Howard Hurt, Ray McGovern, and various other CIA experts, some of them on video at RethinkAfghanistan.com say Get Out.
Matthew Hoh, senior US civilian diplomat in Zabul Province and former Marine captain, resigned and says Get Out.
So does former diplomat Ann Wright.
Our National Security Advisor says more troops could just be swallowed up. Doesn't he get to advise on national security?
Vice President Joseph Biden, Mikhail Gorbachev, and the late Charlie Wilson are among those wondering what in the world we're up to.
And all the experts who lack the prestige that comes with having been wrong about everything for decades also say Get Out.
Malalai Joya says it. William Polk says it. The U.S. public says it. In a U.S. Army-funded survey, 94% of Kandaharis say they want negotiations, not assault, and 85% say they see the Taliban as "our Afghan brothers."
The RAND corporation says that 90% of insurgencies against weak governments like Afghanistan's succeed.
So, why are we escalating, rather than ending?
A clue comes from the fact that President Obama sent his first 17,000 troops early last year, openly stating that he would sit down and consider what his strategy was only after sending them. We all know there are interests in wars from those who profit, that we are building military bases, and that Washington insiders like Zbigniew Brzezinski openly point to a gas pipeline as a primary reason to occupy Afghanistan. But the real reason we're there is pure cynical, and probably wrong, electoral politics. Obama doesn't want to end a war without having an escalation first, because his advisors tell him that would look bad -- even though he still claims to be planning to end another war in Iraq, a country that by some measurements of violence and stability is worse off than Afghanistan.
If all of this sounds less than brilliant, it may be time to really start worrying, because Secretary of War Robert Gates said that if he didn't get the money for the latest escalation in Afghanistan by the Fourth of July he would have to begin doing stupid things. Begin? Begin?
Gates, who has moved the dealine to the end of this month, meant not that he would have to undo and apologize for an escalation that has not been funded. He meant that he would have to fund it out of the military budget of all crazy things -- exactly what Congressman Alan Grayson's "The War Is Making You Poor Act" would require him to do, eliminating taxes on Americans earning $35,000 or less, while substantially reducing our national debt. How stupid would that be?
But because 6 months have gone by since the president and his not yet insubordinate generals publicly debated the escalation, nobody even talks about the current off-the-books "emergency" war spending bill as an escalation, instead claiming it's to "support the troops" who are overseas, never mind how they got there or how we'll get them home.
Frida Berrigan pointed out yesterday what sort of alternatives there are to what we are doing with the money our children will have to pay back to China with interest:
"Rethink Afghanistan -- Robert Greenwald's effort to help us understand the war on terror, its costs, and consequences -- has a new Facebook application aimed at breaking down exactly how much we can get for one trillion dollars.
It is fun (in a qualified-world wide web-war on terror sort of way), and eye-opening.
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