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If we had learned anything in the last eight years, it should be that we cannot defeat terrorism with conventional military forces. Every time American troops kick in a door, we have made more enemies and potential terrorists. Every time a missile from one of our pilotless drones kills a "suspected" terrorist (along with a few innocent neighbors), we have created more people who want to kill Americans. Sending more troops will only make things worse.
"A UN report now estimates that up to 500 Afghan civilians are dying monthly from US cluster bombs, most of them children and teenage boys. Finally, a UN study shows that civilian deaths have not only increased Afghan resentment of foreign forces but also motivated many of the suicide bombings. As an Afghan vegetable stand owner told the Washington Post, "I never heard of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan until the Americans and this government came.'"--The Nation, 1/8/09
During recent hearings of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Republican ranking member Richard Lugar asked about General McChrystal's request to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan. "Who would we be surging against [in Afghanistan]?" The answer:
"Let me answer that with an old Middle Eastern proverb, "It's me and my brother against my cousin. But it's me and my cousin against a foreigner.' So if we send 40,000 Americans...that will coalesce every local rivalry; they will put their local rivalry aside to actually shoot the foreigners and then they'll resume their own internecine fight.... Sending troops with weapons just will unify everybody against those troops, unfortunately."--Dr. Marc Sageman, Senior Fellow at theForeign Policy Research Institute and former member of the CIA's Afghan Task Force, 10/7/09
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"As soon as possible, the US/NATO troops must vacate our country. We want liberation, not occupation. With the withdrawal of occupation forces, we will only have to face one enemy instead of two."--Malalai Joya, former Afghan parliament member and current director of the Organization for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities, World Pulse Magazine, 12/2/08
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Leading the call for more troops in Afghanistan is Senator John McCain [R-AZ]. He (along with his ventriloquist dummy, Lindsey Graham [R-SC] and their comic side-kick Joe Liberman [I-CT]) wrote a piece for the Wall Street Journal (9/13/09) pushing for a "significant increase in U.S. forces" and warned that "a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure."
Then, McCain appeared on CNN (10/11/09), to warn that "The great danger now is not an American pullout. The great danger is a half-measure"--that sending anything less than 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan"would be an error of historic proportions."
Another 40, 000 troops, in addition to the 21,000 already approved by President Obama, would bring the total American military presence in Afghanistan to about 100,000. That is certainly not a half-measure. It is more like a one-sixth measure:
"In his definitive recent field manual on the subject, Gen. David Petraeus stipulates that real counterinsurgency requires 20 to 25 troops for each thousand residents. That comes out, conservatively, to 640,000 troops for Afghanistan (population, 32 million). Some 535,000 American troops couldn't achieve a successful counterinsurgency in South Vietnam, which had half Afghanistan's population and just over a quarter of its land area."--The New York Times, 10/10/09
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This is why President Obama needs to hear from the American people. This decision cannot be left to the generals or the military contractors to make.
- "War...should only be declared by the authority of the people...instead of the government which is to reap its fruits."--James Madison,
There is nothing for America to win in Afghanistan. Do we really want to sacrifice more American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars, so someone can build a pipeline across Afghanistan? Does anyone believe that the Afghanis will allow oil to flow across their occupied country? (Remember: It took one drunk with a rifle to shut down the Alaskan Pipeline for almost three days.)
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