Vision Fails

Karzai calls for peace. But it’s not his call to make. Suing for peace is a call for surrender. Karzai is not a leader. Just like the American president, he stands at the mercy of events. War is a constant condition. From birth we learn to fight. We fight for our place at the trough; we fight for attention; we fight for a mate; we fight for resources, for market share; we fight for sympathy. The Left has it right: Competition, the essence of capitalism, produces inequity: For someone to win, somebody must lose. The difference is that on the parlor game battlefield of capitalism, the same players can begin another round right after one side declares checkmate.

Afghanistan is not so advanced. Whereas we use the abstraction of a ‘ball’ in all our various national pastimes, Buzkashi (the Afghan national sport) still uses the headless carcass of a calf or goat to define the action. They determine victory by the measure of blood spilled. And they will not stop until we have either gone or bled dry. And even then it’s unlikely to end as the terms of surrender will never be agreed to by all.

Wars are the milestones of human history. Wars mark beginnings. They also signal ends. As such, they chart our progress from one upheaval to the next. On a concept circle, war and peace are represented by a single point; they are two sides of the same coin. War is not the opposite of peace just as peace is not the opposite of war. Each is merely the (temporary) absence of the other. That is why war and peace can exist simultaneously – in different places; at different times; and within separate chambers of the human heart - each failing to appreciate the other in what essentially amounts to a charade of willful delusion.

It might even be said that peace is a precondition for war; that peace itself foments the poisons that eventually force men into battle; that the simmering chaos underlying outward tranquility allows for inequities to build unseen, until these then must topple under their own weight. The laws of survival during war are far less forgiving, after all.

Some have sought to break the cycle of history by (the) diplomacy (of delay) or by outright appeasement. This has only lead to even greater disasters as evidenced by past horrors. Success or failure in diplomacy eludes objective measurement (such as body counts) and can be manufactured by effective propaganda campaigns. The latest effort centers on a strategy termed containment; allowing conflicts to fester in the hope that they will simply go away. Clearly, so much discontent is currently being stoked the world over – such dearth of leadership; so many hearts aflame - it’s hard to know exactly where the firebreaks we’ve attempted to enforce will be breached first.

In human history one third is given over to war, while two thirds is given to peace (or the absence of war). War continues to be the domain of the young; the virile; the idealists. It is a tool meant to be grasped by those with the courage to pursue (or protect) a vision. Once one’s own vision has failed, the challenge is never far. One must either fight blind or yield. In the Hindu trinity, war is represented by Shiva (the destroyer) who is by far the most popular in the trinity of Hindu gods.

War is a wound that never heals. We are forever tempted to scratch it open for the fascination of watching it bleed. Even in peace, the memory of past wars continues to haunt us. Even in peace, the prospect of the next war is just over the horizon. That’s why we urge our populations to support armies that stand idle two-thirds of the time.