Ignoring Afghanistan — Murder by Not Caring — the Death of Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Junior (USMC) Symbolizes What Happens when a Volunteer Military Exclusively Bears the Brunt of Stupid American Foreign and Military Policy

© 2012 Peter Free

 

20 September 2012

 

 

Introduction — consider this

 

If America had a military service draft, Afghanistan and Iraq would have ended almost before they began.

 

This reveals the callous indifference with which American leadership treats our troops.  We squander members of the uniformed services in pursuit of unachievable missions that benefit only the Military Industrial Complex.

 

 

Citations — to news accounts of Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Junior’s death in Afghanistan

 

David Ariosto, Slain Marine sensed insider attack was coming, dad says, CNN (16 September 2012)

 

'My Boy!' Emotional funeral for Marine killed by Afghan police traitor, Daily Mail (United Kingdom) (19 September 2012)

 

 

 

What happened to Lance Corporal Buckley — might have been prevented, if lunatic policy had not gotten in the way

 

From CNN:

 

On August 10, 2012, Greg Buckley Jr. was gunned down by the very forces he had been training, just days after learning that he was to head home early.

 

"It was only two days he had left there in Afghanistan," his father told CNN.

 

© 2012 David Ariosto, Slain Marine sensed insider attack was coming, dad says, CNN (16 September 2012)

 

There is more to this sad parable.  According to his dad, Lance Corporal Buckley had correctly predicted his own death, under exactly these circumstances, during a phone call from Helmand Province to his family, this summer.

 

Buckley explained that one of the Afghan trainees was unremittingly hostile to the American presence in his country.  When the two confronted each other, superiors allegedly pulled them apart.  One made Lance Corporal Buckley apologize.  The trainee refused his hand.

 

Apparently no one followed up to clean the trainee group of its insurgent(s).

 

 

When stupidity is institutionalized

 

I have witnessed this kind of organizational stupidity under other circumstances.  You probably have, too.  Inept policy triumphs over good sense.

 

Lance Corporal Buckley, who inadvertently had exposed an infiltrator in the midst of the Afghans whom he has been order to train, was allegedly forced to apologize for his discovery.

 

But apparently nothing else was done to clean up the dangerous situation.  Insurgent sentiment remained inside the base, where its perpetrators could plan and eventually execute American troops.

 

 

The larger picture — our leadership’s determination to continue a murderously stupid course of action

 

For at least 8 years, it has been obvious that Afghanistan is not a place that can be conquered or converted into a nation-state.  It has been equally obvious that Afghans are rather casual about transferring death-dealing loyalties from one leader and faction to another.

 

So, why would our military leadership agree to have our troops arm, train, and serve with unscreened Afghans inside our own military bases?

 

And even more idiotically, after some of these people murdered our troops, why would we continue the above inside the gates policy?  The military’s mentally ill initial response to these incidents was to require our troops to keep their arms at hand, even inside our bases.

 

Apparently, our political and military leaders are too unimaginative — or too callous — to recognize that people cannot possibly be on guard against someone immediately next to them, every second of every day.

 

I find this kind of stone-headed thinking almost inexplicable.  The whole point to Army and Marine Corps training, especially, is to bond squads of people into units in which trust and mutual dependence are unquestioned.

 

So, given that philosophy, why would these same military organizations suddenly switch philosophical course and assume that we can integrate foreign citizens, whose culture(s) we clearly do not understand, into these squads’ day-to-day living situations?

 

I cannot think of a better way to introduce anxiety and crazy-making behavior into the American military mission.

 

 

Against American historical precedent

 

To my knowledge, American military forces have never done this kind of dangerous intermixing, within a near-inscrutable insurgency, before.

 

 

 

The moral? — Not only is Afghanistan an insane place to be geopolitically, our policy there has become increasingly and murderously ineffective

 

Yet, neither Commander in Chief Obama, nor his Republican Party opponent, Governor Mitt Romney, has had the “balls” to take this insanity by its horns and twist its crazy head off.

 

We owed Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Junior, and all our fallen and maimed, more.

 

The mark of a genuinely courageous American political leader will be to call for the return of the military draft.  Until we all begin to serve the nation with our own blood, America’s self-destructive militaristic insanity is going to continue.  It is so easy to squander other people’s lives in the pursuit of our own financial and political self-interest.