The Empire Versus the Taliban

"To my fellow Americans who have loved ones over here, who know what it's like to miss them, you have the power to make our government bring them home...please bring us home so that we can be back where we belong and not over here, wasting our time and our lives and our precious life that we could be using back in our own country. Please bring us home. It is America and American people who have that power." -Pfc. Bowe Bergdahl

Bowe Bergdahl is facing the existential grief of his own death and never again seeing his loved ones that most soldiers still freely walking about their bases in Afghanistan never will. He does not appear to have been tortured, as captives of the empire are routinely, and he does not feel the discomfort that his captors face, many of them having lost family and friends and homes to the immoral imperial assault following September 11. For nearly eight years the empire, and its lieutenant Brits among others, have been shooting and bombing their way across Afghanistan with no only the promise of troop surges.

Bergdahl is likely not a traitor or coward, though official reports of his abduction differ from his own. However, be sure that many will take him to be such implicitly through this argument. He was promised release, or at least no torture, if he would tell the Americans (propagandize) that he wants the troops to leave Afghanistan. If Bowe Bergdahl believed in the righteousness of the Afghanistan War, if he and his fellows were fighting a war worth waging, he would have to be tortured before saying these things.

"The region is known to be Taliban-infested." AP describing the area in which Bergdahl is believed to be held

When we think of infestation, we think of damage. A termite infestation or a boll weevil infestation. It's a term that carries negative connotations, yet in the world of ecology, we know that infestations serve a purpose. Termites process wood into more easily digestible matter for other organisms. Boll weevils thin the population by attacking the weakest plants, leaving the strongest to reproduce.

The Taliban-infestation is performing the vital function of opposing American hegemony. Just as great piles of wood attract termites and vast monoculture fields of cotton attract boll weevils, the imperial invasion of force, economics, politics, and culture tends to attract and strengthen these "infestations" of what Ronald Raygun once termed freedom-fighters (when their guerrilla tactics were turned on the Russian invasion).

Of course, totalitarian actors reject their role in creating infestations. They just happen, imperial logic goes, so we have to redouble our efforts and wipe them out. We saturate the wood with chemicals toxic to all life to kill termites. We insert pesticide-producing genes into cotton, that kill all insects, to kill boll weevils. We call in Predator drones, Hellfire missiles, counterinsurgency tactics, and indiscriminate bombings based on "reliable" evidence...

Once upon a time in Vietnam, the White House referred to its policies as "draining the swamp to kill the mosquitoes." It's not a workable analogy for the moral individual, but it makes perfect sense to the resource-hungry empire, which is not interested in ever leaving Afghanistan. Kill one mosquito-person (a loathsome name, but is terrorist or enemy combatant any better?) or bomb one wedding party, someone's family and friends, and you've just birthed another swarm of mosquito-people out of the swamp of Afghanistan. What looks like a disaster for us is simply justification to Congress for a bigger Pentagon budget.

Bowe Bergdahl has been put in a position to speak, without Pentagon reprisal, the one inevitable solution to the American-infestation of Afghanistan. The empire, with its failing ability to address mounting issues in the homeland, must leave. Your agreement does not matter, except (perhaps) in determining whether we provide support to help clean up the mess of nearly a decade of cluster bombs and whether we leave sooner or later.