War and Newton’s First Law of Motion
Why are we still at great material and personal cost to ourselves continuing to send our sons and daughters to fight, and, for some, to die in Afghanistan? Googling does turn up a number of answers, but none of them are convincing, no more than the domino theory ever satisfactorily explained our decision to remain in Vietnam.
The best answer found may be the highly questionable hypothesis, that by remaining in Afghanistan we are taking the fight to Al Qaeda, rather than allowing Al Qaeda to take the fight to us here at home. But there is simply no direct cause and effect linkage between our being over there and their not being here and carrying out further 9/11 like acts of terrorism.
At the present moment the whole country is awaiting President Obama’s decision — will he begin the withdrawal of our forces, or will he give General McChrystal the additional troops requested? Or something else?
I fear very much that his decision will be not to withdraw but to hold the line and keep our forces there while maybe even increasing their number, much as the General recommends.
Why would he do this if there is no convincing reason to continue the war? Isn’t it obvious to all that we’re not going to bring a feudal, tribal society kicking and screaming into the modern age?
Nor are we going to create a liberal democracy in a hardscrabble land where any loyalty or allegiance that people may feel is only to heads of family and local chieftains, not to any federal officials no matter how enlightened, which of course is not the case with the highly corrupt Hamid Karzai government in Kabul.
The answer to why he would do this, decide to keep going, must be that this war, like a physical object, is subject to inertia, or the tendency of an object in motion to remain in motion, or an object at rest to remain at rest, unless acted upon by a force. It would take more than he’s ready to give to do so. Not enough fight in him to end the fight?
This war like all wars is an object in motion, but unlike past “good” wars there is no end in sight, nothing that would bring a stop or a reversal to that motion, such as when, in World War II, the overthrow and destruction of the leaders of Germany and Japan brought ends to our wars with their countries.
In order that the Afghan war be ended it must be acted on by an external force, a force greater than the forces keeping it in motion. Is the President ready to apply, or is he even in possession of sufficient force, to turn things around so to speak? For one, to face up to the military-industrial complex?
Again, I don’t know, but I’m afraid not. Furthermore what’s in motion in the Middle East, and not just in Afghanistan, is much more substantial and resistant to external forces than, say, a single aircraft carrier or battleship, themselves not easily turned once in motion.
Isaac Newton’s First Law of Motion is a physical law, describing the behavior of material objects in time and space. Could war itself be such a material object, subject to physical laws?
Well yes, I would say, in reference to the War in Afghanistan, for otherwise there is no explaining why our ruling elite, including once again the “best and the brightest,” good, smart men such as Barack Obama and Robert Gates, would decide to continue with this reckless expenditure of our national treasure of money and lives. It’s just easier not to change direction.
So our continuing to remain in Afghanistan defies common sense, but not the laws of motion. And the war motion, for more than 8 years now, has been in just the one direction, that of greater and greater engagement, greater commitment of our forces, all this a kind of acceleration, taking the war even further in the same direction and rendering it thereby even more resistant to any opposing forces that might have slowed it down.
So far no one in our leadership seems willing and ready to slow the war effort down, if not bring it to a stop. No one seems interested in taking on the inevitable and unintended consequences of an abrupt change in direction. And so it goes, and goes on.
The President, like so many before him, including the best of his predecessors, prefers the devil he knows, the war itself (which was not of his creation), to the devil he doesn’t know, or the abandonment of the fight, much as did Washington (OK, he wasn’t yet the president), Lincoln, Roosevelt, Truman, and Johnson in their wars.
But in the other cases (with the exception of Johnson, who just as inexplicably, as did Bush and now Obama in Iraq, continued a “bad” war in Vietnam) these wars did have reasonable and desirable ends (if not reasonable means). This one, like the war in Vietnam, doesn’t.
What will it take to bring this war to an end? Must we await, again, a new president who is elected on the promise to end the war? We may still be surprised and hear from our president that he is going to do it himself, as he promised during the campaign in the case of Iraq, and that he will be that external force that will stop the war’s motion, bring an end to the inertia.
November 9, 2009 at 11:33 am
I think you’re right.
My hope, albeit faint, is that he withdraws and solves his political problem by being more aggressive in some other arena, or by using Afghan savings to invest in other needed military upgrades.