IT is way past time for us to get out of Afghanistan. Our military leadership has lied to this President and to the American people about the status of the war effort, protecting the profit margins of the military-industrial complex because war is big business. WE can no longer tolerate the blood sacrifice of Americans in the name of profits for lockheed martin, general dynamics, boeing, xe and all the other defense contractors whose bottom line depends on the deaths of American troops propping up the corrupt government in Kabul. This war is not about terrorism, or democracy or human rights, it is about war as business and the rich getting richer off Americans being killed and maimed, American families being destroyed physically, mentally and financially. It is time for Congress and the President to listen to the American people and get our troops out of Afghanistan ASAP. NO MORE KILLING IN OUR NAME, NO MORE KILLING FOR THE PROFITS OF THE MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX! From HuffPost.....
You'd think a ten-and-a-half year war would be a major issue in a
presidential campaign -- especially a war going as badly as the one in
Afghanistan. And especially in the wake of Sen. Jay Rockefeller
publicly urging
President Obama to speed up the withdrawal of U.S. troops. Maybe if the
administration proposed funding a Planned Parenthood clinic in
Kandahar, the war might get the place it deserves in the national
conversation.
Our political and media establishments seem to regard being in a
constant state of war as simply part of the "new normal" (to go along
with
over 8 percent unemployment).
Things continue to go from bad to worse, yet we continue to be wedded
to plans for a gradual withdrawal that will leave troops in Afghanistan
until
some point in 2014.
But even though our leaders don't seem to feel any sense of urgency,
plenty of others here at home do -- indeed, the vast majority does.
There are, of course, many issues on which our leaders are out of sync
with the country at large (too big to fail, punishing those who caused
the economic crisis, continued tax breaks for the rich, etc.), but this
one is especially egregious, given the toll it continues to take in
terms of lives lost, money squandered, and Afghan hatred of us
increased.
According to a recent
New York Times/CBS News poll,
support for the war has hit a historic low, at 23 percent, with 69
percent saying we should no longer be in Afghanistan. And the sentiment
that the war is going badly is one of the few bipartisan things in this
campaign: 68 percent of Democrats and 60 percent of Republicans say the
war is going somewhat or very badly. What is more, according to a
Washington Post/ABC News poll, 60 percent of Americans believe the war has not even been worth fighting.
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta's response to this turning of
public sentiment against the war? "We cannot fight wars by polls," he
said.
"If we do that we're in deep trouble." Of course that's true, and
nobody's asking him to "fight wars by polls," but what he can do is use
the same common sense that underlies those polls. We're over ten years
in -- these aren't snap judgments. And the fact that we're in "deep
trouble" in Afghanistan has nothing to do with our leaders being overly
responsive to the public's wishes.
Of course, the war was back in the news most recently because of the
horrific killing
of seventeen Afghan civilians, allegedly by Army Staff Sergeant Robert
Bales. This grotesque act of violence was both an aberration and not an
aberration. It was an aberration in the sense that it in no way
represents the behavior of the over
two million
men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 9/11. But
it was not an aberration in the sense that war is indeed hell, and
atrocities -- even by the best-trained armed forces, and ours is
certainly that -- are inevitable in prolonged conflict. That's why
prolonging wars a second more than necessary is so deeply immoral. But
does anybody sense that kind of urgency?
As Mark C. Russell, a retired U.S. Navy Commander and military psychologist,
wrote
on HuffPost, the military calls atrocities "misconduct stress
behaviors," which always occur in war, "even at the hands of otherwise
decent people." While noting that, of course, blame should fall foremost
on the perpetrator, Russell believes that the circle of responsibility
should be drawn considerably wider:
Bales and his family are just the latest of a long string of
members of the warrior class that have unjustly born the burden of
fighting an 11-year war. For instance, more than 107,000 military
personnel have been deployed at least three times.
Bales, by the way, was
on his fourth combat tour. Robert H. Scales, a retired Army major general and former commandant of the Army War College,
put it this way:
"I think if someone wants to place blame, it should be on a succession
of national leaders who fail to recognize that combat units,
particularly infantry, just wear out."
The sort of warfare the U.S. is fighting in Afghanistan, which
exposes soldiers to "the horrors of intimate killing, along with other
factors such as fatigue, thirst, hunger, isolation, fear of the unknown
and the sight of dead and maimed comrades," writes Scales, "all start a
process of moral atrophy that cannot be reversed."
So beyond Bales, says Scales, "the real institutional culprit is the
decade-long exploitation and cynical overuse of one of our most precious
and irreplaceable national assets: our close combat soldiers and
Marines."
And though the Bales case is one of the most sensational, that
cynical exploitation has resulted in plenty of others. Just last month,
Der Spiegel published photos
of two U.S. soldiers posing with the corpses of Afghan civilians in
2010. The two were convicted of murdering those civilians, including a
15-year-old boy, last year, and were also the centerpiece of a
Rolling Stone piece on U.S. war crimes called "The Kill Team."
But the danger is not just the odd overextended U.S. soldier breaking down. Last week an Afghan police officer
shot nine of his fellow officers,
then fled in a government car loaded with AK-47s and ammunition.
Earlier the same week, a U.S. soldier was killed by another Afghan
police officer, and two British soldiers were killed by an Afghan
soldier.
According to the
Washington Post, the "apparent surge in
such incidents" has "raised concerns about the state of the war effort."
Indeed, these incidents are becoming so common they're called "green on
blue" killings. And Pentagon numbers
show that 75 percent of the deaths since 2007 have occurred in the last two years. As the
Independent wrote, "the deaths raise fresh questions" and "deepen concerns... "
Over ten years in, isn't it time we stop raising questions and
deepening our concerns? How deep do the concerns have to be before we
act on them? How many fresh questions have to be raised until we start
responding with the obvious answers?
And it's not just the war that's going wrong. As the
New York Times reported
last week, more and more Afghans are fleeing the country, with over
30,000 applying for asylum in other countries last year, the largest
number in a decade. At the same time, only 68,000 Afghans returned, down
sharply from the 110,000 who came back the previous year, or the 1.8
million who returned in 2002. And a sum of cash representing a quarter
of Afghanistan's entire annual GDP was "physically carried" out of the
country last year, raising more "fresh questions."
Even though over two-thirds of Americans want to end the war, the GOP
candidates (with the exception of Ron Paul, of course) haven't exactly
seized the issue. Certainly not the way they've latched on to the
burning issue of contraception. Instead, they've mostly attacked the
president for daring to have announced a timeline for withdrawal. "It's
unthinkable that you say, 'Here's the date we're gonna leave, regardless
of the circumstances,'" Mitt Romney
said, adding: "Before I take a stand on a particular course of action, I want to get the input from the people who are there."
This obligatory "listening to the generals" approach ignores that the
generals' job is to accomplish the mission they're sent on. It's not
their job to decide what that mission is, what its scope should be, and
whether it's worth committing U.S. blood and treasure to. That's the job
of the civilian leadership, aka the president.
As for Rick Santorum,
his answer,
in response to the Bales incident, was actually closer to the truth:
"Given all of these additional problems, we have to either make the
decision to make a full commitment, which this president has not done,
or we have to decide to get out and probably get out sooner given the
president's decision to get out in 2014."
Given that doubling down for a full commitment (Another decade? Two
decades? Or should we aim for a full century?) without a clear mission
would be doubling down on insanity, the answer has to be: "get out
sooner."
The only GOP candidate who has had a consistently clear position on
the war is Ron Paul. "The truth is, I'm trying to save the Republican
Party from themselves because they want perpetual wars," he
said on
Face the Nation.
"It was a waste, there's not gonna be a happy ending, and I think the
Republicans have dug a hole for themselves because they're trying to
out-militarize the president, say 'we should do more.' Yet 75 percent of
the American people say 'we've had enough.'"
And yet even though, as Paul notes, he's the one in agreement with
the vast majority of the country, the media mostly treat his foreign
policy views as something your crazy uncle might say after one too many
drinks.
Surely we can all agree that the first rule of military action should
be: do no harm to your own national security. But right now we are
doing a lot of harm, losing hearts and minds every day and making our
country ultimately less safe as a result.
So, this war is not just a tragic waste of lives and money, it's also
weakening our national security by strengthening the resolve of those
who will stop at nothing to harm us. And it's deepening our involvement
in a civil war that is never going to be resolved while we're in the
mix.
"War is destructive of the human spirit,"
said Vietnam vet and military scholar Andrew Bacevich in an interview with Bill Moyers. "War compromises our humanity."
This one is now compromising our humanity, our national security, our
standing in the world, and our claim to the moral high ground.
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Tell
U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta to stop the arms flow to Syria
by cancelling the U.S. arms contract with Rosoboronexport! 
Bout guilty conspiring to kill Americans
Viktor Bout atty: 'We intend to appeal'
