COLUMN: From the left
American and Afghani relations reached a breaking point last week when American soldiers burned copies of the Quran at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan.
According to reports, the Qurans were burned because prisoners at the base’s prison were using them to pass notes to each other. Afghanis working at the base saw the burning Qurans and reportedly managed to retrieve eight of them.
The Quran — Islam’s sacred text — is considered the literal word of God and is to be treated with reverence and respect. In many sects of Islam, a Muslim must undergo a ritual hand washing called “wudu” before handling it.
Though burning the Quran is one accepted method for disposing of worn out or old copies, heaping copies with the day’s garbage would hardly fit any acceptable Islamic standard.
However, the waves of protest at the accidental burning of the the Quran are merely symptomatic of a larger smoldering anger and resentment of the Afghani people toward the more than decade-long American occupation.
What are we really doing there? Operation Enduring Freedom — as it was termed by the Bush Administration — is now the longest war involving the U.S. It was a unilateral attack by the U.S. without any international authorization — a war crime according to international law.
Rather than act as freedom fighters, Americans are increasingly seen as imperialists, occupiers and even criminals.
Just last month, footage emerged showing U.S. soldiers urinating on dead Afghan corpses. A few days later, photos were published showing U.S. soldiers posing in front of a flag bearing a Nazi symbol.
Unmanned drone strikes at weddings and funerals have killed scores of civilians — including children.
The country is less stable and more divided than before the U.S. invaded, and the longer we stay in Afghanistan the more ineffective we become.
A few days ago, Jay Carney, White House press secretary, was asked by ABC News reporter Jake Tapper when the last time was that the U.S. killed an al-Qaida operative in Afghanistan. He didn’t have an answer.
However, according to queries filed by George Zornick of The Nation magazine to the Defense Department and NATO, their answer was April 2011 — nearly a year ago. Since then, over 460 coalition soldiers were killed.
The quagmire we find ourselves in is only going to get worse and highlights the problems of nation-building.
It’s time that we pull our young men and women out. We have no business being in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden is dead, and al-Qaida moved to other locales.
We are spending over $2 billion a week, yet some argue that our country doesn’t have enough to support Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security programs.
It’s time we take that money and put it to use helping poor and needy people here rather than killing poor and needy people thousands of miles away.
The longer we stay, the more we are resented and the more it fuels radical and violent attacks against the U.S. — making us, in a tragically ironic way, less safe overall.
If the war doesn’t end now, when will it?