Highlander Newspaper

Issue date: 2/2/10 Section: Opinion

Media Credit: Courtesy of Flickr.com/US Army

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have endured long enough to outlast the dozens of television shows that have drawn more attention with a single episode compared to the sum of news since the onset of the wars.

It will soon become the pinnacle demonstration of that phrase, "the elephant in the closet." But we as a nation have, through our silence, elected to give the elephant a spot in the corner. Worse still, we are feeding it and cleaning up after it. And not a soul seems to do so much as to look the other way when the television features anything about a car bomb or suicide bomber.

That was reflected in Obama's State of the Union Address last Wednesday, when he made pronouncements indicating that the U.S. involvements in Iraq and Afghanistan would end in 2011.

But as we shelve Iraq and Afghanistan away for the next year, it would do to recall the following: more soldiers are being sent to Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay remains open and insurgents remain capable of strapping explosives to themselves and boarding airplanes.

Furthermore, we still find it difficult to consider the plight of soldiers once they are out of uniform. Not all of them come back whole-some lie in hospital beds, while others are left to consider the triumph and trauma of their deployment.

Worse yet, it still appears impossible to address them in any way apart from the single word, "troops."

Counting the numbers of military personnel Obama has asked to be deployed to Afghanistan-about 30,000-there will soon be about 100,000 US forces operating in that nation. But for what purpose? The last time Afghanistan was mentioned in the news, the words "tainted election" followed closely behind.

Additionally, there is nothing that remotely promises the ever-sought stability the United States is looking for, regardless of whether one looks in Afghanistan or Iraq.

And assuming President Obama follows through with this 2011 pledge, this escalation will last for a year and a bit more before slowly evaporating away along with the rest of the forces deployed in the region.

Generally speaking, escalation portends a desire to remain. American deployments to Haiti, for instance, hint that we do plan to remain for a protracted amount of time. One would be hard-pressed not to recall that ever-so-abused promise to "bring them home by Christmas." Given any reference to history, no such deadline will ever be met.

The promise of the closure of Guantanamo Bay is broken and forgotten; by this time, that icon of the Bush Administration's "way of doing things" should have been abandoned and falling into disrepair.

Although its numbers have dwindled, little suggests that it will be closed in the immediate future; the Justice Department has suggested that fifty prisoners be held indefinitely at Guantanamo without charge. Presently, 193 prisoners remain at the camp.

Everything has changed-and yet, nothing has changed.

The United States stands as dedicated to maintaining its presence in Iraq and Afghanistan as it was the previous year, yet promise after promise has been made to wind it all down, wrap it up and put it away.

The worst offenses of the previous administration's doings are past, but the premises remain for committing them again.

Finance may dominate the talk of the nation-but that is no excuse to forget the cost of war.

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