In a military town, some question Afghan war
Dante Chinni
Posted: 09.21.2009 / 9:38 AM PDT
When the president announces a new military strategy, everyone listens, but some places listen more closely. For the 57 counties that Patchwork Nation lists as “Military Bastions,” those announcements aren’t just about protests or foreign policy; they are about the local economy and the emotional well-being of friends and neighbors.
Even though those places suffer psychologically and economically when their men and women leave, surveys show the communities have been strongly supportive of the military efforts since 2001. Even as President Bush left office wildly unpopular, 27 percent in these communities said Mr. Bush would be remembered as an outstanding or above-average president – the highest of Patchwork Nation’s 12 community types.
But as the road in Afghanistan threatens to grow longer and more treacherous, those views are being sternly tested. Some signs of fraying may be appearing in Hopkinville, Ky., a “Military Bastion” near Fort Campbell.
Why will our troops be different?
On Sept. 1, retired Army Col. Bobby Freeman, who lives in Hopkinsville, sent an e-mail to some 50 people laying out his concerns about the war in Afghanistan.
The email was a well-written historical look at the efforts to try to conquer and/or stabilize Afghanistan going back to the British efforts of the 1800s up through the Soviet failure of the 1980s. He ended the e-mail with a question: “What has changed in almost two hundred years in Afghanistan to lead Washington to believe that the United States can win a war where a Muslim population sees all outsiders as infidels and invaders?”
Mr. Freeman is no antiwar protester. He is a former garrison commander at Fort Campbell and describes himself as a patriot. His home is a shrine to his military service and that of his children, who also joined the armed forces. He was a supporter of the war in Iraq and sits on area boards dedicated to better serving the area’s military.
His e-mail, in other words, represents something of a surprise. But he’s likely not alone in Hopkinsville, considering the hard times the town has seen since the Iraq war began siphoning off large numbers of the area population. As we have noted in the past, that can have a big impact on “Military Bastion” economies like Hopkinsville’s.
Fort Campbell, home of the 101st Airborne, has seen its share of deployments over the past six years. Some soldiers are getting ready for their fourth deployment in May or June of next year – and more may soon be announced.
Resigned
Soldiers and their families are famously reticent to talk of their feelings about war. That’s one thing that makes Freeman’s e-mail so surprising. But even with the concerns Freeman raises, there is a certain amount of resignation in Hopkinsville.
“Me personally, I wish we weren’t there,” says John Brame, commander of the Hopkinsville VFW post 1913. “I wish we didn’t have to have soldiers anywhere. But like the majority of people here, I just think we have to finish it.”
Mr. Brame says Afghanistan is the root of the larger global terrorism network, so there is little choice. “We hate that these boys down the road [at Fort Campbell] have already done four or five tours, but those are the circumstances.”
Even with the area’s overwhelming military support, however, there is clearly a lot of antagonism toward the current commander in chief, President Obama, who captured only 39 percent of the vote in Christian County, Hopkinsville’s home. In e-mails and conversations, people criticize the president for a range of reasons – from being to liberal to being indecisive.
Brame, for instance, called the president a magician who jumped from issue to issue without answering questions in a straightforward manner.
As the president weighs approaches in Afghanistan, and some liken the war to a potential Vietnam, “Military Bastions” like Hopkinsville may prove crucial to the debate. Their largely unflinching support of the military and its mission may come into conflict with general war weariness and mistrust of the president.
Freeman’s e-mail indicates that in Hopkinsville, at least some are already beginning to ask questions.
September 21st, 2009 at 1:39 pm PDT
The true Republican response before the Party was taken over by Religious Right. Who it seems now endorse Nation building, torture, and murder for not believing as they do. listen to two former Republicans ………
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
” ..But today it is the United States that lives in infamy, as its government adopts the foreign policies of Imperial Japan.”
Arthur Schlesinger, March 19,2003. The day the U.S. invaded Iraq.
No more troops, no more Nation building, no more deficit spending to support wars that we will not win. Do these people not remember Korea, Viet Nam
Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1954
September 21st, 2009 at 7:34 pm PDT
We have a multidimensional problem in Afghanistan, and we are attempting to accomplish the impossible. We have forgotten our basic imperative, which is to protect ourselves and the rest of the world from fanatical, preditory people. Nation-building is not a viable solution, not really. We cannot, and should not, attempt to mold a culture that lives five-hundred years in the past to fit a paradigm of what our culture considers appropriate! It isn’t even possible!
The military, for all its increase in global sophistication and technical progress over the years, is still the same institution that took us down the twisted road we went in Vietnam. People like McCrystal and Petraeus may be heroes in the classical sense, but their judgement is, in some respects, two-dimensional. We need to take their expertise in its proper context. After eight years, a change on overall strategy seems appropriate, to one of containment.
We are not going influence, much less change, a culture steeped in violence for hundreds of years into one that bends to our needs. However, what we can do is concentrate on sealing the Pakistan-Afghani border (and other borders around Iraq and Afghanistan) as well as instituting an international campaign to reduce the availability of explosives and automatic weopons around the world. (If these ideas sound ambitious, consider what we are trying to do now!) Also, we must acknowledge the enormous financial and logistical support from the millions of proponents of violence throughout that region, and convene an international summit, inviting all nations to attend, Muslim and European alike, to discuss the exact nature of Militant Ideology and what it really means. In this spirit, we need to recount all of the events of the preceeding fifteen years leading to the events of “9/11,” in order to put into perspective the reasons for our military presence in the Mideast, in order to remind people that we, as a nation, did little to block the efforts of Militants while they escalated their efforts year after year. The message we need to convey here is that Muslims, who purport to embrace religion as a way of life, need to acknowledge a sense of responsibility (and shame) for waging senseless violence against nations whose only crime was allowing them to immigrate to our countries and partake of our generosity and resources.
September 22nd, 2009 at 1:48 pm PDT
We’re not trying to nation build: we’re trying to state build. Very different thing–as state building is no attempt to mold culture.
The face of war is changing. A three-block war concept–involving civic aid, conflict resolution, and combat, all together, is quite different from traditional warfare. I’ve talked to veterans of Iraq who never fired a gun while in Iraq.
Whether we should or should not be there is an important issue. And those of us who are opposed should talk about the why from the standpoint of reality, not memories of Vietnam and earlier wars.