Obama’s Taxi

Commentary abounds on the new Afghanistan strategy, which looks a lot like the old Iraq strategy. They both place a high, perhaps top, priority on making the disasters caused by frivolous warmaking look less like defeat.

The triumphal march into Baghdad was supposed to usher in an era of Middle Eastern democracy and nonstop feeding at the oil trough by happy U.S. corporations. Instead, Bush and Cheney achieved the following: an invigorated, lunatic, anti-Semitic, quasi- military regime in Iran; disappearing business opportunities for anyone associated with the American occupiers; domestic bankrupcy and crushing fiscal deficits; habeas corpus protections, that once distinguished us from monarchies and dictatorships, on the ropes; the national soul pawned on the altar of Security.

What will be the eventual balance sheet on Afghanistan when the postponed withdrawal inevitably comes?

Instead of reading the endless reactions to what Obama said, I spent last night watching Taxi to the Dark Side, a 2007 documentary about how U.S. troops killed a peasant taxi driver named Dilawar at Bagram prison near Kabul. There, soldiers—pumped up with post 9/11 chauvinism and ticking-bomb apologetics for torture—were set loose on a kid caught up in local politics. Since they believed Bush-ite ravings from their superiors that the driver was a deadly terrorist, all their Christian upbringing back in Nebraska didn’t alert them to the possibility that teenagers maybe shouldn’t be beaten to death.

The filmmaker sympathizes with these disoriented and untrained prison guards who took the rap for Rumsfeld, but personally, I can’t share in the ‘just doing my job’ defense. We’ll see how long those excuses last when the harrowing techniques developed by the CIA and the military to turn human beings into lumps of quivering protoplasm are learned—and employed—by our ever-increasing enemies against kids just like these.

Obama is pretty worried about looking like the guy who ‘lost’ Afghanistan, but he is a lot less concerned about what was lost here at home, despite his campaign promises to stop presiding over a lawless military regime that murders teenage boys.