This desert's gonna swallow you whole, son
A few entities (Reuters most notably) have gone ahead and parsed through the docs, though nothing conclusive can be drawn yet. A few words and phrases keep recurring, including civilian casualties, quagmire, and thank god people are paying attention to Iraq instead of this clusterfuck. Naturally, the government is pissed. Surprisingly, not quite so many people seem to be paying attention as one might think - it's possible that they're preoccupied with the BP oil spill or the upcoming off-year elections or, more likely, following the wild exploits of pop sensation Ke$ha to keep track of whatever is happening in a poor third-world country half a world away. Or maybe they're just waiting for the movie.
In any case, to those that have actually studied history and warfare, none of this is particularly surprising. Consider as an analog the source of PTSD or Shell Shock or whatever we're calling it today: you grow up thinking that war is something like you'd see in Combat! or G.I. Joe where bullets either (in case A) kill you quickly and painlessly and get you shipped home to your appreciative mother, or (in case B) don't do anything except allow you to bail out of your Rattler and listen to Cobra Commander call you an imbecile as you parachute safely down to earth. Then you actually go to war and find that bullets tend to either blow your face clean off your head or suck your guts out the exit wound in your back so that your friends can spend the next 4 hours in a fox hole listening to you die.
Tell...tell my momma I...I...OH GOD THE PAIN...tell her I...Gurglespluuurttt...(*die*)
Then of course there's the chance that you win your engagement, and rather than just hump it back to base for chow and hooch and whatever teenage hookers the village sent up this week, but no - you've got to go around finding dead enemy bodies, cutting their dicks off, and stuffing them in their own mouths as a warning to any other "insurgents." Naturally, when they find out about this back home, you will be tried and convicted as a war criminal for doing this while the officer who ordered you to do so will have long since been promoted away from any such trouble.
But...but... was only following orders!
But this is how empire is made, and if anyone finds the details of the Afghan War Diary shocking or surprising, I can only ask where the hell they've been for the last, well, forever. Contrary to the hawkish point of view, war is not the provident exercise of a burly, Anglo-Saxon English-speaking Jesus who leads his troops bloodlessly into battle for apple pie and baseball, and contrary to the dovish point of view, there's no way at present to have a beautiful paradise of milk and honey and multi-ethnic prosperity without occasionally going out and murdering a bunch of people in order to take what they have and make it your own (caveat: you can have someone else do the majority of your killing a la the Marshall Plan after WWII).
So long as we consume, we must conquer, and this has been true for thousands of years. I quote Tacitus here, as he writes regarding the Barbarian tribes:
The Germans have no taste for peace; renown is easier won among perils, and you cannot maintain a large body of companions except by violence and war. The companions are prodigal in their demands on the generosity of their chiefs. [...]. Such open-handedness must have war and plunder to feed it. You will find it harder to persuade a German to plough the land and to await its annual produce with patience than to challenge a foe and earn the prize of wounds. He thinks it spiritless and slack to gain by sweat what he can buy with blood.
gGive me that bloody and victorious spear
The Romans were no different, though of course to Tacitus that was a matter over-and-done-with. The Roman empire was built by murdering, displacing, and absorbing other Iberian tribes, but, you know, that was then, and this is now. It's totally different. Really. In turn, we do much the same: we want, we take, and in taking we redistribute internally. As we set up South America, so we gained year-round produce. As we conquer the middle east, so hopefully should we get oil. What's next? Who knows. Maybe we'll conquer the Canadians for ice.
As the narrative of the Afghan War Diary unfolds, just remember - You, Joe Taxpayer, are at the top of the chain of command. You are in fact facilitating everything in these documents. We forget that sometimes in this country, and we keep looking up at our elected officials when really we should be looking down at our public servants. We allow our apathy to swell up into a wave of complicity that carries all these shitty events along with it. Evidently, we approve of everything going on - we haven't broken 60% voter turnout at 4-year elections since 1968, and we haven't broken 40% voter turnout at 2-year elections since 1970.
It's the world's smallest violin playing a sad song for liberal pussies
Now this all sounds like I'm some big bleeding heart liberal pussy who wants to sit around making daisy chains and singing Kum-Bay-Ah, when I'm not. Well okay, I personally would rather do that than fight, but I don't think that's generally speaking a good national policy. Nor, however, do I agree with imperialism. I think it leads to monoculturalism which is not only stagnant, but also boring.
The question for the 21st century is, I hope: How will we go about the business of war-making? Can we adopt a neutral position, like the Swiss? Will we try to conquer by sword, as the Germans? Or will we commit to perpetual police actions, like the British before us? In all cases, history has a lot to teach us, and by "us" I mean you and me both, so read up, write your officials, and get to voting. If you like what you're hearing out of the Afghan War Diary, vote to keep it going. I'll be canceling you out, but that's how democracy works.
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