Robert Fisk: Why these deaths hit home as hard as the Somme

Our Indiana Guard is in Afghanistan. These are our friends and neighbors. They and their families are the ones that are bearing the brunt of a misguided and doomed to failure strategy while the rest of us go on with our lives back home. Our troops deserve an honest debate back home on the policies that have put them in harm's way. Such a debate is already taking place in the UK, as the Fisk piece shows. We need that debate in the USA now!

Robert Fisk: Why these deaths hit home as hard as the Somme

Tuesday, 18 August 2009

More than 200 soldiers dead in Afghanistan, and now Gordon Brown advises us that "the best way to honour their memory is to see the course through". I don't know which particular "course" Gordon has in mind – protecting democracy, training the Afghan army, defeating the Taliban, talking to the Taliban, or just fighting them so they don't turn up on British shores – but this is straight out of the George W Bush tear bucket.

Not so long ago, I seem to remember, Bush was telling us that we would be betraying the American dead in Iraq if we gave up the fight. We owed it to the dead to go on killing more Iraqis. And now we owe it to the dead to go on killing more Afghans. Who, of course, will go on killing us. Is there no end to this madness?

If we are now going to send our soldiers to be killed because the soldiers we sent before have been killed, then we should get out of Afghanistan today. As a matter of fact, I believe that's what we should do. None of our military – or any other Western soldiers – have any business occupying a square metre of the Muslim world. But there you have it.

We've lost more than 200 soldiers but to honour them, we've got to lose some more. The Brits – wise folk, though sometimes a bit slow on the uptake – worked all this out a long time ago. Hence the lines of mourners at Wootton Bassett (no government ministers, of course) every time a flag-draped coffin comes home.

Yet I do wonder whether our concern about this war doesn't just come from the weirdness of the military campaign, but from the funerals themselves.

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-these-deaths-hit-home-as-hard-as-the-somme-1773468.html