U.S. Betrays Afghan Allies
As I've written before, our country's crap treatment of Afghan wartime allies sends me through the roof. I'm not the only one.
MS NOW (the weird re-brand of MSNBC) has an opinion piece from Jason Houser, former chief of staff for ICE. Every word is a gut punch.
Houser writes about his time as a Naval Intelligence Officer in Afghanistan and the country's reliance on Afghan partners who were "essential to the American mission."
They interpreted conversations in which a misunderstood word could get someone killed. They warned us about threats we could not see. They entered villages ahead of us, stood beside American service members under fire and placed their families at risk.
We owe them our lives, and we told them that the United States does not abandon its friends.
"That promise has been broken," Houser writes. "Afghan allies are ... treated as instruments of demographic and cultural change — as members of a suspect population whose presence is the offense. That worldview is profoundly at odds with the military values in whose name America sent me and millions of others to war."
