American Zones

By Richard Boettger

Chapter Three of my new cheerful news column is, sadly, a life-saving plan that is unlikely ever to happen.  Basically, I have figured out a simple way to avoid our nation’s having to carry on endless wars like those in Afghanistan, Iraq, Vietnam, etc. Wouldn’t it be sweet to avoid sending our armies around the world for ten to twenty years a pop—and letting our guys get killed, killing large numbers of their soldiers, killing too many wedding parties with drones, and earning the hatred of entire countries whom we are, in our own clumsy fashion, just trying to help out?

So here’s my method of avoiding war and instead spreading love and democracy around the world.  It is simple: create what I’d call an “American Zone” within a country, instead of sending in the troops and blowing everything up.  American Zones would be property within a country taken over by the U.S. on behalf of the citizens of that country.  It would be like Guantanamo in Cuba and Hong Kong under the British, but lots better.  It would be a safe place for the folks we consider the Good Guys to create homes they can stay in and businesses they can run within their home country, instead of getting killed when we leave, or spending years coming to often-unfriendly neighborhoods here in the U.S. of A.

For example, in Afghanistan right now we have already carved out 30 square miles around Bagram Air Base.  This would be a safe zone for the interpreters, women teachers, and politicians who had supported us, and who would be in danger of reprisal from the Taliban after we left them on their own there.

The goal would be to provide a safe zone without the disastrous methods we have until now employed, so very badly, to rescue the Afghanis who hitched their wagons to our unfaithful star. To be expatriated to the U.S., we currently require a vetting process that has taken over two years.  And if a single Afghani we accept goes postal, the whole process is discredited.  We have let so many die because we were obsessively vetting them.  It would be easy,by my plan, to enter an American Zone, and for so many, preferable to uprooting themselves to America.  They would get to have any number of their friends and family join them in what would still be a part of their country.

Yes, it would cost a lot for us to administer these zones.  Most important would be enough of a military presence to prevent any danger to the Zone. Second would be a contingent of NGOs, ideally including members of an expanded Peace Corps.  But most of the administration would be by the Afghanis themselves, generally following the example of our democracy, just modified to their own ways.

The point would be to avoid the multi-trillion-dollar inhumane wars we have waged in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  Think if we had set up an American Zone, call it Afghanica, in 2004, after we had won whatever war we were waging up until that point.  Think not only of the thousands of American lives saved, but of the 100,000+ Afghanis we killed with our troops and drones.  Imagine the thousands of American veterans without PTSD and, even worse, permanent physical and brain damage from decades of pointless war.  

We now have a good record of the costs of doing post-9/11 wars the old-fashioned way, helped by an exhaustive Inspector General report on Afghanistan called “Lessons Learned.” It would be impossible for any “American Zone,” even one with gold toilets, to spend more money corruptly with more damage to Americans trying to help out.  The cost since we invaded has been over $290 million per day.  Most of this went to worsen the standard corruption in Afghanistan, funding the Taliban, warlords, and American citizens who jumped in, one paying a record $390 million fine for his ghost subcontractors, undone work, etc.

Worse than the corruption was our cost in soldiers.  We lost over 7,000 troops and 8,000 contractors in the fighting over there—and over 28,000 suicides by just our military enlistees, 22/day and rising, with an unrecorded number of contractor suicides.  

The war, the way we waged it, showed Bin Laden to be right in his quotes after 9/11 that “The values of this Western civilization under the leadership of America have been destroyed,” and that we spent $1,000,000 in reprisal for every single dollar of the mere half million spent by bin Laden to launch his terror attack on us.  All to have even more Muslims hate us than before.  Imagine if just a small fraction of this money had been spent to set up an American-like liberty and economic zone on Bagram.  After 20 years, the Muslim world would see a thriving small country giving living proof of the virtues of our civilization, not the bombs, Abu Ghraibs, torture, and corruption we nursed instead.

I say, give Peace—in the form of American Zones—a Chance.  Too late,in Afghanistan, but let’s start afresh in Syria.  God knows millions there would love our help.

[livemarket market_name="KONK Life LiveMarket" limit=3 category=“” show_signup=0 show_more=0]