We don't have any plausible exit strategy in Afghanistan so we've never defined victory in that forsaken land. History tells us we'll have to leave. Why not declare victory now and spend some of our money on our country? Obama is letting the GOP push him into a failed escalation of our troops in Afghanistan and we have US citizens dying daily because of lack of health care. Altruism begins in the home.
The article "Biggest State Party to Obama: Get Out of Afghanistan" at
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/24986
describes that California, which is responsible for 13 percent of the United States GDP and whose GDP is larger than all but eight countries in the world has had enough of Obama's occupation of Afghanistan as the article states "There's a significant new straw in the political wind for President Obama to consider. The California Democratic Party has just sent him a formal and clear message: Stop making war in Afghanistan.
Overwhelmingly approved on Sunday (Nov. 15) by the California Democratic Party's 300-member statewide executive board, the resolution is titled "End the U.S. Occupation and Air War in Afghanistan."
The resolution supports "a timetable for withdrawal of our military personnel"
and calls for "an end to the use of mercenary contractors as well as an end to
air strikes that cause heavy civilian casualties." Advocating multiparty talks
inside Afghanistan, the resolution also urges Obama "to oversee a redirection of our funding and resources to include an increase in humanitarian and developmental aid."
All the fads start in California and in time go east. California is hugely Democratic. Obama, if he is worrying about polls, should start the phased withdrawal now.
The article "Just Say NO to the War in Afghanistan" at
http://www.commondreams.org/print/49450
suggests that Obama picked Afghanistan as his war because he didn't want the GOP to call him a pre-9/11 thinker as the article states "
Instead, President Obama had the audacity and shortsightedness to declare that the fight in Afghanistan is a "war of necessity" that is "fundamental to the defense of our people." Talking about switching the war from Iraq to Afghanistan might have seemed a politically clever way to show that he was not "soft" when he sought the presidency, but restating that rationale now that he is president has boxed him into the same misconceptions that have led the United States into losing wars for the past fifty years."
Bush 43 always conjured up fear when he said that terrorists want to use a nuclear WMD on the US, but as the article states "In the short run, the United States needs to improve its defensive capacities through careful scrutiny of the airplanes, boats, and containers that reach this country. Such scrutiny measures, some of which were implemented after September 11, should be given greater attention. But the deep truth is this: there is no way to ensure that a group of terrorists will never obtain and set off an atomic bomb in an American city. As the technology of mass destruction and delivery of bombs becomes more sophisticated, the vulnerability will increase, regardless of what happens in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, or other countries in that region.
The solution has to lie with eliminating people's desire to destroy us."
When we were kids and there were limited supplies of cake, the responsible adult would divide it equally. The reason why there are people who would become jihadists is as the article states "These victims of our global economic arrangements are sitting ducks for ideologies that preach anger and violence against those Western powers that are seen as arrogantly ignoring this suffering."
Until a more equitable method of dividing the limited resources of the world is arrived upon we are not going to be able to kill more terrorists daily than our wars produce as the article states "The fourth step is for the advanced industrial societies, led by the United States, to launch immediately a Domestic and Global Marshall Plan that would dedicate between 2 percent and 5 percent of their gross domestic product each year for the next twenty to once and for all end global poverty, homelessness, hunger, inadequate education, and inadequate health care, and to repair the global environment."
