Has it really been eight years since we started this phase of the Afghanistan catastrophe? I can hardly believe it. Even so, those dark days of late 2001 are beginning to seem like a long time ago now. It was a difficult time, to be sure, on so many different levels – a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, lashing out at one utterly destroyed by decades of warfare, much of it stoked by our government (with the cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). We are now told that the place is being overrun by religious fanatics – the Taliban – who want to bring the place back to the 13th century. From where it stands now, that wouldn’t be a very long trip.

The Soviets pounded the living piss out of the place, to be sure, but we made a very conscious decision to fund and support hyper religious elements within Afghan society as the core of that nation’s resistance efforts – some say before direct intervention by the Soviet military, and certainly thereafter. Our relationship with Pakistan’s ruling general Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq during the Reagan administration helped transform Pakistani society into one that is now, if not ruled by fundamentalist Islamists, at least defined by the degree to which that extreme brand of religiosity has constricted civil society.

So, if we go back eight years, we should certainly go back another 20 years before that… and more, when the Carter Administration started funneling support to the Mujahideen – a policy later carried forward with great enthusiasm by the even more craven Reagan, who built the effort up into the largest C.I.A operation up to that point. That was when legions of fighters from Muslim countries (including that guy named Osama) flocked to the Afghan frontier to fight the Russians and, into the bargain, any thought of secularism in that country. When the Russians left, we lost interest and the place went even more profoundly to hell, descending into fratricidal war and chaos that made even the Taliban’s tenuous rule seem stable by comparison. But the one-eyed mullah and his pals, along with Sheikh Osama and his, were creatures of our own manipulative foreign policy.

And all these years later, here we are again, poised on the brink of yet another policy decision. Will Obama, Nobel Peace Prize in hand, commit another 40,000 troops to an effort he just shored up with another 17,000 a few months back?  I’m almost certain that the answer will be… more dynamite from the Nobel laureate, for the people of Afghanistan. Change comes hard. Mighty hard.

luv u,

jp

A new study published in the American Journal of Public Health provided us with a useful portrait of the true cost of our current health care system. The study found that uninsured Americans have a 40% higher risk of death than those who have health insurance. Based on current levels of uninsured – somewhere around 45 million people – they estimate the annual death toll of our profit-focused system at around 45,000 lives lost. Lack of insurance is now one of the most deadly medical conditions in this country, ahead of kidney disease in the number killed. That is to say nothing of the number sickened, disabled, and bankrupted in addition – many of the last category, I’m certain, immediate kin to the dead. I would imagine this would be shocking news anywhere else in the world. Here, it merits perhaps a brief reference on the evening news… then it’s time to move on. Yep, 45,000 dead from lack of health insurance. Man, that’s a lot of bodies, Ken! Up next, here’s Brad with tonight’s sports, then it’s over to Kristen for our weather forecast.  Only in America.  

Imagine for a moment what would happen if, instead of lack of health care, a terror attack took 45,000 American lives. Think about it. We lost 3,000 lives in the September 11, 2001 attacks, and it nearly cost us our constitution. (In fact, I’m not certain it didn’t… the jury is still out on that one.) Much as political pundits seem to recall this time of unity and mutual support, it was in fact a time of public panic and governmental authoritarianism. And just as the attacks opened a sickening hole in lower Manhattan, they also created an opening through which some of our worst tendencies as a people crept on all fours. I heard people openly discussing the use of nuclear weapons on… well, on just about anybody. (Some of that came from Franklin Graham, purported “man of God”.) We curtailed civil liberties for whole classes of people, we invaded and occupied two countries, and we made torture an integral part of our military culture, instead of something done only in the shadows. It was a shocking and terrible time, and it resulted from the murder of 3,000. Now… imagine if such an attack killed 45,000.  And if that attack took place every year.

What would happen? As a nation, we’d turn ourselves inside out to respond. We’d transform ourselves into a police state, no doubt, completing the terrifying odyssey we began eight years ago when those planes struck the twin towers. And yet, think about it – that magnitude of loss, and all the additional pain that proceeds from that, is occurring right now. Not as the consequence of some catastrophic terror attack, but of something much more easily prevented. To my mind, that makes this all the more insidious. We are allowing tens of thousands to die, hundreds of thousands to suffer, and millions to lose their shred of prosperity just to preserve the profitability of the health insurance industry. We are allowing a narrow segment of corporate shills to shut out the interests of our entire nation by preventing us from having the kind of public health system that every other industrialized nation enjoys. What the hell does that say about us? Much as I hate to channel Bob Dole, where is the fucking outrage? 

Bin Laden doesn’t need planes, suicide belts, or truck bombs. All he needs to do is stand back and let our dysfunctional privatized health insurance do the job for him. 

luv u,

jp