Even by the sometimes grimly humorous standards of the print edition of The New York Times, Monday’s A section contained a doozy of a juxtaposition. On the left side of the page was a story about an internal Afghan government investigation into the collapse of the Kabul Bank. Hundreds of millions of dollars were given out in unsecured and even undocumented loans to Hamid Karzai’s brother and a number of other well connected individuals. The investigating commission, appointed by Hamid Karzai, officially absolved his brother and his fellow travelers of stealing the money that they plainly stole. Inset to that story was a two column version of the Times’ appreciatively hollow “Names of the Dead”, blandly noting the deaths of ten more Americans.
Alone that would’ve been just morbidly ironic, but the humor of this dark comedy came on the right side of the page, where there was a large ad for Macy’s. The photo was a handsome and prosperous looking twenty-something, dressed in a very fashionable suit and looking like he’s having the time of his life. And why was this fit, healthy, draft age young man sporting those natty threads? Memorial Day sale.
Maybe the advertising layout people never talk to the news layout people. Maybe someone at the Times is pissed off at someone at Macy’s (or their ad agency). Maybe no one noticed, or if they did, didn’t care. And why should they? Macy’s paid for their notice, and, in a different fashion, the soldiers paid for theirs. Both of them have to go in the paper, and if you end up advertising a Memorial Day sale on men’s clothing right next to the names of men who will never wear a suit again because of a corrupt and dead end war, so what?
The great bulk of the American people have long since relegated the Afghan War to the pile of old news. It’s a near certainty that sometime before the next presidential election there will be a minor on-line media flap when some poll shows that a large fraction of Americans (O/U 1/3) think the Afghan War is over already. The hyper connected bloggers and journalists will rush to their keyboards to decry this latest piece of ignorance from their fellow citizens, but this may be one of the rare instances where the ignorant have a better grasp of things than the informed.
While the plugged in debate counterinsurgency wisdom, discuss the merits of training Afghan security forces, and all the other absurdist props necessary to sustain the fiction that the war is a national priority, the rest of the country has moved on. After all, we already have a pretty good idea of how it’s going to wind down. We’ll hang around until domestic opposition in America becomes too strong to resist, then we’ll gingerly withdraw and hope whatever delicate government we leave in place can last a decent enough interval to let us get distracted by other events.
Neither the money we’re spending nor the people getting killed and injured are costly enough to break through that assumption. A few hundred more bodies and billions just isn’t enough to matter in a country this big and this rich, which is why, as far as most facets of American life are concerned, the Afghan War is over. It’s grown too stale for the comedy programs, neither political party wants to talk about it, and even the news doesn’t have much to go on: a roadside bomb here, an airstrike gone astray there. These days an exciting development is when there’s some new unpronounceable valley or province that’s been deemed the key to victory, but good luck remembering it this time next month.
Here in the second year of this still young decade, the Afghan War is being treated like just another embarrassing artifact from those star crossed Naughts. We’re as tired of it as we are of Coldplay, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, and Tyler Perry in drag. Karzai will get up and bleat about civilian casualties, but he needs us far more than we need him, and both of us know it. And when we do finally find a way to slip out, you can count on the fact that minimizing American embarrassment will be of the utmost importance. No one likes to be seen as being behind the times, and the Afghan War is long out of fashion.
