most of which are no longer in Afghanistan. As Al Qaeda has been consistently beaten down in the past several years, attention has turned to counterinsurgency or COIN. But is it worth it?
COIN is method of “fighting” that focuses more on winning over the local population than killing the enemy. This form of warfare places military members at greater risk while simultaneously placing restrictions on the means of warfare. The hope, apparently, is that if we give the local population enough stuff, they’ll like us and either point out the bad guys for arrest and prosecution or convince the bad guys that Americans really aren’t that bad. It’s a sort of Full Metal Jacket approach (paraphrasing the movie: “inside the heart of every Afghan is an American trying to get out”). It’s the height of ethnocentrism and it apparently guides our war effort. To know us is to love us, right?
So here we are pursuing a strategy of buying love, affection, and support. We’ve asked our soldiers and Marines to perform a function not typically considered part of warfighting while placing them in greater danger (I recently saw a story about Marines taking agriculture classes at a southern California university; Marines, for cryin’ out loud, our nation’s shock troops, learning to grow corn!). This scenario leads to a consideration of “gruesome math.”
Since Al Qaeda is no longer a real threat (and never really was an existential one) and we are making Afghanistan our own little money pit, we must be here to save Afghans, right? Some say that if we leave, violence will ensue and many Afghans will die. I have no doubt about the veracity of this argument. Many tribes are rearming in the aftermath of President Obama’s drawdown announcement. If it’s one thing Afghans know for sure, it’s that pacifists die in this country. So this sounds like a wonderful cause, preventing the deaths of some unknown number of Afghans. But what does the math say?
In the roughly ten years that we’ve been in this country, we’ve lost roughly 1660 Americans according to at least one source.* That’s an average of 160 per year, 13 per month, or 3 per week. In other words, every two days here an American dies. They die for an effort to save an untold number of Afghans. Therefore, saving an unknown number of Afghans must be worth the deaths 160 Americans per year to our political and military leaders. But, when do we reach the tipping point? How many American lives per month is too much in the equation? And if we do in fact reach that point, do not the previous lives lost also become too much? In other words, I pose a question to those who say we should stay to protect Afghans (as opposed to eliminating an existential threat): Can you look a mother, sister, wife, or child in the eye and say their son, brother, husband, or father had to die so that some unknown Afghan(s) could live? Or more bluntly: How much is an American life worth in terms of Afghan lives?
Now some reading this will certainly be offended at my ability to analyze this issue dispassionately. But we’ve done this before. Look at Rwanda or Darfur. Some within the international community begged the US to intervene. We chose not to do so. Why? No strategic interests you say? How is that calculation any less gruesome than the one I just made? That calculation places interests such as oil (or lack thereof) above human lives. I think those situations are the same as now. Then, we made a calculation that American lives were not worth risking. Today, they are. Why? I have no idea. I’m simply confused. I have no answers – and that is what makes this so hard.
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