The funeral for LCPL Matthew R. Rodriguez, U.S.M.C., is taking place today in Fairhaven. The Greater New Bedford Regional Vocational Technical High School graduate was just 19 years old when he was killed in action in Afghanistan on December 11.
DC politicians and pundits scratch their heads at polls showing Americans have no interest in getting our troops involved in new battles in places like Syria and Iran. But Americans are remembering their sons and daughters lost to war in Iraq and Afghanistan – the 6,786 killed and the 51,763 wounded in action, along with the silent toll of the hundreds who’ve taken their own lives after returning home.
While the Washington Post’s front page remains fixated on the Obamacare website yet again today, the news about Lance Cpl. Rodriguez has dominated the front page of the local Standard-Times since his death – nearly two weeks now. Let’s finish honoring the dead from our last two wars before we go volunteering to start any new ones.
He was in 2nd grade when the towers fell. What’s wrong with us?
This is the important stuff. We’re losing good people — two in my tiny town of Swampscott since the start of these two conflicts — and for what?
Let’s not spill anymore blood for a country we’re leaving.
It’s be how could ask a man to be the last man to die in Afghanistan, how could he ask a man, to be the last man, to die for a mistake?
To be fair to our former Senator, he has done far more than his predecessor or his boss to wind this one down. I have a good friend who is a firefighter in Cambridge and serves in the MA National Guard-glad he came home in one piece and found a job-but he lost an engagement over his long deployment and seemed a little aloof when I saw him last. I hope he doesn’t have to ever go back.
…Afghanistan wasn’t a mistake. Our withdrawal is long overdue, but we were right to go in when we did.
because we screwed it up. It would have been one thing to go in, but it was another to go in and then ignore it (like the Bush admin did — barely putting any focus on Afghanistan) until the problem blew up, simultaneously demanding more attention from us but no longer able to be contained.
By the time we realized things were going bad, it was already too late to fix it… which has made the whole entire ordeal the only thing that’s worse than a mistake: a tragedy.
One that kids are still dying over, too.
So, yeah, it would have been better had we not gone in at all, much as I would have preferred going in with a real strategy, goals and, most importantly, an exit plan.
All of that is really moot, though, and I don’t want to argue about it here further than this.
The point here is a great kid’s life just ended in Fairhaven and it didn’t have to be that way. It’s time to bring the troops home — now.
Interventions that topple a regime without a strong political replacement typically degenerate into carnage. Thus, Vietnam and Iraq. With Afghanistan, there was a lot of that.
Afghanistan’s largest ethnic group is Pashtun. Our allies at the time of the intervention consisted of the Northern Alliance, which is overwhelmingly Tajik. To the extent that there was a legitimate legal body, it was the loya jirga. Significant pressure was put on this body not to return the former king, Zahir Shah, to power, and there is also evidence of significant Northern Alliance intimidation.
The result was a government with a Pashtun leader (Karzai) but most of whose other leaders are Tajik and whose military is Tajik. Thus, the Bush Administration, which always falsely thought it knew better, succeeded in installing a government that was never going to be viable.
Now, possibly a massive Western intervention might have made it possible to remove warlords, root out corruption, and ensure economic prosperity. That might have worked, but nothing even mildly like that happened. The Bush Administration spent much of 2003 pulling resources out of Afghanistan.
So yes, knocking the Taliban out of power was a great idea, but the buffoons that subsequently ran that war ensured its failure. Now that we have a political disaster our armed forces are trying to paper over with lethal, military power. Utterly hopeless.
Let me say I honor and respect his sacrifice. Just crazy to think that on my bus home from school on 9/11-some of the youngest kids on it would still be fighting in this war thirteen years later. Glad to see RMG got volunteers to block the WBC. We can all agree those guys are the worst, and I send my prayer to the family during this difficult time.