When is a war not a war? In his recent column for the Gray Lady, bearing the highly dubious title “The Afghan War Is Over. Did Anyone Notice?”, Mr. Ackerman, described by the Times as one of the paper’s “contributing opinion writers”, explains it all for you:
Afghanistan in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 2020. Where once we were fighting to win a war, today we are fighting to sustain a tenuous peace. This is a distinction Mr. Biden should make to the entire country. That means, assuming conditions on the ground remain stable, decoupling the phrases “U.S. troops in Afghanistan” from “the U.S. war in Afghanistan.”
Okay, so maybe we are killing a few civilians as well as “bad guys”, but not many, at least not officially, ever since the Obama administration came up with the clever idea of counting every military age male we killed by mistake as a “young militant”—because you know how militant young dudes are—always got that chip on their shoulder about something. Lighten up, dudes! So we won’t have to kill you so often!
As for getting an accurate body count out of the Trump administration, well, fuggedabouttit already! ‘Cause they sure have! And, anyway, if we can relabel a corpse we can relabel a war! It’s a win-win!
Afterwords
The Times, of course, has a policy of publishing a variety of opinions, but it would be nice, once in a while, to hear, on the topic of foreign affairs, where the Times continues to plow the “moderate neocon” furrow with great regularity, from someone to the left of Tom Friedman. Bonus links: My “thoughts” on l’affaire Tom Cotton and l’affaire Bari Weiss
