Command Sergeant Major Timothy Bolyard deserved better than he got — deadly American stone-headedness continues in Afghanistan

© 2018 Peter Free

 

27 September 2018

 

 

Where's the sense in this?

 

Command Sergeant Major Timothy Bolyard was gunned down by two Afghan policemen outside Kabul on 03 September. His death followed an American air strike that unintentionally executed 9 Afghan policemen on 07 August.

 

Both "incidents" illustrate the murderous futility of strategically unnecessary and unwinnable American warmaking.

 

Timothy Bolyard was on his seventh combat deployment. Our penchant for starting — and never letting go of — purpose-lacking wars caught up with him.

 

He had deployed a total of 13 times. Only military families know the strain of that.

 

 

Blame?

 

Sgt Maj Bolyard would probably have been among the last to point a finger of institutional responsibility. But I — combining realism that comes with advanced age with a sense of paternal caring — do not hesitate to assign negligent responsibility to those who deserve it:

 

 

Our stream of highest ranking, strategy-challenged US military commanders.

 

And the equally unstoppable flow of recklessly stupid American politicians.

 

 

Both of whom repeatedly put Sergeant Major Bolyard (and significant numbers of others who serve) into failed strategy situations that inevitably produce the hatred that killed him.

 

 

Plutocracy does this

 

Oligarchically originated American national policy misleads and misuses the nation's most honorably inclined (and arguably gullible) subpopulation.

 

We take these service-inclined people for granted. Once killed or partially butchered, they quickly pass from Life's view, without public protest.

 

Add in the hundreds of thousands of foreign lives purposelessly lost in these idiotic endeavors, and you have moral abomination of significant historical size.

 

Consider the irony. The United States, born with a stated aversion to foreign conflict, is now the planet's preeminent initiator of planet-wide combat for conflict alone's sake.

 

 

The moral? — Inane strategies and poorly aimed tactics murder without purpose

 

Command Sergeant Major Bolyard, as well as the reportedly 9 dead Afghan policemen, were erased from existence just as wastefully as ancient Aztecs' human sacrifices.

 

He deserved better. They all do.

 

The ability gap between America's leaders and Plato's philospher kings is enormous.

 

That virtually no one chooses to address this shortfall, even as an ideal, is indicative of the decadence at the heart of American political and economic culture.