Congress Has the Power and Responsibility to End this War
The House of Representatives will be voting this week, possibly as early as Tuesday, on $33 billion in funding to escalate the war in Afghanistan. The vote comes at a time of embarrassment and evident failure in Afghanistan. Record deaths of troops and Afghan civilian, rapidly rising spending and reports indicating it will just get worse.
The news reports of problems on the ground are bad enough, but the release of 92,000 documents by Wikileaks shows the war is "more grim than the official portrayal," as the New York Times concluded. TIME's Joe Klein reported said that the documents make clear how futile the situation in Afghanistan is and how utterly duplicitous our Pakistani "ally" has been.
Summarizing the Wikileaks war documents, the Guardian says:
à ‚¬ How a secret "black" unit of Special Forces hunts down Taliban
leaders for "kill or capture" without trial.
à ‚¬ How the US
covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air
missiles.
à ‚¬ How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill
Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.
à ‚¬ How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of
their roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to
date.
The House vote is not a slam dunk but you can be sure that the White House and military establishment will do everything they can to get the supplemental funding. The vote is likely to be close as the previous vote for war funding in the House won with only a five-vote margin. To accomplish that the House leadership had to manipulate the vote so that it was a procedural vote on "a self-executing rule" as well as amendments but not an actual vote on war funding. In addition, the war vote was sweetened with funding for unemployment benefits and state budgets included.
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