War is an adventure till bullets pass one by. And of course, one has to be on the winning side. The UK Guardian has reported the Mercian Regiment’s encounters with death in a very breezy, devil-may-dare manner. Everything centres on the British and their daring. A Lieutenant Simon Cupples, 25, gushes about events in September, 2007. One does not understand whether Cupples is an adventure hero from the time of Rider Haggard or a real contemporary soldier. He drops place names like “the killing fields”, “Taliban territory” and then in the latter part of the report we have a string of references to men killed in the war. It is needless to say that they all received different honorable medals and all shine as stars in a cooling firmament. Where are the Afghans? How many Afghans died? When the world community is so eager to help Afghans develop, why would it be heroic to die killing Afghans? Most importantly, is there any heroism in war at all?
There are a few aspects to this conflict which needs greater looking into. Notice the youth of the British soldiers. They are hardly out of their swaddling clothes and are plunged into war. And the moment that anyone dies, the British Government goes over-board to award the Military Cross. And none hears about the roughened middle-aged guerillas. The Taliban soldiers are middle-aged, ideologically superior and yet technologically inferior. They do not have any advanced media network or machinery working for them to report the inevitability of war. This biased reporting serves only two purposes. The first one is to induct more British young men into the services, by making war heroic. And the second purpose is just blatant wartime propaganda.
I cannot help but add that it is for the good that the Taliban are backward. With the British, one at least knows the depths to which they can sink; the Taliban on the other hand, cannot be contained by even hell. Hell is too high for the latter.
Source: UK Guardian
Image: UK Telegraph
