Forget Afghanistan. We're Losing the War at Home.
I, like many of you, watched President Biden’s statement on Afghanistan this afternoon, August 16. It was a good speech, and he was right that nation building, imposing democracy and getting mired in someone else’s civil war were always bad ideas. Most convincingly, he argued that American armed forces should not be expected to do what Afghan forces, for the most part, would not do themselves.
Most disappointing, though, was his refusal to talk about the appallingly poor intelligence we’ve had over the years (or, perhaps, we had good intel but refused to heed it), and especially his failure to explain the relatively rosy picture he tried to paint about the looming withdrawal earlier this year. He took ownership of the decision to leave, but nothing else.
Well, defeat in war is not unusual – at least half the time one side loses (sometimes both sides). I recommend a piece by Anatol Lieven that appeared today (August 16) on Politico for a more thorough analysis of how the war was lost than I ever could write – Lieven covered the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s and knows a lot more than I do. Probably more than Joe Biden, as well.
I’ll add only this: we’ve long had a policy best described as “no win,” which doesn’t mean we don’t want to win wars, but we suffer under the delusion that we can always outlast the enemy, that we can make the costs too high for any adversary to think they can succeed. But the other side has outlasted us, here as in Vietnam.
I want to write about how America is losing another war, this time at home. It’s not the crumbling infrastructure, the poverty amidst plenty, the racial reckoning, the political polarization, the perennial crime (we have a murder rate at least 10 times higher per capita than in Europe), the immense scale of the ongoing opioid crisis, our dismal early response to Covid (other than Operation Warp Speed, which was a success), or weird conspiracy theories from the likes of QAnon. These have all been covered well by others.
But there’s something else I see, a disease of decades that seems to be less well understood but which speaks to our increasing infirmity as a nation.
For example, in researching my 2011 book, “At the Crossroads: Middle America and the Battle to Save the Car Industry,” which I co-authored with Ted Evanoff, now the Business Editor at The Commercial Appeal in Memphis, I discovered the case of a Chinese businessman who approached an Indiana automotive engineer and offered to buy the patent for a clever item he’d designed and produce it abroad, or else he would authorize his factory back in China to make it anyway and not pay any royalties, confident that he would get away with the theft of intellectual property. That was 10 years ago, and still we are talking about theft of our intellectual property by China. In fact, sometimes large corporations are giving away their IP away just for the right to manufacture in that country and reap greater profits.
Then again, perhaps production costs are higher in America due to union rules and demands, at least in part, or maybe American workers really are inferior to those abroad. Blame Big Capitol or Big Labor - either way, we are losing the war at home.
I watched much of the Derek Chauvin trial earlier this year and wondered why the defense strategy was so poor, and why there were so few expert witnesses on behalf of the defendant, and not very good ones at that. Then I read a perceptive analysis – virtually no criminologists or forensic experts wanted anything to do with the defense for fear of being tarred and feathered because they were helping a murderer. Note the logic here: they would have been guilty of defending a murderer before he had been convicted of murder! The violence being done to due process here should be clear to all but there was something else going on, as well. Either the experts who stayed on the sidelines all were cowards, or they really had cause to fear for their reputations and careers. Either way, we are losing the war at home.
During the depths of our national despair during the Covid-19 pandemic last fall and winter I noticed that television ads for a certain anti-AIDS PrEP (Pre-exposure Prophylaxis) medicine had been pulled from the air. This was the one that provocatively teased users by saying you could have sex with “your many loves” because your levels of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, would be undetectable. Last spring, when things were looking better, the ad was back. This is not a gay rights issue and I don’t know if “undetectable” means non-existent or not. It is the return to promiscuity and reckless abandon, though, that alarms me. We are losing the war at home.
I was shopping recently at a famous discount department store and I took time out to watch the great display of obesity as other customers indifferently passed me by. I don’t remember seeing anything like this in my youth. Look at any photos from the 1950s and 1960s, from any community, Black, White or Hispanic, and you will not see nearly the same level of obesity. Visit any European country today, with the partial exception of the United Kingdom, and there is nowhere near the same level of obesity. Obesity is linked to myriad diseases, including a much higher risk of serious illness or death from Covid-19. Yet there is more publicity and messaging about fat shaming and body positivity today than there is about the perils of obesity, and the media has all but stopped linking serious Covid-19 infections or death to obesity, presumably for fear of offending anyone. As such, the media must be considered instrumental in assisting mass suicide. We are losing the war at home.
I remember doing a story for The Indianapolis Star on the eve of our invasion of Iraq in 2003. I decided to interview students at our local commuter college, IUPUI (Indiana University Purdue University-Indianapolis). Some students had somewhat informed opinions, others couldn’t be bothered because there was no military draft. But one student’s response flabbergasted me. “I always root for American athletes in international sports,” he said, “so I hope we’ll win in Iraq.”
In the same vein, a co-worker at The Star once told me that a survey had been done at the University of Michigan that asked students what it meant to be “American.” The most common response was, “Nothing.” I wasn’t able to independently verify that such a survey actually was conducted, but I believe it, all right.
Forget Afghanistan? No, not really. We should always learn from our mistakes. But I despair of progress because we are losing a bigger war, the one at home.