{"id":373707,"date":"2018-08-17T00:59:22","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T23:59:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-us-war-of-abysmal-repetition-in-afghanistan\/"},"modified":"2018-08-17T00:59:22","modified_gmt":"2018-08-16T23:59:22","slug":"the-us-war-of-abysmal-repetition-in-afghanistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/the-us-war-of-abysmal-repetition-in-afghanistan\/","title":{"rendered":"The US War of Abysmal Repetition in Afghanistan"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I\u2019m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America\u2019s <\/span>second<\/em> <\/span>Afghan War, no less)? I <\/span>began writing<\/a> <\/span>about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the US invasion of Afghanistan. That was how I inadvertently launched the unnamed listserv that would, a year later, become <\/span>TomDispatch. Given the website\u2019s continuing focus on America\u2019s forever wars (a phrase I first used in <\/span>2010<\/a>), what choice have I had but to write about Afghanistan ever since?<\/p>\n

So think of this as the war piece to end all war pieces. And let the repetition begin!<\/p>\n

Here, for instance, is what I <\/span>wrote<\/a> <\/span>about our Afghan War in 2008, almost seven years after it began, when the US Air Force took out a bridal party, including the bride herself and at least 26 other women and children en route to an Afghan wedding. And that would be just one of eight US wedding strikes I <\/span>toted up<\/a> <\/span>by the end of 2013 in three countries, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen, that killed almost 300 potential revelers. \u201cWe have become a nation of wedding crashers,\u201d I wrote, \u201cthe uninvited guests who arrived under false pretenses, tore up the place, offered nary an apology, and refused to go home.\u201d<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what I <\/span>wrote<\/a> <\/span>about Afghanistan in 2009, while considering the metrics of \u201ca war gone to hell\u201d: \u201cWhile Americans argue feverishly and angrily over what kind of money, if any, to put into health care, or decaying infrastructure, or other key places of need, until recently just about no one in the mainstream raised a peep about the fact that, for nearly eight years (not to say much of the last three decades), we\u2019ve been pouring billions of dollars, American military know-how, and American lives into a black hole in Afghanistan that is, at least in significant part, of our own creation.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fair warning. Stop reading right now if you want, because I\u2019m going to repeat myself. What choice do I have, since my subject is the Afghan War (America\u2019s second Afghan War, no less)? I began writing about that war in October 2001, almost 17 years ago, just after the US invasion of Afghanistan. That was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-373707","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373707","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=373707"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/373707\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=373707"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=373707"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=373707"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}