By Diana West
My question: Who’s high here? Illiterate Afghans on drugs, or educated Americans on fantasy?
Like a legion of buttoned-down and uniformed Don Quixotes seeking the impossible COIN (counterinsurgency theory) — winning Afghan hearts and minds from Islamic loyalties, constructing a heretofore unseen Afghan “city on a hill,” training Afghan police (literacy rate 4.5 percent) while simultaneously weaning them from addiction, and don’t get me started on “ally” Pakistan — the United States has plunged into a depth of denial only an extravagant “intervention” could reverse.
This American flight from reality skews everything, whether large and obvious, like waging a sanity-defying war, or small and easily overlooked, like starkly refusing to bestow a medal on a deserving fallen soldier. I refer to the appalling fact that Pvt. William Long, slain at age 23 by an avowed jihadist outside an Arkansas military recruitment center in June 2009, has not received a Purple Heart from the U.S. government. When Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad fired his AK-47, killing Pvt. Long and wounding Pvt. Quinton Ezeagwula (no Purple Heart, either), he was committing an act of war. The United States refuses to recognize this fact even as Muhammad, in interviews, statements and letters to media, has never shut up about it.
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