A United States Army Special Forces captain with leaders in Amaloul, Niger, one of the nations in an antiterrorism program, NYT Photo- Peter Tinti
What did you learn
in school today, dear little boy of mine …? I learned that war is not so bad, I learned
about the great ones that we've had … {from Tom
Paxton song of the 60’s}
If we teach how to become proficient warriors, how will
they become creators for the common good?
You get what you pay for. This axiom holds for all those we train for
war, both home and abroad.
“United States
Special Operations troops are forming elite counter-terrorism units in four
countries in North and West Africa…. The secretive program, financed in part
with millions of dollars in classified Pentagon spending and carried out by
trainers, including members of the Army’s Green Berets and Delta Force, was
begun last year to instruct and equip hundreds of handpicked commandos in
Libya, Niger, Mauritania and Mali.
The goal over the
next few years is to build homegrown African counter-terrorism teams…
“Training
indigenous forces to go after threats in their own country is what we need to
be doing,” said Michael A. Sheehan, who …. now holds the distinguished chair at
the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. [Please read
the full article, and a companion article
on our current clandestine training of Syrian Sunni fighters.]
resident Obama announced in a recent
speech at West Point that this is going to be a major focus of our foreign
policy now-- training foreigners to fight their countrymen at our behest. [Not a new idea; the British had their Gurkhas
in India.] It didn't work in Iraq. It didn't work in Afghanistan, nor in Libya,
not even in Vietnam. But the war
industry persists in pervading its military myths.
The outcomes of these preemptive undeclared wars of
expediency are all bad, never resolving conflict. Instead, the memory of who killed who, for
whom, persists for generations.
First we’ll consider the damage done to those we teach
and equip for war overseas: next week some
of the effects on our own younger generation soldiers and civilians.
The foreigners we make special effort to enlist in our “wars
on terror” abroad, have to live in their countries after the war trainers have
gone home. When their countries lose
their face value to us, we have a very
poor record as to how we treat those we’ve trained to protect our interests
by proxy. When we become disinterested,
they become expendable—often targets of enemy factions in their own communities,
who now hate them even more because they sided with us.
nd we become viewed in these foreign lands, by nearly
all parties, as resource colonists interested in them only for what we want to
control and extract—from them for ourselves.
We’ll never stay in their country, never live as neighbors to them,
because we've shed too much of their blood, and our own, to achieve our
goals. And our soldiers often become targets
of those they've trained to fight with us, never being certain of their true
loyalty. In the end we leave their
nations more desolate and depopulated, more divided, devastated by war.
There is a gulf between us and them, whole populations as
well as soldiers, because so few of us learn their language, we aren't
interested in their culture. It is this
attitude that hurts us.
A former American
Special Operations officer said there was a broader lesson for any future Libya
training mission: “The
take-away here is they’re going to take a lot more adult supervision to
make sure the checks and balances are in place, so you don’t have outside
militia taking over.”
Treating other people as if they were the children, we
the adults, because we have the more powerful life-style. Do we think we’re smarter because we own more
smart phones, drive a lot of bigger machines everywhere we go? Carry bigger sticks, guns, drone targeting technology? What does Jesus mean when he says the first
shall be last in God’s kingdom? Pride
and greed are our own worst enemies, and this is true for all the influential
people in all nations. Thankfully, God’s
unconditional nonviolent merciful love, and saving grace, can redeem us all. Time to put away the swords, admit we’re
sinners, and ask for this saving grace.
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