Forever at war.

• Author: Howell, Llewellyn D.
• Position: WORLD WATCHER

READING DEXTER FILKINS' The Forever War, I reflected on war throughout my own lifetime and realized that I do not remember a time when the U.S. was not in a war of one kind or another. Born just before America's entry into World War II, I have only vague specific memories about the conflict itself--but I remember wartime. There was rationing, hunger, militarization, soldiers and sailors everywhere, fighter aircraft (we lived just off the end of a military airport runway), the atom bomb, and the sense and threat of enemy (Germans and Japanese then). We learned to fear and hate the enemy.

At the end of World War H, the U.S. launched almost immediately into the Cold War. Again, there was a sense of militarization and threat--just a different enemy, this time the Soviets. Television, then a new phenomenon, filled our homes with films about war's battles and stories concerning romance, gallantry, heroism, and death. The Korean War initiated the 1950s, and news programs were rife with images of columns of fighting men amid explosions. We learned to hate the Chinese and North Koreans amid word that we no longer should loathe the Germans and Japanese.

Then came the Suez crisis, Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, Laos, wars of liberation, decolonization, and drawn-out trauma of Vietnam. Communist Vietnamese were the new enemy. Behind them, somewhere, lurked that old nemesis, the Soviets. For eight years we lived with the graphic depiction of battles fought across our TV screens, in vivid color this time: jungle green and blood red. Before long came the Iranian hostages, Lebanon bombings, and world of terrorism. The 9/11 attacks led us to Afghanistan and, in a perverse sort of logic, Iraq and back to Afghanistan again. One crisis keeps following another.

We always have a reason, but we always seem to be fighting--and it will not end soon. We may be fighting in Afghanistan for many lifetimes. Filkins' Forever War accounts portray a netherworld of Islamic radicals, criminal gangs, and tribal thugs that is far deeper than ordinary soldiers (no matter how well trained) ever can penetrate--ever.

We cannot win in Afghanistan because we do not know this enemy. We are trapped in the military matrix of the 20th century. We know how to fight governments and their armies, but not tribes, clans, or religious groups. After eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we still cannot distinguish between Sunnis and Shiites, Arabs and Kurds, Arabs and Persians (Iran...