The Malaise

(I began writing this piece before the flap over Stanley McChrystal hit the media.)

Something is terribly wrong with the American occupation of Afghanistan.

It’s not working. The Afghans are unwilling partners in the game we are playing with their country.

The world’s lone superpower appears lost and confused as it blindly chases shadows across one of the most backward countries on the planet.

Longest “war” in U.S. history.

Let that fact sink in.

Longer than the Civil War. Longer than WWII. Longer than Vietnam.

President Obama claims the U.S. will withdraw some of its combat forces in mid-2011, but in reality the U.S. has no intention of fully withdrawing from Afghanistan – not after pouring billions of dollars and at least a thousand American lives into the country. Bases and outposts are being built for a long stay by U.S. forces and private contractors, and it’s time – years past time – for American voters and taxpayers to ask why.

Why are we in Afghanistan almost nine years later? Who are we fighting? What is our primary strategic objective, and is that objective realistic? Are we in Afghanistan so that a long sought after oil pipeline can be built and then secured through the western part of the country? Are we simply after Afghanistan’s plentiful mineral reserves?

But perhaps the most important question is the one least asked by the American news media and American politicians: how many Afghans have been killed or wounded since we invaded in 2001? What’s the body count?

And let’s go further and ask another basic question: what is the will of the Afghan people? Do they want American and NATO soldiers in their country?

Time stands against us in Afghanistan, as does history. The language spoken today by the American military and political establishment is eerily familiar to that spoken during the Vietnam War. Our military firepower is unmatched, but the conflict in Afghanistan, like Vietnam, can’t be won by firepower alone.

Stanley “Poor Judgment” McChrystal is gone and David “The Miracle Worker” Petraeus is taking command, but something remains terribly wrong in Afghanistan, not to mention in Washington D.C., and Albany, NY and Sacramento, CA and Detroit, MI and Phoenix, AZ.

Call it the superpower malaise. The case might be terminal.

Iraq. Afghanistan. The BP oil hemorrhage. An economy that won’t recover for any except the wealthy. Stubbornly high unemployment. State budgets in disarray. People suffering. The national political system paralyzed, polarized, bought and paid for with campaign bribes.

I have the sense that the world’s lone superpower is like the proverbial Potemkin village – a façade, an elaborate charade – all polished surfaces perched on a rickety foundation very near total collapse. The confidence and élan we once carried as our American birthright has been replaced with apprehension and fear – fear of Muslims and Mexicans, fear of decline, fear of change, fear of the future, fear of taxes, fear of death, fear of life, fear of the dark, and, most of all, fear of the truth about our situation.

In the years following 9/11, Hunter S. Thompson referred to the U.S. as the Kingdom of Fear, but the sort of fear I’m talking about here penetrates even deeper.

We are now a nation living on borrowed time and paying the bills with borrowed money. Our politicians and their corporate masters hum the same hackneyed tunes while the shining city on the hill burns.