COMMENTARY
War will be long, but we must not falter
By Chuck Callahan
The global war on terrorism is a political football whose run is well into mid-season. Gallons of ink have been spilled by both sides rooting for and against the team on the field. Armchair quarterbacks trade Monday morning critiques from bar stools to computer terminals.
Mine is a different perspective as I stomp the dust of Kuwait, Kandahar and Baghdad from my boots.
I am a simple guy: a soldier who happens to be a doctor. This global war strikes me as a relatively straightforward problem, though I admit that the solution is daunting.
There are 6 billion people in the world today. At this moment, a finite number of them are willing to give their lives to kill me, my wife and my children. These enemies existed before our invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, before Abu Ghraib, as the events of 9/11 bear witness. Some of these enemies may exist in our country. But most do not. As a soldier, it is my job and that of my colleagues to find and fix, close with and destroy these enemies. They need to be captured and brought to justice.
We could wait to go after them until they declare themselves, until they target Houston or Hollywood. But I do not want to expose my loved ones to that risk. They must be brought to justice wherever they are. Every nation on Earth shares the risk and the responsibility. Americans are certainly not the only target.
Nations that stand with us against these enemies are our friends. Those who won't are not. Those who harbor or would harbor them are our enemies. It is simple. We cannot afford to wait. The world is not the same as it was in the '40s or '50s, the '60s or '90s when we faced regional groups with ambitions hindered only by technological impotence. They would have reached out in hatred to destroy us. They merely lacked the means.
Today our enemies do not. A dirty nuclear bomb, a release of weapons-grade smallpox, a cyber-bomb that cripples the Internet, all are within the enemies' reach.
As I have met and worked with soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in all the theaters of Southwest Asia, it strikes me that these men and women know this. They are active-duty kids from Brooklyn and middle-aged men and women from Missouri deployed with their Reserve and Guard units yet again. They all understand. This is our generation's Normandy. It is our Guadalcanal. We hate being away from home. We certainly didn't choose the fight we are in. But we will be in it as long as there exists that finite number of people in the world who hate us, who retain the motivation and the means to do us harm.
Therein lies the second piece of the puzzle. Consider this: We are training an Army in Afghanistan to defend the government and fight terrorists. We are raising a nation in a place where many people drink from the same stream that they use as a toilet. It is a place where one in four children die before age 5, and one in 12 women dies in childbirth.
This is the training ground of our enemy, and this country is decades away from joining us at the table as a developed nation.
We discuss "rebuilding" in Iraq. In Afghanistan, it is a matter of building from the ground up a nation where one has never really existed before. The nuances are complex, but the realities for a doctor are simple. I turned away from the bedside of a dying child in a non-U.S. hospital in Afghanistan when the doctor told me that nothing could be done. I am not sure. But I know in America we would have tried.
Can we focus our national energy on building the healthcare system of this nation to the point where that infant would have had the same chance mine would have had? Is this not an effort worth our national soul or limited American attention span?
This summer, while dozens of pampered yet deserving athletes battled in Athens, thousands and thousands of America's sons and daughters risked their lives in the hovels of Afghanistan and Iraq laboring to build and rebuild these fledgling nations. But we do not read about their stories or even think of them often enough. If we are to be successful in Southwest Asia, it will not be a matter of this administration or the next. This is a fight that will take decades to win. And it is these young people who will win it.
But these complexities are beyond me. I am a simple guy. It strikes me, though, that if our enemies are finite, we might further diminish their number by taking away their ability to recruit from the children of the next generation. These potential enemies are the same children American soldiers mingled with and cared for in Mosul, Iraq, and Masar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan.
Consider a child whose first memories of America are the faces of the doctors and nurses in uniform, struggling to save her after she stepped on a mine. What will this child and her parents think of the Americans they have met? And more importantly, will their memories make them less likely to become our enemies?
Time alone will tell. Unfortunately, it will be a long time. It will take the next president's administration at least, I think, and probably several more beyond it. The question is whether we, a "drive-through," "microwave," "no-wait," "take a pill" nation, will endure it.
For the sake of all of our children, I hope so.
Col. Chuck Callahan is deployed to Camp Arifjan, Kuwait. He has been chief of pediatrics at Tripler Army Medical Center since 1998. These are Callahan's own views, not written in any other capacity.
