During a recent debate between the Colorado senatorial candidates in Denver, Republican Ken Buck gave his considered assessment of the occupation of Afghanistan. "It’s a fundamental mistake to assume that a people as backward as the Afghans are going to be able to build the industrialized nation and the democracy that it takes to be able to achieve what we would consider a Western-style democracy."
Staff Sgt. Calvin Gibbs would certainly agree. In written and videotaped evidence to Army investigators, a member of his brigade described Gibbs as harboring "pure hatred for all Afghanis," saying he "constantly referred to them as savages." So to prove his Western-style sophistication, Gibbs would allegedly order civilians to be "waxed" for sport. Then he and his fellow soldiers would pose with the corpses and, sometimes, keep skulls and other body parts as trophies.
As Buck was speaking, the race was on for the military to recall all the pictures that had been circulating in the unit before the "backward" Afghans got hold of them and drew their own conclusions about the kind of civilization their occupiers had in store for them.
This, of course, should not be confused with the raid in February that killed two pregnant women, a teenage girl and a police commander (all innocent) or the execution-style murder of eight teens and preteens in Kunar province just after Christmas—both of which were originally covered up. Or any other atrocities that we have not yet heard about or may never hear about.
But if Buck’s comments were a gaffe, it is not clear by whose standards. Unlike Christine O’Donnell’s flirtation with witchcraft or Meg Whitman’s nanny saga, his statements made no headlines, sparked no comment and drew no fire. Among the hundred or so liberals in an overspill room watching on the big screen, there was nary a howl of derision or disbelief. Buck’s Democratic opponent, Michael Bennet, did not see fit to challenge him. His remarks moved neither polls nor people nor pundits. The race did not change.
The American people, it seems, are bored with war. Like a reality show that’s gone on too long, it ceases to shock, shame or even interest. In September, when pollsters asked what the most important problems facing the country are, just 3 percent mentioned Afghanistan. Even when combined with Iraq it has not reached double digits for several months. In a CBS poll in early October it did not register at all. A Pew poll the same month found that just 23 percent said they were following the situation closely. And they do not like what they see. Polls show that 60 percent of Americans believe Afghanistan is a lost cause, and roughly half compare it to Vietnam and favor a timetable for withdrawal.
Unlike Iraq, however, which was electoral kryptonite for the GOP, the Afghan war is absent from this electoral moment, suggesting that nobody will be asked to pay—let alone be
to pay—for these mistakes. "The essential characteristic of a nation is that all its individuals must have many things in common," wrote nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan, "and must have forgotten many things as well."
