Young men go off to war
And score
Deaths, rapes, across an alien nation
Which they chimp-like can revel in –
Which they in later years regret,
Never discuss, never forget.

The one thing that Donald Trump and Joe Biden could agree on: get out of the trillion-dollar waste of Afghanistan. Trump had Pompeo negotiate with the Taliban–the US would leave in 2021 so long as the Taliban didn’t kill any more US personnel; he presumably wanted to wait until the 2020 election was over, because the withdrawal might be chaotic and would look bad anyway. Biden stuck with the Trump agreement, and his calculation must be that, messy or not, hopefully it will be ancient history by the 2024 election.

You can’t fault the US for wanting to go after Osama Bin Laden after 9/11… but that’s separate from trying to stay and nation-build a supremely difficult and corrupt country. And it was probably not criminal under international law, whereas the subsequent Iraq invasion *was* illegal and breached the UN Charter, as Secretary-General Kofi Annan said. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz (and Tony Blair)… many people see them all as war criminals, unpunished, and leaving their front-line pawns (if they survived) to live with guilt and PTSD.

The American defeat in Vietnam turned out to be very good for the Vietnamese. Let’s just hope things turn out well for the Afghans. And congratulations to Joe Biden for getting the US out – you can’t impose human rights on a corrupt tribal society by invasion. It doesn’t work like that. There are far more constructive ways to approach international human rights issues… like cleaning your own house first.

This poem was published by Visions International, a poetry journal with perhaps a brighter past than present.

“New recruits at physical jerks – Flinders” by State Library Victoria Collections is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0