Opinion

Former Army Capt. Mike Breen has been stationed in the mountains of Afghanistan, in those remote places we read about, those places where small groups of soldiers live in isolation and try to draw out and stop the Taliban who know the terrain so well.

“Our mission was to interdict the flow of weapons and fighters across the border with Pakistan,” said Breen, a native of North Hampton. “We were working to secure a very large area of the country against the insurgency.”

He was there for more than a year, leaving in 2006. Before that, in 2003-04, he served in Iraq, managing civil reconstruction projects in Baghdad by day and then engaging in counterterrorism and counterinsurgency efforts at night. That tour ended south of Baghdad in “the triangle of death” with “some pretty serious counterinsurgency stuff. It was tough.”

It’s fair to say this man knows a thing or two about war, most particularly in the Middle East.

He entered the Army, he said, because he wanted to give his time to a society that had given him quite a bit. He was a scholarship student both to Phillips Exeter Academy and to Dartmouth College, where he joined Army ROTC.

“I felt I had a responsibility to give back, and military service seemed like a good way to do that,” he said. “I evaluated it constantly. A lot of my friends asked me to justify what I was doing. Of all the things I could be doing with my life, why this? The answer I came to? It was an act of faith in our system of government and in the American people themselves.”

That faith remains strong, but it has shifted focus for him.

“One of the things that happened as I was involved in these two conflicts and fighting terrorist organizations with global financing, I started to look at the way the network operates, where they get their resources,” he said. “It should not be a shock to anyone that a large source of the funding comes from private donations made by private individuals living in the Gulf States.”

Breen references a recent article in The New York Times. In it, Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said $106 million of the Taliban’s revenues in the past year were derived from donors abroad. A CIA official was quoted as saying the money came from private citizens who live in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran and some Persian Gulf nations.

It certainly took no leap of faith for him to make the connection in his mind between our nation’s security and our dependence on Middle Eastern oil.

“Even if we’re getting our oil from friendly countries like Mexico, we all know that OPEC sets the global price,” he said. “In real terms, the money we spend for oil is going to the Taliban and al-Qaida.”

And so when he heard about Operation Free — a group of veterans of all wars crisscrossing the country to advocate for a sustainable economy as a way to weaken oil ties with the Middle East — “it was a no-brainer for me.”

The military, he said, is already getting on the bandwagon. The Marine Corps particularly, he said, has committed to reducing carbon emissions by 25 percent by 2025. “They’re convinced there’s a huge national security risk that’s likely to occur if we do nothing about it,” he said.

He brings these issues up because he said he believes it’s important for Americans to look at sustainability not only through the environmental and conservation prism, but through the national security prism as well.

“Does this mean everybody should stop driving their cars? Of course not,” he said, but it does mean getting behind efforts “to develop clean, domestic sources of energy.”

“We have a way of life we value very highly, and we should be aware that there are people out there with oil money financing those who are parasites to our way of life,” he said.

I also have a request. I am planning to write my second annual Earth Matters column on Christmas shopping soon, and I would love to hear from anyone who can steer me toward local stores, products and goods. E-mail dmcdermott@seacoastonline.com.

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