A tragic day in Afghanistan, US troops Leaving Libya, and wait...we had troops in Libya? We'll break it down on today's hot zone.
Hi folks. Chuck Holton here. People sometimes ask me why I choose to spend my time in so many of the worst places in the world. And it's hard to explain to someone who hasn't had a chance to experience it. I think the best answer I can give is that it gives me a great sense of meaning and wonder. Meaning because I feel like it's my job to shine light on the dark places, and wonder because I get a deeper understanding of the history that we are living through, a front row seat to history. Plus I love the creative process. I think if you took away my camera and sent me off to these places, I wouldn't be able to stand it because the act of documenting the world around me is a deeply creative one. So I guess it comes down to creation, redemption and a higher purpose.
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Okay, on to the news. A roadside bomb went off just outside bagram air base in northern Afghanistan on Monday, resulting in seven American casualties - three US troops died in the blast as well as one military contractor. three more troops were wounded. This makes seven so far this year, which puts us on pace to have more US deaths this year than last. That's a function of the Taliban stepping up attacks to try to assert their power in negotiations with the Afghan government.
The Afghan President, Ashraf Ghani recently laid out a four step plan to put an end to this conflict, which as you know has been going on for nearly two decades now. Some of his ideas are quite good - weaning the country off of the massive amount of money being spent there by governments like ours, and some are kind of pie in the sky - getting Pakistan and Iran to stop their meddling. Good luck with that.
IED's are terribly destructive devices, homemade usually, that have been responsible for the majority of the 2400 American deaths in that country during the war. I've been in three IED incidents myself - never hit directly, thank God, but let me tell you, it's really annoying when people you don't even know try to blow you up. I mean, how rude!
So imagine being a young Marine going out on patrol every day, and living with the fact that just about every step you take outside the wire could be your last. You might think these guys would start to harbor a deep and abiding hatred for the Afghan people. But when you ask them what keeps them going, I've found the tend to talk more about the people they care about back home. Listen to this short interview I did with a Marine Lance Corporal on patrol in Helmand province over ten years ago.
[Burt Mitchell piece]
That was my first trip to Afghanistan, alongside Oliver North. During that same trip, North's convoy was hit with an IED and his cameraman, Chris Jackson was in the vehicle that got hit. I was only about a kilometer away and showed up within minutes with the quick reaction force. Two marines were injured - one, Courtney Rausch lost his foot. I filmed the aftermath as the ammunition in the humvee cooked off and melted down. I had been in Afghanistan at that point for three days. There would be two more incidents like that - fortunately with no more injuries - during that same trip.
My point in bringing this up is that the troops putting their lives on the line in service to our country are facing their mortality on a daily basis, but they don't do it out of hatred for the enemy. They do it out of love for their country and our way of life. It's not about who is across from them on the battlefield, it's about who is behind them.
Being a warrior means cultivating that kind of love. One has to be able to turn on the tap of hate when fighting for your life, but the hate has to stay subservient to the love for your tribe, your country, your family. If ever the hate overcomes that love, you are no longer a warrior. You are a savage. That's just my opinion.
I want to show you a couple more packages we sent back from Afghanistan when I was working with Oliver North as his cameraman. The thing that strikes me looking at these ten years later is that we are still trying to accomplish the goals we were trying to accomplish back then. It turns out getting the Afghan army up to speed where it can protect it's own country has been a much bigger job than we thought.
[OLN foot patrol]
The taliban wants to bring Sharia law to all of Afghanistan. I think in light of how tenacious and pervasive their ideas have been, the US should have simply defeated them the first time in 2001 and then left the country altogether - offering advice if the new government asked for it but otherwise leaving them to their own devices with the promise that they could remake their country any way they saw fit, but the moment they posed a threat to the US, we'd come back and wipe the slate clean once again. Think of the blood and treasure we'd have saved doing it that way.
Don't get me wrong. We've done a lot of good for a lot of people in 18 years in Afghanistan. And that counts for something. Here's a package from an embed we did with a medevac unit, very much like the one my son Mason is serving in today.
[OLN Pedros]
The bottom line is this. Whether or not you and I think it has been worth it, the troops who keep going back say it is.
[Matt Lampert]
I guess it's hard to argue with that.
Okay. Let's take a look at Libya. If you recall back in 2011 the Obama administration declared that Libyan Dictator Moammar Khaddafi was an illegitimate leader and needed to go. We embarked on a bombing campaign to speed up the process, and that contributed to the overthrow of Khadaffi.
Just as an aside, I wonder how many politicians in the US were all for Obama's use of military force to depose a dictator and are now dead set against Trump taking any action that would get rid of Nicolas Maduro. Might be worth looking into.
Anyway, the second and third order effects of our intervention in Libya have been overwhelmingly negative. First of all, Libya had huge stockpiles of weapons and munitions, which when Khadaffi fell, got looted by very bad people in the area, and much of it ended up in the hands of ISIS jihadists, enabling them to wreak havoc all over the region. The rest went to a bunch of warlords who are now fighting amongst themselves to control Libya.
If you didn't realize we HAD troops in Libya, you're not alone. The truth is we've had a small contingent of US forces stationed there for a couple of years. Special ops guys mostly who have been "assisting" local forces in fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda in the region. We've dropped lots of ordnance on people who needed it over there, but now we've pulled those troops out. Why? Well, all of a sudden a powerful leader has marshalled his forces in the eastern part of the country and decided to say "mine" to the rest of Libya, including it's vast oil reserves.
See the UN has been backing the sorta weak government in Tripoli, called the GNA or Government of National Accord. But a powerful general last week launched a surprise offensive to take over control, and that has the UN running around with it's hair on fire. They are evacuating their "peacekeeping force" which almost never does any good anyway, and the US decided to sorta get out of the way and see how this thing plays out.
This whole mess is yet another consequence of Barack Obama's feckless and limp-wristed foreign policy. Khaddafi was a bad guy, but the Obama administration's naive support for the "Arab spring" uprisings have led to literally hundreds of thousands of deaths across the middle east, supported the rise of ISIS and generally made the world a more dangerous place for Americans and everybody else.
History won’t be kind to the decisions made by the Obama administration in the Middle East. I think the lesson is that we as a nation have to be very cautious about who we support, and even more so who we give weapons to in conflicts around the world. My opinion is that if it’s worth doing, we should have a policy that we will do it ourselves. If Khaddafi needs to go that badly, we should be willing to put our own sons and daughters in harm’s way to depose him. Whenever we support other factions because we’re not willing to do the dirty work ourselves, that might be a good sign that maybe it’s not worth doing at all.
Just my opinion there. Anyway. That’s all I’ve got for today. Thanks for being with me on this journey. We’ve got lots of great content for you in the days ahead.
I’m Chuck Holton, and this has been the Hot Zone.
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