CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
After decades of ramping up the political-patriotism every ANZAC Day and Remembrance Day to justify sending our bright-eyed young men and women to the Middle East to impress George Bush, it seems the Afghanistan War might be joining Vietnam, Korea and Iraq on the long list of foreign conflicts that only seemed to worsen the situation in these countries that never asked for our help.
This follows Prime Minister Morrison’s surprise announcement that it will close its embassy in Afghanistan in the next few days, expressing fears over the “increasingly uncertain security environment” in Kabul – a week after he announced the pullout of the remaining 80 Australian soldiers deployed over there.
This means, after nearly 20 years since American, British and Australian armed forces arrived in Afghanistan – we are now leaving the country in such an unstable state that we can’t even ensure the safety of our own consulate staff in their capital city.
Looking back at all of the global Islamophobia that came to surface in our government’s insistence to occupy this country, it is not yet known what the whole point of this war was.
Especially when considering that Osama Bin Laden was hiding out in Pakistan the whole time, and the Taliban certainly hasn’t been eradicated.
In fact, all that seems to have come from this whole thing is the deaths of hundreds of thousands of allied troops and civillians, as well as the dispossession of hundreds of thousands of refugees, who will definitely not be offered asylum in Australia.
As is usually the case with war, the rich old men that sent our soldiers there – who are currently long-lunching in Sydney’s Bellevue Hill – will face no accountability for this clusterfuck that has left Afghanistan with no roads, libraries or any future for their women.
Afghanistan is currently looking awfully like Iraq did when we realised they didn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, and we left them with a war-weary population where the average male age was 14, and no books except for the easily misinterpreted religious scripture.
Today’s news marks an emotional end of an era for the ADF Top Brass, who have donated waves of young Australians to this unspecified cause ever since John Howard ignored the street protests of hundreds of thousands of his own citizens and decided to send troops into Afghanistan in 2001.
More than 25,000 Australians have served in the country over the years, costing our country billions of dollars that could have been put towards free dental care for the entire population, or, you know, public housing for all those homeless veterans who served in other wars that we definitely didn’t need to get involved in.
MORE TO COME, in ten years or so.
