June 10, 2010 6:33 AM

Is it any wonder why we're not universally loved?

(CNN) — A bombing at a wedding ceremony Wednesday in Afghanistan’s Kandahar province killed 39 people and wounded 73 others, officials in the village of Nagaan said. The International Security Assistance Force confirmed the bombing but had no information on casualties. They and Afghan forces have secured the area, they said. The explosion came during the wedding dinner, between 9:30 and 10 p.m., striking the area where the men and boys were dining separately from the women. All the casualties were men or boys, village officials said.

Time was when the war in Afghanistan made sense. Unfortunately, that time was late 2001. Now that Afghanistan has become this country’s longest-lived war, it has long since ceased to make any sense. Incidents like this only serve to demonstrate that the moral currency we may once have possessed in the war on terror has long since been spent. We’re no longer in the business of killing terrorists; we’re in the business of creating them…and business is good.

How do we, how CAN we, possibly justify continuing a war in which the most numerous, obvious, and visual casualties are civilians? How does bombing a wedding contribute ANYTHING towards making this country safer and more secure? How can anyone argue that killing civilians in this manner makes the Homeland more secure? The answer, of course, is that it can’t and doesn’t make us any safer or more secure. If anything, exactly the opposite is true…and yet we continue along the same path, acting in the same manner, and expecting different results. This, ladies and gentleman is the very definition of insanity.

Here’s a radical idea: How about instead of continuing to invest more blood and treasure in this generation’s Vietnam, we bring our troops home? How about we invest the billions that it takes to conduct the war in Afghanistan in things here at home? How about we invest in education, health care reform, and infrastructure? How about we work at making our country safer and more secure from within? The tired, old “We must fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here” canard is a boat load of crap, plain and simple. The “evildoers” will always be out there. We can kill, and kill, and kill some more, but others will rise in hatred of America, determined to continue their struggle against what they view as the Evil Empire, the Great Satan. When we’re bombing weddings, how can we even pretend to occupy the moral high ground?

How is it that we can justify spending $60 billion on the war in Afghanistan, but we can’t find it within ourselves to pony up $24 billion for unemployed Americans? Have we really lost our moral compass? Would we rather subsidize killing and destruction over assisting Americans in need of a helping hand? Clearly, the answer is yes…and we’re all poorer for it.

It’s time that we turn our focus upon ourselves, on the Homeland, and on how we can make this a better, more just, and safer place for all Americans. No, I’m not advocating isolationism, but projecting American military might has clearly proven to be expensive, messy, and supremely ineffective. Those of you convinced of American exceptionalism need to take a good, long look in the mirror and recognize that killing ever-increasing numbers of terrorists does nothing to make America a respected member of the international community. We’ve become our own self-perpetuating terrorist generator.

We could be doing so much more so much more effectively with the money being shoved down the rat hole that is the war on Afghanistan. To quote the late Yitzhak Rabin, “Enough of blood and tears.” Enough of killing. Enough of suffering. Enough of destruction. After all, as the late Mahatma Gandhi once sagely observed, “An eye for an eye only makes the whole world blind.”

WE DESERVE BETTER.

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This page contains a single entry by Jack Cluth published on June 10, 2010 6:33 AM.

Now that summer is finally here, surely the sun can't be far behind...right?? was the previous entry in this blog.

Today's exercise in maintaining perspective is the next entry in this blog.

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