Out Of The War Zone Into The Fire Zone

I’ve been back in So Cal for six weeks now. I’ve had this ongoing internal debate on weather to retire the blog or keep writing. People keep reading it so I decided I should keep writing it. The LA basin is in for a hell of a fire season. It’s early in the season and already the Station Fire has charred 160,000 acres of local mountains. A new fire is raging as I write this. This new fire is upwind from the canyon I live in and with Santa Anna winds blowing, that can be worrisome. I spent six months in Afghanistan and generally felt safe. If some dumbass shoots at you, bullets can be sent back post haste. If Katushka rockets or mortars are inbound, they generally come in threes or fours, they are short lived attacks and infrequent. Mind you this is from my experience at Bagram not at Helmond, Kandahar, Patika, Ghazni, etc. That said, my community lies anxiously waiting for the end of the Santa Anna’s. We are at the mercy of random arsonists. Cowardly bastards that should be severely punished. Such is life in the alleged bastion of democracy.
There is a major debate in the USA right now about Afghanistan. Should we send in more troops and prove we could have won in Vietnam or do we cut our losses and pull out? I am asked my opinion about this almost daily. My friends and neighbors want to hear the opinion of someone who has seen Afghanistan. I am struggling with the answer. Anyone who has read this blog knows I think highly of the potential of Afghanistan. I think highly of the resourcefulness of the Afghan people. I would love nothing more than to be able to tell people we should send in more troops and that we can win this in under a year. I would love to… but I cannot. I am have this melancholy feeling that we already shot our wad in Central Asia. We had the initiative and going into 2003 we threw it away on the whims of a fascist administration. (As I write this you should know I choose my words carefully) We have really screwed this war up. You can’t invade and then throttle back and pretend all is well. The initial good will of the Afghans, happy to be free of the despotic Taliban Regime, is long gone. The average Afghan wants peace. They want their homes intact, not bombed. They want the mines and ordinance removed, not limbs removed by explosives. We are in a sad state of affairs in Central Asia today.
If the US Army were still led by soldiers who had fought in the hell of Vietnam we might have stood a chance. Insurgencies are ugly. Fighting an enemy who look like civilians is a nasty business full of misidentification and tragedy. I worry that the senior officers raised in the turkey shoot of Desert Storm are completely out of their element now. The lack of effective leadership I witnessed at the field grade officer level leaves me full of unease. I read General McCrystals guidance. It was sound. Unfortunately I don’t have faith that the current Army leadership is capable of understanding and implementing that guidance. If we leave Afghanistan in a quagmire it will not be the Taliban Insurgency that beat us it will have been our own ethnocentrism that kicked our ass.