The Joke That The Afghan War Has Become

The NYT today highlights the confusion around the private Afghan security companies that are hired by the private trucking firms that the United States pay to transport supplies to combat troops.

The story documents what has become painfully obvious. We have no real idea who we are fighting. We claim to be committed to destroying the Taliban, because they are evil and anti-democratic. So instead, we pay money to other groups who on paper oppose the Taliban, even though they are just as violent and repressive. And that's ok, because they aren't called "Taliban", which Americans have been trained to see as the most evil of all people on earth.

So on any given day, we hand out money with no accountability to armed groups who we have no control over, who may or may not be colluding with the Taliban, who are just as repressive as the Taliban, and who may in fact be integrated with, or indistinguishable from the Taliban. We really just have no fucking idea.

Why don't we just guard our own convoys? I was once in the Army back in a different life, and I was a truck driver in a supply company. Do those jobs not exist anymore?

They don't, and the reason is simple. The Obama administration finds it politically impossible to ask for enough troops to actually carry out the mission. So instead, they are literally outsourcing our war. And what's worse, they are outsourcing it to our enemies.

The insanity of this policy is hard to overstate. It is destroying our ability to accomplish the already pointless and impossible mission which we have ludicrously set for ourselves: building a democracy in a strange country whose population doesn't want it. So why do we do it?

There are two reasons, and they stand as an insult to the troops we have who are needlessly sacrificing their lives for a mission which our government is sabotaging daily for political reasons.

The first reason is that politically, our government refuses to tell the people the straight truth, which is that in order for us to waste our time more efficiently in Afghanistan, we need more troops. But Americans won't support more troops, and so our government tries to cover this up by essentially bribing our enemies to allow supplies to go through, so that we can continue to pretend to fight this war.

The second reason is that, while our military could re-supply itself at a far smaller cost, and without handing millions over to people who we call our enemies, we won't do that because these supply and security contracts are bribes in and of themselves. We're bribing American contractors, who lobby Congress daily in order to enrich themselves through our war. And we're bribing members of the Afghan government, who have connections with both the Taliban and warlords who are sympathetic to the government, at least at the moment. (The grim truth is that the loyalties of pretty much anyone with a weapon in Afghanistan lie with whomever can help them out at the moment.)

But don't worry. We have a well-defined goal and a clear path to its accomplishment.

The goal is to destroy our empire in the wilds of Afghanistan. And the path is the one that we are on today.

Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day

Even Tom Friedman is starting to see the light:

Dick Cheney says President Obama is “trying to pretend that we are not at war” with terrorists. There is only one thing I have to say about that: I sure hope so.

Frankly, if I had my wish, we would be on our way out of Afghanistan not in, we would be letting Pakistan figure out which Taliban they want to conspire with and which ones they want to fight, we would be letting Israelis and Palestinians figure out on their own how to make peace, we would be taking $100 billion out of the Pentagon budget to make us independent of imported oil — nothing would make us more secure — and we would be reducing the reward for killing or capturing Osama bin Laden to exactly what he’s worth: 10 cents and an autographed picture of Dick Cheney.

This from the guy who has never met a war he didn't like until this year. This from the guy who has made a career out of apologizing for every atrocious and stupid policy Israel has ever come up with. This from the namesake of the Friedman Unit. This from the guy who said this about our invasion of Iraq back in 2003:







Of course, the only reason he thinks these policies are bad is because they aren't good for the economy.

And what does the war on terror give us? Better drones, body scanners and a lot of desultory T.S.A. security jobs at airports. “Sputnik spurred us to build a highway to the future,” added Mandelbaum. “The war on terror is prompting us to build bridges to nowhere.”

No mention of the hundreds of thousands of dead, the needless destruction of societies, torture, weakened American security, and the debasement of US civil rights. For starters.


Baby steps, Tom. Baby steps.

Why Are We There? (Part 3,798)

From Juan Cole, who does all the heavy lifting when it comes to Afghan policy, comes two related stories. The first:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Deepening a rift between allies, Afghan investigators on Wednesday sharply contradicted accounts by NATOofficials about the deaths of 10 civilians in eastern Afghanistan, saying a visit to the remote site showed that nearly all those killed were school-age boys and one was an elderly man. They blamed international forces for the deaths....

“The delegation concluded that a unit of international forces descended from a plane Sunday night into Ghazi Khan village, in Narang District of the eastern province of Kunar, and took 10 people from 3 homes, 8 of them school students in grades 6, 9 and 10, one of them a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead,” said the statement from the president’s office.

The second:

KABUL, Afghanistan — The second episode of civilian deaths within a week was under investigation Thursday by the Afghan government and NATO officials after reports that up to seven civilians had been killed in Helmand Province in a NATO missile strike.

The latest episode, in Helmand, took place Wednesday afternoon on the outskirts of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, when NATO forces responded to a Taliban provocation and ended up killing a number of civilians. Neither NATO forces nor the Helmand governor’s office gave a definitive number of dead, but reports from local people said that five to seven civilians had been killed, including three children.

We do not know if these allegations are true. But it doesn't matter (unless you're one of the dead.) The United States has a history of these kinds of atrocities; they are unavoidable in counterinsurgency combat. It does not require a stretch of the imagination to believe that they happened. 


These are precisely the kinds of things that inspire Islamic terrorism, further empower the Afghan insurgency, and generally make the United States a less secure nation. And given the fact that these kinds of events are unavoidable, counterinsurgency operations need to have a clear and obtainable objective, and the need to be absolutely vital to the security of the US. So vital, in fact, that the benefit from the operations will clearly outweigh the very real security costs of bombing and shooting schoolchildren.


Given that we have no clear objective, nor any real national security interest, nor any hope of reaching whatever objective we decide on this week, can anyone say with a straight face that the benefits are worth these costs?


I'll let Juan Cole sum it up.

So, the US is killing schoolchildren far too often, enraging the Afghan public. It has provoked a student protest movement against it in Jalalabad and Kabul. Its informants are double agents. Its supposed partner, the Afghan army, mostly doesn't actually exist and couldn't be depended on to show up to anything important; and that is when they aren't taking potshots at US troops; and there is no Afghan government as we go into 2010.

Other than that, we're in great shape.

Afghan Democracy?

Abdullah Abdullah has dropped out:

In an emotional speech on Sunday to thousands of supporters here, Mr. Abdullah said he could not take part in a runoff that he believed would be at least as fraudulent as the tainted first round in August, in which almost a million ballots for Mr. Karzai were thrown out as fakes.

“I hoped there would be a better process,” he said. “But it is final. I will not participate in the Nov. 7 elections.

”

Afghanistan is not ready for democracy. They are not even close. You can't just throw up some polling stations and ballots and claim that you have a functioning, democratic government.

Think about what happened here. There was an election of sorts, which everyone knew was going to be fraudulent. It was found to be fraudulent, and so everyone decided that there should be another one. And then it was apparent that that one would be fraudulent too, and that a whole lot of innocent people were going to die. So everyone convinced one of the candidates to quit, and declared the election off, and decided that the guy who stole the first election gets to keep being president. And then they all stand around and talk about how great it is that there is democracy in Afghanistan.

This is what we're fighting for? What a joke.

Sure, Afghanistan had an election. But what they don't have is a government.

Our Friends in Afghanistan

From NYT report:

KABUL, Afghanistan — Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The C.I.A. denies this, of course.

“No intelligence organization worth the name would ever entertain these kind of allegations,” said Paul Gimigliano, the spokesman.

Mr Gimigliano should be aware that I have, for quite some time, been thinking that we should refer to his organization as the C.A.

We really have no idea what we're doing here, do we?

The one thing that we can be assured of is that the locals know we have money, and they are running rings around us while we try to figure out who is on who's side, and where all the money is ending up, and what the hell is going on. Because we really have no idea.

The locals always hold all the cards. And when the locals are prepared to fight to the death (at the same time we've decided that our newest goal is to reduce violence and increase security), they have us entirely over a barrel.

There is just no conceivable way that this war, or counter-insurgency, or counter-terrorism, or nation-building, or whatever we've decided to call it this week is going to turn out well.

Remember that, when people say we have to stay there, or escalate, because it will be bad if we leave. Because it's going to be bad no matter what. That train left the station a long time ago. The question now is whether we're going to throw live troops after dead, and good money after bad.

Must-Read Afghan Analysis

Robert Dreyfuss has a great article up, with an excerpt from his recent interview with AfPak expert Christine Fair. Here's a taste:

Q. (Dreyfuss) If there's a way out of this, do we need to start with the Pakistanis, get them to bring the Taliban to the table? And maybe that means giving the Pakistanis and the Saudis some stuff that they want, because we need their cooperation?

FAIR: "That's one formulation of the problem. I have a somewhat different take. If you believe that the Taliban is our key national security concern, then what you say is right. I don't think they are our preeminent national security concern. The Taliban are a bunch of hillbillies. They are a parochial, territorial insurgency. Despite all of the hullaballoo, they don't really have an international agenda. These guys are focused on Afghanistan, period. Our concerns are Al Qaeda. And there are more Al Qaeda operating in Pakistan than in Afghanistan, and there are more international terrorist groups operating in Pakistan than in Afghanistan. A vast majority of these international terrorist conspiracies that have been busted in Europe and the U.K., their footprints are in Pakistan. Obviously, Jaish-e Muhammad, Lashkar-e Taiba, the list goes on and on and on. These guys are all in Pakistan. And Pakistan has been using militant groups for six decades as part of their policy. …

"So I would argue that we've got this so completely bass-ackwards that it's almost comical! We've got these troops in Afghanistan, so we've got to placate Pakistan, cajole it, make it feel important, throw money at it, because we need Pakistan to support the logistics. So we have this narrative that says, to stabilize Afghanistan we need to get Pakistan's support. Stabilizing Afghanistan's not the goal. Quite the contrary. We need to be in a different place in Afghanistan so we can play hardball with the Pakistanis. So the idea is, we have to stabilize Afghanistan, so we need to get Pakistan and all these other clowns on board? That's not our objective. Our objective is to wrap up international terrorism, limit our exposure to it, and to preclude a nuclear exchange on the Indian subcontinent, and to preclude nuclear proliferation. And all of the return addresses for those problems are right there in Pakistan. And because of our position in Afghanistan, we are so adversely positioned to deal with Pakistan."

I saw a Dreyfuss speech recently. He made a pretty good case for an Afghan withdrawal, but had no idea whether this would happen.

The thing to remember here is that we really shouldn't care what the Taliban does. They are not international terrorists.

If you are concerned about the terrorist bogeyman, then remember this. It is our invasion and occupation of Muslim countries, and the killings of hundreds of thousands of Muslim people (most of whom are completely innocent), which is fueling the recruitment of terrorist groups.

The next time a 9-11 type event occurs, we will find that the reasons for the attack are because of our policies of invading Muslim countries and killing their citizens. And we will have it coming to us.

Is there any difference, really, between 9-11 and the shock and awe campaign unleashed in Baghdad in 2003? Both events were repugnant, heinous acts of violence against an innocent civilian population. According to the Oxford Research Group, 6,616 civilians were killed just in the initial shock and awe aerial invasion of Baghdad. 2995 people, mostly civilians were killed in the 9-11 attacks.

Please don't tell me that what we did was justified because it was done in the context of war. War is just a label that's used to justify killing civilians. There is no fundamental difference between war and acts of terrorism; they are just different methods of using violence to get an outcome. Neither is acceptable.

And if we want the other side to see that violence is not the answer, then we will need to to reject its use as well, except in true self-defense. The place to start this is Afghanistan. The time to do it is now.

Max Boot is for Max War

Max Boot has an Op-Ed in the NY Times, in which he writes glowing reviews of the results that can be achieved with higher troop levels.

“I HOPE people who say this war is unwinnable see stories like this. This is what winning in a counterinsurgency looks like.”

Lt. Col. William F. McCollough, commander of the First Battalion, Fifth Marine Regiment, is walking me around the center of Nawa, a poor, rural district in southern Afghanistan’s strategically vital Helmand River Valley. His Marines, who now number more than 1,000, arrived in June to clear out the Taliban stronghold. Two weeks of hard fighting killed two Marines and wounded 70 more but drove out the insurgents. Since then the colonel’s men, working with 400 Afghan soldiers and 100 policemen, have established a “security bubble” around Nawa

.


Well, this certainly sounded promising on the surface. I figured I'd better check out Boots numbers.

Here's what I found. Nawa is a town of about 30,000 people.According to Boot, there are 1500 hundred combined troops there, and that has been sufficient to secure the town.

But obviously, our "mission" in Afghanistan, though no one seems able to explain what it is, is most certainly not to just secure the small town of Nawa. So let's extrapolate those numbers and see what it would take to secure the province of Helmund, where Nawa is located.

Helmand has 1.4 million people. Using the same population troop ratio, we would need 46,000 US troops and 23,000 Afghan personnel.

Of course, Helmand is but one of 34 Afghan provinces. The 34 provinces comprise around 28 million people. Using the same ratio, we could secure the country with a mere 933,000 US troops, and 465,000 Afghans.

Now, in case you haven't been paying attention, last year we had 32,000 troops there. Now we have 68,000 troops there. The majority of Americans don't want to send even the 40,000 more that Gen. McChrystal is requesting.

And here comes Max Boot to assure us that we can win this thing-we just need to have a million US troops over there.

And what would we get from this insane escalation?

Only by sending more personnel, military and civilian, can President Obama improve the Afghan government’s performance, reverse the Taliban’s gains and prevent Al Qaeda’s allies from regaining the ground they lost after 9/11.

Let's talk about these reasons.

Are we going to mobilize a million troops so that we can improve Afghanistan's government? Is this really a reason? Why don't we try to improve our own, first.

Reverse the Taliban's gains? They're not generally nice people, but the Taliban is not a threat to the United States. They're an affront the concept of universal civil rights, but they are not trying to destroy America. They just don't want Americans interfering.

Prevent Al Qaeda's allied from regaining ground?

There are less than 100 Al Quaeda left in Afghanistan. They are not a threat to the United States. Their allies (I assume he means the Taliban) already control 40 percent of the country, and have for quite some time. If Taliban control was going to ineveitably result in terror attacks by Al Quaeda, it would have happened already.

These reasons are horse shit, and yet the war machine grinds on.

Logic Fail

Urban Dictionary
Definition: Concern Troll
In an argument (usually a political debate), a concern troll is someone who is on one side of the discussion, but pretends to be a supporter of the other side with "concerns". The idea behind this is that your opponents will take your arguments more seriously if they think you're an ally. Concern trolls who use fake identities are sometimes known as sockpuppets.

It's time to FJM Tom Friedman's latest Op-Ed, aptly entitled "Not Good Enough". In case you don't know Tom yet, he generally believes in invading countries as a first resort. He's never met a war he didn't like; the world may not have been flat when he wrote his book, but he sure seems intent on bombing it until it gets that way.

If President Obama can find a way to balance the precise number of troops that will stabilize Afghanistan and Pakistan, without tipping America into a Vietnam there, then he indeed deserves a Nobel Prize — for physics.

Tom actually seems to recognize that there is a problem with this war.

I have no problem with the president taking his time to figure this out. He and we are going to have to live with this decision for a long time.

Yes, the whole country waits for the president's decision. Will we withdraw? Will we stay the course? Will we escalate? These are the great questions of the day.

For my money, though, I wish there was less talk today about how many more troops to send and more focus on what kind of Afghan government we have as our partner.

And here is where Tom does his best work. He feigns concern for the viability of the unenviably non-viable Afghani government, while, like a magician, he claims that the decision to send more troops has already been made, and that the only question is how many. His concern for Karzai is palpable, and it's designed to distract from the big issue yet to be determined-do we send more troops?

Because when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, the local government is the critical bridge between your troops and your goals. If that government is rotten, your whole enterprise is doomed.

Also, when you are mounting a counterinsurgency campaign, a critical element, according to General Patraeus and the US Army field manual, is to have 20-25 troops per thousand civilians. This means that we need over a half a million troops in Afghanistan, which is about 9 or 10 times the number we have now. Of course, assuming that the American people don't start an armed revolt over sending 600,000 troops to Afghanistan, it will also be necessary to have a stable government in place. The Army field manual says this, too.

Independent election monitors suggest that as many as one-third of votes cast in the Aug. 20 election are tainted and that President Hamid Karzai apparently engaged in massive fraud to come out on top. Yet, he is supposed to be the bridge between our troop surge and our goal of a stable Afghanistan. No way.

I couldn't agree more. We can send all the troops we want to (although it appears that the voters don't want to), and it will be a colossal waste of money unless there is a stable government. (Actually, it will be a colossal waste of money if there is a stable government, but let's forget about that for now. )

I understand the huge stakes in stabilizing Afghanistan and Pakistan. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, our top commander there who is asking for thousands more troops, is not wrong when he says a lot of bad things would flow from losing Afghanistan to the Taliban.

What exactly are all these "bad things", Tom? How bad are they, really? The Taliban aren't terrorists. There are only 100 Al Qaeda members left in the country. 600,000-100 seems a little much. If the Taliban wanted to let Al Qaeda in, they could, since they still control half the country after 8 years of war.

But I keep asking myself: How do we succeed with such a tainted government as our partner?

This is a great question. I don't see how we can.

I know that Jefferson was not on the ballot. But there is a huge difference between “good enough” and dysfunctional and corrupt. Whatever we may think, there are way too many Afghans who think our partner, Karzai and his team, are downright awful.

Yes, and so they think that we, by extension, are also awful. And they're right. So we should not send more troops, but we should, instead, bring our troops home.

That would be logical. But that logic doesn't fit Friedman's predetermined desired outcome, which is to send more troops, and to keep us in a never-ending state of war. And if that is what you want, here's how you frame it.

That is why it is not enough for us to simply dispatch more troops. If we are going to make a renewed commitment in Afghanistan, we have to visibly display to the Afghan people that we expect a different kind of governance from Karzai, or whoever rules, and refuse to proceed without it. It doesn’t have to be Switzerland, but it does have to be good enough — that is, a government Afghans are willing to live under. Without that, more troops will only delay a defeat.

Implicit in this argument is the assumption that we are sending more troops. Again, he tries to distract by talking about how important it is to have a good government there, even though he knows damn well that that isn't going to happen, and has no ideas on how to make that happen.

He goes on to talk about how bad that government is, as though there are still people who haven't yet heard how bad it is.

I am not sure Washington fully understands just how much the Taliban-led insurgency is increasingly an insurrection against the behavior of the Karzai government — not against the religion or civilization of its international partners. And too many Afghan people now blame us for installing and maintaining this government.
Karzai is already trying to undermine more international scrutiny of this fraudulent election and avoid any runoff. Monday his ally on the Electoral Complaints Commission, Mustafa Barakzai, resigned, alleging “foreign interference.” That is Karzai trying to turn his people against us to prevent us from cleaning up an election that he polluted.

Talking to Afghanistan experts in Kabul, Washington and Berlin, a picture is emerging: The Karzai government has a lot in common with a Mafia family. Where a “normal” government raises revenues from the people — in the form of taxes — and then disperses them to its local and regional institutions in the form of budgetary allocations or patronage, this Afghan government operates in the reverse. The money flows upward from the countryside in the form of payments for offices purchased or “gifts” from cronies.

What flows from Kabul, the experts say, is permission for unfettered extraction, protection in case of prosecution and punishment in case the official opposes the system or gets out of line. In “Karzai World,” it appears, slots are either sold (to people who buy them in order to make a profit) or granted to cronies, or are given away to buy off rivals.

And then...

We have to be very careful that we are not seen as the enforcers for this system.

Uh, the whole world knows that Karzai is America's puppet. After 8 years of war, and countless Afghan deaths, it's not very freaking likely that the Afghans won't consider us enforcers.

....

This is crazy. We have been way too polite, and too worried about looking like a colonial power, in dealing with Karzai. I would not add a single soldier there before this guy, if he does win the presidency, takes visible steps to clean up his government in ways that would be respected by the Afghan people

.

Way to act tough, Tom. I can see how this conversation would go if you were the president:

President Tom: Hey, look here, Karzai, this whole corrupt government you've got here, well, it's just not working. The people just hate how corrupt you are, and they hate your laws and everything about how you run things. And now you want us to send you more troops to protect you?

President Karzai: Yeah, that's pretty much what we want.

President Tom: But this is going to bankrupt our country, and we're going to have to send a half a million troops halfway around the world to protect you. People will die. It's going to be bad. And the voters are already starting to realize that we have no mission here besides protecting you. And you are corrupt. And this whole mission is really just helping to breed more terrorists.

President Karzai: But you wouldn't want the terrorists to win, right?

President Tom: Well, no, but this looks like it will go down as another Vietnam. What are we going to do?

President Karzai: I'll try to take some steps to clean things up.

President Tom: That's not good enough! These steps have to be visible!

President Karzai: Visible?! You drive a hard bargain, Mr President! Ok, we'll try to make visible steps.

President Tom: Alright then. Just needed to make sure. You promise?

President Karzai: (laughing to advisers with hand over phone) Ok, we promise.

If Karzai says no, then there is only one answer: “You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this.” (Cue the helicopters.)

Just because you deny that it's an empty threat doesn't mean that it's not an empty threat. This is an empty threat. If we send 600,000 troops over there, we aren't going to send them home because Karzai is corrupt. It'll just be a reason to stay.

So, please, spare me the lectures about how important Afghanistan and Pakistan are today. I get the stakes. But we can’t want a more decent Afghanistan than the country’s own president. If we do, we have no real local partner who will be able to hold the allegiance of the people, and we will not succeed — whether with more troops, more drones or more money.

Stop conflating Pakistan and Afghanistan, Tom. Karzai is not the president of Pakistan. And you are the one lecturing us about how important Afghanistan is. Even though it isn't.

Even George Will Can See It

(Update below)


From his latest column:

The U.S. strategy is "clear, hold and build." Clear? Taliban forces can evaporate and then return, confident that U.S. forces will forever be too few to hold gains. Hence nation-building would be impossible even if we knew how, and even if Afghanistan were not the second-worst place to try: The Brookings Institution ranks Somalia as the only nation with a weaker state.

Military historian Max Hastings says Kabul controls only about a third of the country -- "control" is an elastic concept -- and " 'our' Afghans may prove no more viable than were 'our' Vietnamese, the Saigon regime." Just 4,000 Marines are contesting control of Helmand province, which is the size of West Virginia. The New York Times reports a Helmand official saying he has only "police officers who steal and a small group of Afghan soldiers who say they are here for 'vacation.' " Afghanistan's $23 billion gross domestic product is the size of Boise's. Counterinsurgency doctrine teaches, not very helpfully, that development depends on security, and that security depends on development. Three-quarters of Afghanistan's poppy production for opium comes from Helmand. In what should be called Operation Sisyphus, U.S. officials are urging farmers to grow other crops. Endive, perhaps?

Even though violence exploded across Iraq after, and partly because of, three elections, Afghanistan's recent elections were called "crucial." To what? They came, they went, they altered no fundamentals, all of which militate against American "success," whatever that might mean. Creation of an effective central government? Afghanistan has never had one. U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry hopes for a "renewal of trust" of the Afghan people in the government, but the Economist describes President Hamid Karzai's government -- his vice presidential running mate is a drug trafficker -- as so "inept, corrupt and predatory" that people sometimes yearn for restoration of the warlords, "who were less venal and less brutal than Mr. Karzai's lot."

Mullen speaks of combating Afghanistan's "culture of poverty." But that took decades in just a few square miles of the South Bronx. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, thinks jobs programs and local government services might entice many "accidental guerrillas" to leave the Taliban. But before launching New Deal 2.0 in Afghanistan, the Obama administration should ask itself: If U.S. forces are there to prevent reestablishment of al-Qaeda bases -- evidently there are none now -- must there be nation-building invasions of Somalia, Yemen and other sovereignty vacuums?

Why are we here again?

Update:
I'd also like to comment on his opening paragraphs:

"Yesterday," reads the e-mail from Allen, a Marine in Afghanistan, "I gave blood because a Marine, while out on patrol, stepped on a [mine's] pressure plate and lost both legs." Then "another Marine with a bullet wound to the head was brought in. Both Marines died this morning."

"I'm sorry about the drama," writes Allen, an enthusiastic infantryman willing to die "so that each of you may grow old." He says: "I put everything in God's hands." And: "Semper Fi!

But this is first and foremost in our hands.

We are telling these soldiers that they are dying so that each of us may grow old. But is that true? Are their deaths doing anything to makes us safer?

We have a responsibility to these men and women. And it is not to uncritically agree with whoever says the answer is more troops and more war.

I was in the army once. I joined on my 17th birthday, right before the first Gulf War was starting. I can tell you that I thought I was more politically informed than most, and I was probably was. I can tell you that I had more extensive knowledge of the history of war than pretty much anyone in my brigade. And with all that knowledge, I'm pretty damn sure that I didn't know squat about why we were about to go into war.

17 year olds rarely know more than what we tell them. And so when we tell them to go get their legs blown off, fighting some irrelevant and hopeless counter-insurgency, because it's vital to the security and prestige of the United States, they believe us. And nothing could be more irresponsible and depraved than asking someone to give their life for a war which we know to be lost or unnecessary or both.

Why are we even allowing 17 year olds to go to war? It's not because there aren't enough 30 year olds to do it. It's not because 30 year olds aren't physically capable.

It's because we need young, impressionable minds to mold into killing machines. Minds that do not have the experience and maturity needed to decide whether or not the cause is just.

We tell 17 year olds that they aren't mature enough to make decisions; these decisions include voting, entering into contracts, drinking, and buying cigarettes. Yet the US Army actively recruits our children when they turn 17. And it has no problem sending them into battle to be maimed or killed, and to kill and maim, at 17 and without so much as a high school diploma.

This is shameful. And the crime is compounded by the volunteer military, which preys on the least-educated and most vulnerable among us, instead of requiring all able bodied people to participate in the defense of our country.

Who can doubt but that the world would be a very different place if the Bush daughters had been eligible for the draft?