Making Radio Waves Over Afghanistan

I listen to Bloomberg when I drive to work in the morning. I enjoy listening to the business community discuss situations without having to deal with the dreadful circus known as financial television. Today's program, however, offered a disturbing peek into the thinking of the so-called elite.

Tom Keene
(photo: mediabistro.com)

The offender was Tom Keene, Bloomberg's generally engaging, intelligent morning radio host. During his interview with someone from Davos, Switzerland, Keene compared two American presidents. He postulated that one former commander-in-chief faced a war during his time in office, while Barack Obama does not.

This statement, delivered almost without any real reflection, would have astonished the American soldiers in Afghanistan ducking real bullets on a daily basis. The genesis of Keene's thoughtless assertion comes from a deep place in the American psyche: the Afghan conflict does not lend itself to media glory; the American public would like the war to simply vanish; the Central Asian country is the very definition of "remote."

President Obama managed to deftly extricate the United States from its ill-conceived Iraq invasion and subsequent occupation. American troops, however, remain in Afghanistan, surrounded by hostile nations unified in their desire to see the US out of Central Asia. It's a war by any other name, and a very dangerous one.

A postscript: Keene also interviewed Jacob Frenkel, the wise former governor of the Bank of Israel. Frenkel observed that those who believe in "an eye for an eye" retribution ultimately will result in a society largely inhabited by the blind.