Gone to Texas

By Mark Krikorian on June 18, 2010

Fox reports that 17 members of the Afghan military have gone missing over the past two years from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. While this is an obvious security vulnerability because "Each Afghan was issued a Department of Defense Common Access Card, an identification card used to gain access to secure military installations," I suspect it's more likely that they're washing dishes in the back of a cousin's restaurant in San Francisco or Northern Virginia. (Actually, these aren't mutually exclusive, since they could have just sold the DoD ID card and then gone to wash dishes.)

As the inevitable failure of our nation-building effort in Afghanistan becomes increasingly apparent, expect to see more and more such disappearances, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees coming to a neighborhood near you after the last helicopter takes off from the embassy roof.

Along those lines, about 12,000 Iraqi refugees have been resettled here so far this fiscal year, on top of nearly 19,000 last year and almost 14,000 the year before that. And this is a place where we've supposedly succeeded, which would seem to eliminate the need to take refugees.