In what was arguably the most important speech of his young presidency, President Obama took the stand at West Point last Tuesday to announce his plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Attempting to rally public support for the cause, the President reiterated his belief that the enemy we fight in Afghanistan poses "no idle danger, no hypothetical threat" and that the "security of the United States and the safety of the American people [are] at stake in Afghanistan."
There has been enough back and forth this past week about the wisdom of Obama's strategy, the 2011 deadline that he set and the level of international commitment to the cause. I do not want to further that debate here.
Rather, here are the questions that he did not raise in his speech: Whose war is this? Are the burdens of this national effort being shared appropriately? The president called on the United States to rediscover the unity that it had after 9/11 and in the beginning of the war, but should he have asked the American people for more? Why didn't he explicitly state the sacrifices he was asking of us?
To be sure, thousands of Americans have made tremendous sacrifices over the course of this war. Members of the military, their families and their friends have gone above and beyond the call of duty, and we must never take their service for granted.
The reality of those sacrifices hits close to home when word came earlier this semester that Army Capt. and Tufts alumnus Ben Sklaver (LA '99) had been killed in Afghanistan. The Tufts ROTC members are another example of a group of people on campus agreeing to take on their share of the burdens of this war.
But do most students at Tufts and other schools nationwide feel the burden of this sacrifice? How are our daily lives affected? In light of the fact that our country is at war, what is being asked of us?
For most college students — myself included — these past seven years of war have been fairly normal. Never have I been asked to make any conscious sacrifices for the benefit of the troops, and there has never been the slightest chance that I might have to go fight in either Iraq or Afghanistan myself.
Whereas nearly everyone felt the effects of the economic boom and bust, asking someone if they had endured similar hardship as a result of the war would draw some puzzled looks and negative responses.
The reality is that the war in Afghanistan is just a blip on most people's radar — something that they read about in the paper, watch on the news and have the luxury of ignoring for the rest of their day.
This reality suggests that Americans don't necessarily understand (or believe) that our safety and security are at stake in Afghanistan.
In a war where public opinion is split down the middle, you would expect that the level of visible protests and opposition would be high. But ambivalence has been much more common than action.
The real problem is that, though our safety and security might actually be at stake, Americans do not feel that we have a stake in the war. With our all−volunteer army, there is no risk of conscription through the draft. And despite the billions of dollars we have spent over the course of the war, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have had the courage to push through a politically unsavory tax increase or a proportional decrease in spending to pay the bills.
To seize upon an elementary economics analogy, we are operating under the assumption that the tradeoff between guns and butter doesn't exist.
Two questions arise: First, is this attitude a problem? And second, if it is, how do the consequences manifest themselves?
In my opinion, our current situation certainly presents a moral problem. I can't believe any argument that says we are truly committed to this war when we have repeatedly failed to muster ourselves to sacrifice anything for it.
The blame for this lack of sacrifice is spread around; our leaders are at fault just as much as we are. They are the ones who can demand real sacrifices from us. But though former President George W. Bush and President Obama have never had difficulty telling us that we need to continue our effort in Afghanistan, they have both been unwilling to explicitly call for specific sacrifices from the American people. Say what you will about the differences between the two, but they have both shown an equal reticence on this front.
In terms of the consequences, a war in which there is no shared sacrifice is a war that is vulnerable to the whims of the people and the politicians alike. If we felt a direct link between our tax dollars and the dollars used to pay for the war, people would certainly be more attuned to its progress and prospects for success. And if we could see the consequences of what we would have otherwise done with our tax dollars were they not going to fund the war — in other words, what butter we were losing — we would undoubtedly press our leaders harder to explain the true costs and benefits of the war.
So in closing, to the Tufts community and our country as a whole I will say this: It is time to pull our heads out of the sand. If our leaders won't compel us to share in the sacrifice, we must take the initiative into our own hands. At the very least, force yourselves to remain informed by reading at least one news item each day about the war. And in honor of Capt. Sklaver and his counterparts, think about what sacrifices you can make to begin to thank them for theirs.
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Michael Kremer is a junior majoring in international relations.
