Josh Rushing

Afghanistan: Does anyone in the US still care?

The invasion of Afghanistan’s ninth anniversary passed in DC this week with hardly a notice. 

Media desperate to illustrate the story flocked to a small demonstration of less than two dozen veterans of the so-called global wars on terror.  A rag-tag group of angry, disillusioned and, most of all, disappointed vets gathered in front of Walter Reed Army Medical Center where thousands upon thousands of service members have returned from war to treat their wounds.

The veterans there for the demonstration held a ceremony at the gates of the iconic hospital and placed nine yellow roses - one for each year of the war in Afghanistan - with almost military precision, the occasional salute replaced with a peace sign, before setting off on a six-mile march to Capitol Hill. 

'Mission Accomplished' deja vu

For some reason I've started receiving Newsweek in the mail. No wonder the industry is facing tough times if this is how they handle their subscription base, because I'm sure I'm not paying for it.

Nonetheless, I was shocked at the cover this week which proclaims "Victory at Last: the Emergence of a Democratic Iraq" with a photo of Bush and his infamous "Mission Accomplished" banner in the background.

I had just returned to the States from my sixth trip to Iraq where I expected to film a preview of the elections for an episode of my show Fault Lines, but instead found a civil war in the making.

Major security breach

When I was embedded with the US military in Helmand Province, Afghanistan, in August I wandered into a tent that I immediately recognized from my days in the military. It was an operations tent, but it was far more technologically advanced than any operations center I ever witnessed as a US Marine. There were rows of tables with soldiers at laptops all facing enormous television screens that were filled with video of a family compound in southern Afghanistan. I was amazed at how clear the drone's video was, even though it was being filmed in the dark of night. 

It was easy in that tent, in the middle of what locals call the desert of death, to see how vital drones had become to the US military for both intelligence gathering and for remote-controlled strikes - bombings that Al Jazeera continuously reports on from Pakistan and Afghanistan to Iraq and Somalia.