I'm reminded of Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's excellent autobiography http://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Memoir-Vietnam-Pentagon-Papers/dp/0670030309 in which he recounts flying back from Vietnam with Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in the early years of the Vietnam War. Ellsberg tells McNamara that no progess has been made in the last year and McNamara agrees, but when McNamara gets off the plane, he tells reporters the war is going well.
Obama is too smart to be delusional enough to believe progress has been made. His comments are spin because like so many presidents before him, he is too weak to resist the powerful forces that profit off of our nation being at war.
As this week's Wiki Leaks documents on the Afghanistan War show, nearly everyone involved concedes it's a diaster. Nine years after the invasion which was designed to capture Osama Bin Laden and eliminate the al-Qaeda fighters responsible for 9/11, the US admits that there are few al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan - they're in our ally Pakistan's territory and Bin Laden probably is too if he's alive.
Meanwhile nearly 1,400 American soliders have been killed http://siadapp.dmdc.osd.mil/personnel/CASUALTY/state_oef_oif.pdf and thousands of Afghanis, many of them unarmed civilians accidentally, or in some cases intentionally, have been been killed by Americans. This makes them despise us and creates more enemies for every Afghan, innocent or not, killed. And the cost of the war is some $74.3 billion and counting at a time of record deficits and debt in this country, skyhigh unemployment and a crumbling instrastructure desperately in need of dollars.
I could go on, but everything in my letter to Obama still applies a year later, so I'm reprinting it.
10-30-09
Evan Goodenow
333 W. Suttenfield St.
Apt. 1
Fort Wayne, IN. 46807
President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW
Washington D.C. 20500
Dear Mr. President,
Doing the right thing is rarely easy or politically expedient. Whatever decision you make in Afghanistan, some will hate you for it, but we will withdraw from Afghanistan. The question is only when and how much blood and treasure it will cost us.
This letter is not meant as a lecture. It is simply one American trying to convince the president I voted for not to make a tragic mistake.
The majority of Afghanis don’t want us there any more than we would want a foreign army occupying our nation. Counterinsurgency is just a kinder, gentler occupation, but an occupation nonetheless. Once we had a revolution to throw out an occupying army and to the Afghanis, we are the Redcoats.
You have said you would not hesitate to use force to protect Americans or American interests, but force is often not in our interests and makes us less safe. The more we kill, the more enemies we create. I am not a pacifist – a president should not rule out force as a last option – but I am a realist.
I’m also realistic enough to know that another 9/11 attack is inevitable and if you were to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan before an attack occurred, the Right would use it to make you appear weak. However, we both know the argument that we must stay in Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda from returning and using it as a safe haven to launch attacks against the U.S. and our allies is bogus.
Most of the planning and training for 9/11 was done in Hamburg, Germany and in the U.S. One of the 19 hijackers had his name listed in the San Diego phone book. With our lax gun laws, terrorists could easily obtain semiautomatic rifles in the U.S. and train in the woods before launching an attack. They don’t need to use Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda is more of an ideology now than an actual organization. By conducting a war against them instead of treating them like the criminals they are, we have elevated their status in the Muslim world. And if the safe haven argument were valid, it would mean occupying a dozen other Muslim countries including nuclear-armed Pakistan.
Besides the lives saved by a withdrawal, some of the money saved could be used to secure our nation. About 95 percent of the cargo shipped into the U.S. is never inspected and the budget to prevent nuclear proliferation – and prevent terrorists from getting their hands on missing plutonium and detonating a nuclear bomb in the U.S. – is woefully inadequate. The turf battles and lack of coordination between the CIA, FBI and NSA that allowed the 9/11 attacks to occur continue.
Those problems cannot be solved with 68,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. Or by adding more.
It must be excruciatingly painful for you to speak with families of soldiers killed in Afghanistan. And I realize that most of their families will never accept that their sons’ and daughters’ lives were wasted. But the argument that we cannot withdraw because it would dishonor the dead is the same as saying many more must die because some have died.
You’re a lot smarter and more articulate than me and can convince most Americans the war in Afghanistan isn’t worth winning even if it was winnable. But if a withdrawal prevents you from getting re-elected, that’s a price worth paying to be on the right side of history. Peace also takes courage.
Sincerely,
Evan Goodenow
Well said!
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