Saving face in Afghanistan...but not saving lives

The months long US negotiations with the Taliban to remove the 14,500 US troops there has one overriding purpose: saving Uncle Sam's face from his inevitable defeat in a war he should never have fought. But our endless face saving strategy didn't save the life of US Army Private 1st Class Ellis A. Barreto Oriiz, who died Thursday from a car bomb in Kabul. Ortiz is the fourth US soldier killed in the last two weeks, continuing the surge in US casualties that has made 2019 the worst for US soldiers since our official end to combat operations in 2014.

Most US citizens are oblivious of the ongoing carnage in Afghanistan as the media is complicit in our government's downplaying the 18 year long violence we unleashed on the Afghans in October, 2001. PFC. Ortiz got barely a mention in a tiny, easy to miss blurb on page 5 of my morning paper. That's business as usual as America desperately tries to save face in war everyone knows is lost and must be ended. But while America saves face, PFC Ortiz, his unfortunate comrades in arms, and thousands of Afghans are losing their lives.