Djelloul Marbrook

Albert Einstein (inset) offered an intriguing definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

If that definition is credible, we need more shrinks in Washington and way fewer lobbyists and politicians. For example, once Gen. William C. Westmoreland decided against counterinsurgency in favor of all-out war in Vietnam Einstein’s dictum blossomed in our faces.

Our government’s attitude, Republican or Democratic, it doesn’t seem to make much difference, seems to be that while Einstein may have been right about other countries his words don’t apply to us. That’s American exceptionalism, and it’s ruining us.

Take Afghanistan. Well, that’s the first problem, isn’t it? It can’t be taken. Alexander the Great, who  took everything else in his path, just toured his way through, marrying a Bactrian princess to guarantee safe passage. The British at the height of their imperial hubris couldn’t do a thing about Afghanistan except give us some romantic poetry about the Khyber Pass and East meeting West none too successfully. And the Soviet Union in all its might, when it was still driving our military budget through the roof to the delight of our military-industrial machine, couldn’t figure out what to do about Afghanistan except shed more blood, a decision it shared in common with our Vietnam era decision-makers.

And yet here we are readying to ramp up our sacrifice of youth and what little wealth we have left in Afghanistan to achieve… to achieve what? Not ever having been able to define victory in Iraq we are now prepared to shed more blood in Afghanistan where victory is even harder to define. American foreign policy doesn’t seem to know what to do with itself when it doesn’t have a war to feed. We have a war economy, and that’s the way certain quarters like it.

Does victory mean giving Afghan poppy growers something better, something as profitable to do? Must such a goal be bought in blood? Does victory mean driving the Taliban into Pakistan where they are already doing more harm than they did in Afghanistan? Does victory mean fighting in Pakistan? What in hell does it mean?

Oh, yes, a stable democratic regime in Kabul, the chicken hawks will say. Just what we’ve given Baghdad, right? How about a stable, democratic regime in Belarus or Venezuela or Myanmar? What are we, the world’s cops? Who are we kidding? We have supported the most wretched dictatorships simply because they weren’t red, and now suddenly we want to bring democracy to everyone. We practically crucified Jimmy Carter because he didn’t want to support fascist juntas, and now we’re hot for democracy in faraway places while we line up at the unemployment office and lose our homes?

What could possibly be going on here except the care and feeding of defense contractors? Just as we failed to diversify our economy during the so-called housing boom we continue to coddle the defense contractors at the expense of everyone else.

This would be the right time for the mainstream media, remembering their disgrace in the run-up to the war in Iraq, to remind us of Afghanistan’s history, to remind us at least as often as they remind us of some celebrity ditz’s latest misbehavior, at least as often as they blow hard about immigration. This would be the time, but don’t hold your breath. It’s a lot easier on their budgets to beat the war drums.

We are about to install an intelligent man in the White House, a man accustomed to coolly entertaining opposing views, a man who knows that just because this is an apple and that is an orange it doesn’t mean one is bad and the other good. Let us pray that he contemplates the Macedonians, the British and the Russians before he decides to further bankrupt us in Afghanistan.—DM