Why are we in Afghanistan?

The class I am teaching at SMU with Alma Jadallah is creating proposals for funding as an exercise on the business side of dispute resolution. I hope we can actually get the projects they are working on funded, but in an educational sense that would be, as they say in Louisiana, lagniappe. One of the projects is focused on race relations in the US, one is developing a playground and child care for kids in the West Bank, and one is searching for ways to help women business owners in Afghanistan.

Over dinner last week in Texas, Alma asked me to explain why I think we are in Afghanistan – and I found it hard to enunciate. We are there to protect the population from “radical” anti-democratic forces – but we’ve ignored that situation in many other places. We are there to ensure rights and education for girls and women – but we are actively ignoring situations just as bad, and arguably worse, in other places. We have a “strategic” interest in Afghanistan – whatever that means, and I think it means many things to many people. My point, I guess, is that how one defines “why” we are in Afghanistan depends on one’s perspective.

I met a gentleman on the plane today as I flew down to Atlanta from DC who brought that home to me in a most graphic way. Matthew Kinney is a Staff Sgt. in the Army – he’s a medic who gets into helicopters and flies into places where people get wounded and killed and does his best to keep them alive. He’s done two tours in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan, and because I’m twice as old as he is, I feel ok saying that he’s a remarkable young man. If you’d like a clue as to how remarkable, click on this URL:

http://soldiersangelsgermany.blogspot.com/2009/03/flight-medic-ssg-matthew-kinney-awarded.html

(The "insert link" function is still not working on this site, so you will have to cut and paste the link.)

We talked about rural roots (Nacogdoches and north Mississippi), animals (horses and dogs) and what it meant to teach dispute resolution. At some point in the conversation, I asked him if he supported the call for more troops in Afghanistan, and he answered yes almost before I had the question out of my mouth. I asked him the same question Alma asked me, and he didn’t have any trouble answering. He spoke not of policy or strategy or other abstractions. Instead he spoke of the people there who, from his perspective need our help – we put him there, they need help, so he’s more than willing to give it, whether “it” involves medicine or school construction, or creating safe zones. Reading and hearing the news it is easy to forget that abstract policy debates have very personal and sometimes tragic consequences – we routinely ask young men and women like Staff Sgt. Kinney to disrupt their lives, endure horrors that most of us can’t imagine, and live with visions of their “service” for a lifetime. It is a constant wonder to me that most of them are like Staff Sgt. Kinney – they do their job as best they can and when they see something obviously wrong they try to do the right thing.

For their sakes, I wish our policy discussions were as clearly focused on doing the right thing. And, no, Alma – I’m still not sure I really know why we are in Afghanistan.