Our Insulting Afghan Retreat Afghanistan: President Obama’s abrupt order to withdraw U.S. Marines from Helmand province with zero fanfare was an ill-fitting exit for U.S. forces after 13 years of sacrifice in the war’s bloodiest theater. Is this the thanks they get? No public acknowledgment from the White House. No official statements. No praise for extraordinary dedication or heroism. No proclamations of valor. And certainly nothing about victory. Just a surprise order to abandon the two largest and most dangerous outposts of America’s longest war, Camp Leatherneck and British-led Camp Bastion, sideby-side bases that at one time housed 40,000. The order came so fast that the Marines who had been there 13 years, and who put so much into it, didn’t have “time to digest it,” as one told the Wall Street Journal. Because over the years, as the rest of us went about our daily lives, these courageous men and women were out on patrols in the baking sun over desolate badlands, suffering long separations from loved ones and enduring the alternating boredom and terror of combat with a depraved, Dark Age enemy and its drug lord allies. Some of the bloodiest battles were waged in Helmand. The U.S. lost more than 350 in combat there and the British about 450, nearly a fifth of the war’s total losses. Meanwhile, the injured returned home to bureaucratic insult, as they sought help from a behemoth Veterans Administration that Obama vowed to reform but didn’t. Their courage may have been out of sight most of the time, but it was not unknown. Thanks to a trove of documentaries and feature films about Afghanistan — “Armadillo,” “Patrol Base Jakar,” “Hurt Locker” and “Restrepo,” to name a few — the Marine experience also became part of the national consciousness. Which is why all Americans deserve a presidential statement. But rather than acknowledge the mission and offering at least a few ceremonial words of closure, the president merely ordered that the Marines be “high-tailed out,” as the bitter headline on a Foreign Policy piece put it. As if they’d done something they should be ashamed about. The writer, Colum Lynch, offered his own disturbing theory as to why the president chose such a premature and unceremonious exit: He knew the Taliban would likely take over, just as the Islamic State has done in Iraq, and he didn’t want publicity. The next we hear of Leatherneck and Bastion may be with the Taliban running them. And that would be even worse than the commander-in-chief’s indifference to the Marines’ sacrifices: a willingness to throw it all away. Obama’s deafening silence was simply his way of not calling attention to the fact he let our men and women in uniform down. They deserved better.
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:52:32 +0000
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