Western Courier

Issue date: 10/14/09 Section: Opinion

Skylar Patridge/cartoonist

The buzz across the nation is a grim one. The war in Afghanistan has been dragging on for eight years, and now our military leaders have come forth asking for more troops.

As citizens, we wonder if more troops are necessary. Perhaps we should be more blunt. How many more need to die for a cause that is essentially invisible?

It seems that the war in Afghanistan has faded in the background. Our eyes are no longer glued to the television as scenes of fireballs and bloodshed fill the frame, an up-close account, sometimes in night vision, of an empire being reduced to dust and rubble. The Afghanistan war has transformed into the gruesome beast behind red curtains. We've seen the beast. We've watched in awe. We've debated repeatedly. Now, most of us wish it would simply disappear. But it's not that simple.

Every so often, we get a glimpse - a few column inches in the newspaper, a special report on the small screen - of what might be happening out there. But do we really know?

All we see are numbers. Although the statistics of war are always changing, it can be safely estimated that nearly 750,000 people have been killed in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, with nearly one million injuries according to unknownnews.net. Perhaps we didn't know what we were signing up for when we bit the bullet and deployed.

We entered the war with the basic intentions of smoking out high-level Taliban leaders and removing the terrorist organization al-Qaeda. Judge H. Lee Sarokin said it best when he wrote in a recent editorial that "trying to rid Iraq and Afghanistan of terrorists is like the impossible task of trying to capture all of the criminals residing in New York City or any other major city."

To follow Sarokin's analogy even further, one could question the priorities of a government that, at the moment, seems to be more concerned with the well-being of countries other than their own.

Yes, we injected ourselves into the war. We made the decision to be there and carry the burden of war. But perhaps it would make much more sense if we pursued a visible, yet transparent, result, one that doesn't involve sending young men and women home in boxes, while old men and women contemplate their next move in air- conditioned offices.

And sure, bigger numbers can win the battle, but there's no guarantee they'll win the war.

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