{"id":384694,"date":"2018-11-12T02:48:26","date_gmt":"2018-11-12T01:48:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-the-war-stories-ever-end\/"},"modified":"2018-11-12T02:48:26","modified_gmt":"2018-11-12T01:48:26","slug":"will-the-war-stories-ever-end","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/will-the-war-stories-ever-end\/","title":{"rendered":"Will the War Stories Ever End?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Originally posted at TomDispatch<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n

Death-by-ally: now that, by definition, is a fate from hell. You might at least imagine that such \u201cinsider attacks\u201d \u2013 in which a member of the Afghan security forces turns his weapon on his American or NATO trainers or advisers and tries to gun them down \u2013 would be the rarest of events. After all, if you\u2019re an armed Afghan who decides to try to kill such an ally, you have to be aware that you\u2019re almost assuredly committing suicide. You have a moment to fire and then, in that armed environment, you\u2019re likely to be dead. And yet those attacks, which started in 2007-2008 with four American deaths, peaked in 2012<\/a> with dozens of them, and by 2017<\/a> had resulted in 157 deaths<\/a>, most of them American (along with many uncounted Afghan deaths). However, between 2013 and this year, such desperate acts faded, becoming the exceedingly rare events you might expect them to be. But no longer<\/a>.\u00a0 In one case after another recently, armed Afghan allies have been turning their guns on their American and European<\/a> advisers and trainers, sending a devastating message our way about the now-17-year-old American war there (even if we, in the U.S., have largely preferred not to hear it).<\/p>\n

Since early July<\/a>, Americans have died in five<\/a> such attacks, including a sergeant major<\/a> and the mayor<\/a> of a town in Utah (deployed with his National Guard unit), while an American brigadier-general<\/a> was among the wounded. This has left Americans in Afghanistan reportedly<\/a> dealing with their Afghan counterparts largely by phone and email, rather than in person.<\/p>\n

To put more than a decade of deaths-by-ally in perspective: historically, such numbers are, I suspect, simply unprecedented. No example comes to mind of a colonial power, neocolonial power, or modern superpower fighting a war with \u201cnative\u201d allies whose forces repeatedly found the weapons they were supplying turned on them. There is certainly nothing in the American historical record faintly comparable \u2013 not in the eighteenth and nineteenth century Indian wars, nor in the Philippine Insurrection at the turn of the last century, nor in Korea in the early 1950s, Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, or even Iraq in this century. In this sense at least, Afghanistan is unique.<\/p>\n

And here\u2019s the thing: thought about a certain way, those aren\u2019t the only kinds of insider attacks that Americans continue to experience, thanks to this country\u2019s never-ending war on terror. There are others right here in the homeland, even if they\u2019re never thought of as such. TomDispatch<\/em> regular<\/a> Rory Fanning who, following two deployments to Afghanistan with the 2nd Army Ranger Battalion, walked across the United States for the Pat Tillman Foundation in 2008-2009 and then wrote a book, Worth Fighting For<\/em><\/a>, about his experiences, is an expert on the subject. As he suggests on this Veterans Day, many of those like him who took part in America\u2019s unending twenty-first-century wars brought those conflicts…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Originally posted at TomDispatch. Death-by-ally: now that, by definition, is a fate from hell. You might at least imagine that such \u201cinsider attacks\u201d \u2013 in which a member of the Afghan security forces turns his weapon on his American or NATO trainers or advisers and tries to gun them down \u2013 would be the rarest […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2519,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-384694","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\/384694","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\/2519"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=384694"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/384694\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=384694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=384694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=384694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}