12 Mar 2012

The remoteness of modern war

They tend not to live amongst us, but in their own towns. Sometimes they are sons and daughters of people we might know, but when I ask around, I do not meet many with close links.

I know two generals and an admiral socially – friendships established through my day job. But then quite suddenly, the military are in our front room. They enter through our computer and TV screens in times of death.

The war in Afghanistan is eternally remote and yet eternally present. Some of it is fought from somewhere in the US with man-less drones but much of it is hand-to-hand, boot to boot, very, very far away. It’s a  nasty thing, as nasty as its accompaniment in Iraq, and we have been at it for twice the period that our parents and grandparents fought the second world war.

It is when a soldier goes berserk and kills 16 Afghan civilians, nine of them children, or a when direct hit steals six British lives from an “impregnable” armoured vehicle, that war lurches back into awareness.

So little does the war play upon our normal lives that so long as it is distant and foreign we can apparently live with it forever.

But the US soldier’s killing of so many is beyond war, and the worst single incident of its kind in modern times. Perhaps this time these killings may wake us and make us wonder…what on earth are we doing?

How loud will that question ring, and for how long shall we hear it? In a ghastly way that may depend upon how many the ‘enemy’ now kill in reply (we don’t really call them that; the ‘Taliban’ is perhaps more easily mysterious and distant).

A sort of end has been declared: 2014/15. But the feel is of dangerous drift. The cost is vast in cash, lives, and resolution. It seems, this bleak morning, that the bloodletting will intensify. If it does, will the war manage to retain its customary and convenient remoteness, or have we reached a new moment? I suspect we may have.

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