I am blessed in many ways, and my latest blessing is that my son has returned safely from his second deployment in Iraq. The bad news is that his outfit was scheduled to deploy to Afghanistan in January of 2011. Because of this, I listened to President Obama’s West Point speech with my attention more focused than the average citizen.
It would be fair to say that my family hung on grimly during the Iraq war-of-choice, war-of-presidential-ego, war-for-no-apparent-reason, and we wondered at the difference between how the public reacted to the craziness of Iraq compared to how the public reacted to the craziness of Vietnam once public opinion caught on to the fact that we were not going to be able to save Vietnam from the Vietnamese.
The difference was the draft.
I was always opposed to the draft, although I volunteered both for military service and for service in Vietnam. I did my best to get myself prosecuted for refusal to carry a draft card. The last time I sent the card back to the draft board, in 1968, they promised to refer my file to the U.S. Attorney for prosecution, but either they didn’t or the U.S. Attorney did not want to deal with the publicity that would surround prosecuting an honorably discharged veteran for refusal to carry a draft card.
I was wrong. I was looking at it from the point of view of a potential draftee or a GI who might have somebody watching his back who did not want to be there. That last point was greatly overblown. The one thing you seldom fail to learn in the military is that it’s necessary to take care of each other, and anybody who fails to learn that is unlikely to get past boot camp.
Without a draft, the “chicken hawks” are free to run wild. By the time Vietnam was known for the debacle it was, everybody knew somebody who had been there and the troops who had been there did talk about it.
In Iraq, the people we placed in the crossfire among Sunni, Shi’a and Kurd were all volunteers. An all-volunteer military is a working class military. If the volunteer military is sent on a fool’s errand, nobody “important” in American politics is getting shot at.
Leaving aside the nature of an all-volunteer military, American Indians always volunteer in disproportionate numbers. Some claim that it’s because we are still warrior cultures, but I will leave that question to the anthropologists.
I will say that I have been privileged to interview a couple of the Navajo code talkers who served in the Marine Corps during World War II. I did ask the “Why?” question and I was particularly struck by how personally an elderly man remembered taking the Pearl Harbor attack. There was steel in his voice at the memory, and this man was a teenager who had never set foot off the reservation when Pearl Harbor happened.
One of the major arguments for Indian citizenship was that Indians were being drafted and sent off to fight wars by politicians for whom they were not allowed to vote. All of this history is to show that what happens in the tribal lands of Afghanistan is important in the tribal lands of the United States.
In spite of my total contempt for the “war on terrorism” cant, I believe President Bush’s decision to invade Afghanistan was morally and legally justified. There is a well-settled body of international law on dealing with non-state criminal actors. They were called pirates in the old days, and our actions in Afghanistan were well within that body of law. Every nation has jurisdiction.
No nation was allowed to harbor pirates, so I’m not sure why a modern nation should be allowed to harbor terrorists. Not that Afghanistan bears any relationship to a modern nation. As wags said at the time, we could not bomb them back to the Stone Age because they are already in the Stone Age.
We went to Afghanistan in lawful pursuit of international criminals, a goal the Bush administration bungled. The question for President Obama was whether that goal was still possible with Al Qaeda entrenched on the Afghan-Pakistan border?
Obama thinks that if Pakistan will cooperate there is still a chance. Our best intelligence says there are about 100 Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and I’m arrogant enough to think that would be work for maybe 30 U.S. Marines rather than 30,000.
What is scary is that we appear to be taking on the Taliban. Now, these people are the scum of the earth. You don’t throw acid on girls for going to school. You don’t destroy ancient artwork that is sacred to the beliefs of other people to glorify your own beliefs. Taliban actions, leaving aside harboring Al Qaeda, are beneath contempt, but the Taliban are Afghans, and we cannot save Afghanistan from the Afghans.
We cannot bring Afghanistan into the 21st century or even the 20th. We cannot give Afghanistan a strong central government. The Afghan government is broken but we did not break it, so we owe nothing on Colin Powell’s “Pottery Barn theory.”
Our sons and daughters are entering the “graveyard of empires.” The Persian Empire, Alexander the Great, the British Empire, and the Soviet Empire have all come and gone. On the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass, there are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, whose organizational chart looks eerily similar to the BIA. On Dec. 7, a Chicago man was charged in federal court with plotting the Mumbai terror attacks in the FATA.
I am not happy about my son’s probable deployment to Afghanistan, but at least this time there is a just cause. Best of all, the president has put the corrupt Afghan government on a short leash. The timeline does not advantage the Taliban; having the home field does. In a couple of years we will have crushed the Al Qaeda leadership or not, but our warriors will be coming home and that, for all of us in the U.S. tribal areas, will be a blessing.
Steve Russell, Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, is a Texas trial court judge by assignment and an associate professor of criminal justice at Indiana University. He is a columnist for Indian Country Today. He lives in Bloomington and can be reached at swrussel@indiana.edu.