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The plight of US Army
Irfan Asghar
Email: irfanasghar99@yahoo.com
Because of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, the US army has got
groggy and worn-out. It is ‘about broken’ at this time. Only a third of
the regular army’s brigades now qualify as combat-ready. The army’s
exhaustion has been reflected in problems such as the rate of desertion
and unauthorized absences – a problem that has increased three fold on
the period before the war in Afghanistan. Officers educated at the elite
West Point academy are leaving at a rate not seen in 30 years, with the
consequences that the US army has a shortfall of 3,000 commissioned
officers and the problem is expected to worsen. This has led the US army
to reduce its standards for joining the military, particularly over the
issue of no longer looking too hard at any previous history of mental
illness.
The most dreadful feature is that suicide rates in the US Army have
soared over the past three years, hitting levels not seen in more than a
quarter century. Army officials have attributed the whopping rise in
suicides to strains in soldiers’ marriages and other relationships as
deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan lengthen and multiply. Everywhere
you go you hear the same complaints: soldiers talk to you about divorces
or problems with the girlfriends that they don’t see or about the
children who have been born and who are growing up largely without them.
Colonel Elsbeth Ritchie, psychiatric consultant to the army’s surgeon
general has regarded this as a marker of the stress on the force.
Data released by the army show the numbers of suicides and attempted
suicides spiked in 2006 after climbing steadily in the wake of US-led
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the figures, more than 2,000
soldiers tried to take their own lives or injure themselves in 2006,
compared to about 375 in 2002. The figures indicate that the number of
suicides were even higher in 2007, with 89 confirmed suicides and
another 32 deaths awaiting confirmation as suicides. The suicide rate
per 1,00,000 soldiers in the active duty army spiked to 17.5 by the end
of 2006, up from 12.8 at the start of the year. While that remains
slightly below the suicide rate for a comparable slice of the general
population, it is well above suicide rates that have prevailed in the US
Army since 1980, when the service began tracking them in detail. The
Army’s previous high was 15.8 per 1,00,000 in the mid -1980’s and all
this is very distasteful for the US. If we have an analysis and get down
to the subtleties, it comes out that most of the suicides entailed
relationship differences, while a smaller percentage stemmed from legal,
financial or occupational problems. The organizations which run group
sessions to help soldiers with emerging mental health and discipline
problems report that in about 50 to 60 percent of their cases, the
problem stem from issues at home. Suicide incident reports, which track
motives, indicate that people do not commit suicide as a direct result
combat. But the frequent deployments strain relationships. And strained
relationships and divorces are definitely related to increased suicides.
These strained relationships have also given rise to many other
disorders like post-traumatic stress disorder, sleep disorder etc.
within the ranks of the US army.
The military officers are concerned that the country’s armed forces have
been dangerously overtaxed by the Afghan and Iraqi conflict. These two
conflicts have killed over 4,000 soldiers and left more than 25,000
injured. What leaves bad smell in Americans’ mouth is that the strained
US military cannot react quickly and fully to another outbreak elsewhere
as it has not improved its ability to respond to new crises.
This is also lent credence by a poll survey according to which some 60
percent of more than 3,400 active and retired high-level command
officers polled have said that the US army is much weaker than five
years ago. If we think morally, it appears that the US army is paying
the cost of its war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. American army has
stooped so low in Iraq and Afghanistan that any neutral analyst may dub
it as a soul-less army, and its members as ‘merciless savages’. It has
smashed all human standards to smithereens. More than one million Iraqi
civilians have died, another one million wounded and millions more
driven from their homes into exile as a result of the American – led
invasion and occupation. And this murder rate exceeds the Rwanda
genocide ( 8,00,000 murdered ).
There are numerous accounts of the brutal treatment of Iraqi civilians
by some US soldiers. US forces also stand culpable of abusing and
torturing Iraqi civilians – men, women and children with impunity. The
combination of recklessness and wantonly destructive behaviour are
believed to have wreaked havoc with the fabric of Iraqi society.
Similarly in Afghanistan, the US army along with her stooges is
violating human rights and killing defenseless Afghan civilians on a
massive scale. The destitution and suffering of the people has
multiplied many-times. There are certain principles of nature which are
applicable universally. Nobody can
The nucleus of these principles is that every action has got a reaction.
Each and every act, be it good or bad, has to evoke a certain kind of
reaction and each and every body has to reap the harvest. Going by this
principle, the US empire is receding and its army getting afflicted with
both mental and physiological syndromes in reciprocation for its
misdeeds, arrogance and brutal attitude towards the creation of Almighty
Allah.
