Bellum sine fine. Englehardt in a sorrowful retrospective :
--
I began writing about that war in October 2001 ...
I wrote about our Afghan War in 2008 ... “We have become a nation of wedding crashers," I wrote, "the uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home.”
I wrote about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of “a war gone to hell”
I wrote in 2010, thinking about how “forever war” had entered the bloodstream of the twenty-first-century U.S. military ...
I wrote in 2012, when Afghanistan had superseded Vietnam as the longest war in American history: “Washington has gotten itself into a situation on the Eurasian mainland so vexing and perplexing that Vietnam has finally been left in the dust ...
I wrote in 2015, thinking about the American taxpayer dollars that had, in the preceding years, gone into Afghan “roads to nowhere, ghost soldiers, and a $43 million gas station” built in the middle of nowhere ...
I wrote last year thinking about the nature of our never-ending war there: “Right now, Washington is whistling past the graveyard. In Afghanistan and Pakistan the question is no longer whether the U.S. is in command, but whether it can get out in time.
... the Pentagon and the country's field commanders seem to be hooked on America’s “infinite” wars. They exhibit not the slightest urge to stop them. The Afghan War and the others that have flowed from it represent both their raison d'être and their meal ticket.
Despite that military’s supposedly apolitical role in this country’s affairs, its leaders are uniquely capable of blocking any attempt to end the Afghan War.
Every day that the U.S. military stays in Afghanistan is indeed a victory for... well, not George W. Bush, or Barack Obama, and certainly not Donald Trump, but the now long-dead Osama bin Laden.
Unfortunately, it’s a reasonable bet that, in August 2019, or August 2020, not to speak of August 2021 I’ll be repeating all of this yet again.
--
Read the whole thing:
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/08/16/war-piece-end-all-war-piecessidd