Word: afghanistanism
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Taken for GrantedSoldiers who serve in Iraq and Afghanistan may not experience the hostility from society upon their return to the U.S. that Vietnam vets did. But they encounter something that psychologists say is nearly as disorienting: America has found ways to distract itself from the fact that it has dispatched 1.6 million service members to two wars and kept them fighting for far longer than the duration of World War II. This struck Waddell while he was at a mall, when a shopper asked him how he broke his leg. "Iraq," Waddell answered. The reply...
Waddell became an expert at hiding his PTSD symptoms from his fellow SEALs. Despite his wife's constant pleas for him to seek help, Waddell's standard reply was, "I don't have a problem. You do." It took a full six months after the SEALs' disaster in Afghanistan before Waddell admitted to Marshéle that he was hurting. "Training inoculates you against trauma. The first time you see someone dead, it's a shock. By the 10th time, you're walking over dead bodies and making sick jokes about what they had for breakfast. But all that stress...
...leaks and speculation are anything to go on, President Barack Obama will deliver a number of different messages in his Tuesday-night speech about the war in Afghanistan. He will announce plans to send some 30,000 additional troops to the war zone. He will lay out benchmarks that the government of Hamid Karzai will be expected to meet. He may even sketch a timetable for an eventual U.S. withdrawal. At some point, he will likely describe the conflict in Afghanistan as a war of necessity...
...mere fact that Obama has reached a decision on Afghanistan, coupled with the speech's West Point backdrop and the President's oratorical gifts, will probably boost public support for the war effort in the short run. But it is unlikely to convince most Americans that a war that has already lasted more than eight years is worth fighting indefinitely. Even if Obama sets a target date for leaving Afghanistan, he'll still be asking the public to sign on to a major escalation that will see many more Americans killed and wounded, and will cost hundreds of billions more...
...Obama team, which believes that foreign policy should be guided more by interests than by ideals. There are two problems, however, with trying to sell a troop surge solely on national-security grounds. The first is that it is almost impossible to prove that sending more troops to Afghanistan will make Americans safer; after all, al-Qaeda's leadership is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan, and recent history shows that terrorists can plot and strike in Moscow and Madrid and Mumbai regardless of whether or not they have a safe haven in Afghanistan. The second problem with the national-security argument...