Old Bonespurs Spits on Graves of European NATO Soldiers who gave Lives for US in Afghanistan

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By Juan Cole for Informed Comment

In an interview with Fox “News” in Davos, Switzerland, President Donald J. Trump a.k.a. “Old Bonespurs” and “Five-time-Deferment,” smeared the European NATO soldiers who gave their lives in Afghanistan to defend the United States.

The president said,

“I’ve always said, ‘Will they be there, if we ever needed them?’ And that’s really the ultimate test. And I’m not sure of that. I know that we would have been there, or we would be there, but will they be there? We’ve never needed them. We have never really asked anything of them. You know, they’ll say they sent some troops to Afghanistan, or this or that. And they did – they stayed a little back, a little off the front lines.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949, is pledged by Article 5 of its charter to consider an attack on one as an attack on all. Ironically, since the group was marshaled against the Soviet Union, Article 5 was never invoked during the Cold War, when US and Soviet nuclear capabilities led both powers to respect each others’ sphere of influence. The Soviets invaded their own satellites in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, to which NATO did not react with force, but they never marched into a NATO country.

It was the 9/11 attacks that caused NATO member states to swing into action, invoking Article 5 for the first time.

We can argue about whether that reaction was a good thing. French President Jacques Chirac attempted to convince George W. Bush not to frame 9/11 as a military attack but as an act of criminality. We would have been better off if Bush had listened. Al-Qaeda was a small organization with a few thousand members, and while it had cells in many countries, most of them were tiny. These operatives were more like outlaws or pirates than they were like enemy soldiers of an organized army.

Bush’s “Global War on Terror” or GWOT scooped up Iraq and Afghanistan into a Napoleonic campaign to change the face of the Middle East. The Baath government of Iraq, led by Saddam Hussein, had nothing to do with 9/11 or al-Qaeda, and in fact put out an all points bulletin for the arrest of the only al-Qaeda member known to have infiltrated into Iraq, linking him to the “Saudi terrorist Usamah Bin Laden.” The Taliban leaders likely did not know that al-Qaeda, foreigners in Afghanistan, were planning to hit the United States.

However unwise and costly it was in blood and treasure, Bush went to war. He did not in fact substantially change the governance of the Middle East toward democratization. That pretext was in any case an afterthought.

In Afghanistan, the US waged a twenty-year war that it lost. It did not wage the war alone. NATO explains:

The number of NATO troops killed in Afghanistan was 3,486.

2,461 of them were US service personnel.

457 British troops were killed.

165 Canadian troops were killed.

Here is a chart of coalition killed in Afghanistan (including non-NATO allies):

• USA      2461
• UK      457
• Canada      159
• France      90
• Germany      62
• Italy      53
• Poland      44
• Denmark      43
• Australia      41
• Spain      35*
• Georgia      32
• Romania      27
• Netherlands      25
• Turkey      15
• Czech Republic      14
• New Zealand      10
• Norway      10
• Estonia      9
• Hungary      7
• Sweden      5
• Latvia      4
• Slovakia      3
• Finland      2
• Jordan      2
• Portugal      2
• South Korea      2
• Albania      2
• Belgium      1
• Bulgaria      1
• Croatia      1
• Lithuania      1
• Montenegro      1
• Total      3621

The British, with 457 men killed, are so furious that even the nondescript Keir Starmer grew enough of a spine to protest mildly. That is more than he ever did for the tens of thousands killed in Gaza.

But there are lots of ways to look at the numbers. Denmark only has 6 million people, so its 43 dead make its sacrifice greater per capita than any country other than the United States.

The Danish are doubly aggrieved, since the slur comes atop Trump’s attempt to muscle his way into Danish Greenland. AP quotes Danish Platoon Commander Martin Tamm Andersen, who fought in Afghanistan and lost men there, as saying, “It feels surreal. It feels like it’s a bad joke somehow,” Andersen said. “I mean, you can’t really fathom that this is actually something that is being said out loud. It just seems too crazy.”

If it seems that way, it is because it is.

Juan Cole

Juan Cole, a TomDispatch regular, is the Richard P. Mitchell collegiate professor of history at the University of Michigan. He is the author of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam: A New Translation From the Persian and Muhammad: Prophet of Peace Amid the Clash of Empires. His latest book is Peace Movements in Islam. His award-winning blog is Informed Comment. He is also a non-resident Fellow of the Center for Conflict and Humanitarian Studies in Doha and of Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN).

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