As the war on Afghanistan enters its ninth year, President Barack Obama is trying to decide what to do. Call the White House (202-456-1111) and let President Obama know that it is time to end Bush's wars and bring our troops home.

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Right now, President Barack Obama is trying to decide what to do about the war in Afghanistan.

According to a senior administration official, President Obama â??has embarked on a very, very serious review of all options.â?

...but is that true? Are all options on the table? When you hear White House spokesman Robert Gibbs say things like:

â??I don't think we have the option to leave. That's quite clear.â?--10/5/09

...or Defense Secretary Robert Gates, declaring:

â??We are not leaving Afghanistan. This discussion is about next steps forward and the president has some momentous decisions to make.â?--10/5/09

It makes you wonder if they really are considering â??all the optionsâ?--since many Americans believe the best option is to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring our troops home. If President Obama doesn't even consider that option, he is left to choose the best way to continue a war that we should not be fighting.

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Let's do our own review of the war in Afghanistan. We can start by asking, â??Why are we fighting in Afghanistan?â?

The Bush Administration's stated purpose for invading Afghanistan was the â??disrupting, dismantling and defeating the terrorist organization that attacked us on September 11.â?

Okay, in that case--Mission Accomplished! According to Obama's National security adviser, James Jones:

â??[A]l-Qaida has fewer than 100 fighters operating in Afghanistan without any bases or ability to launch attacks on the West.â?--AP, 10/6/09

So, al Qaida has left Afghanistan--leaving America to fight a war against the Taliban, who are not leaving, because they are Afghanis, and Afghanistan is their country. Like it or not, the Taliban were the government in Afghanistan, prior to our invasion.

The Bush Administration seemed to have no problem recognizing the Taliban as legitimate when it appeared that they were going to allow the UNOCAL Corporation to build an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. As long as the Taliban stuck to oppressing women and blowing up Buddhist shrines, they were okay. It wasn't until they said no to the UNOCAL pipeline deal that the Taliban suddenly became a threat to world peace.

The military plans to overthrow the Taliban were already on George W. Bush's desk before the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. We cannot even pretend that would be a â??preemptive warâ?. That is good old American Imperialism at it finest. The attacks just served as a convenient excuse to overthrow the Taliban and set up a puppet government headed by Hamid Karzai, who just happened to be a UNOCAL consultant (another UNOCAL consultant, Zalmay Khalilzad, was named Special Envoy to Afghanistan).

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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 â??suspectedâ? 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.

â??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, â??I never heard of a suicide bomber in Afghanistan until the Americans and this government came.'â?--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. â??Who would we be surging against [in Afghanistan]?â? The answer:

â??Let me answer that with an old Middle Eastern proverb, â??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.â?--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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â??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.â?--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 â??significant increase in U.S. forcesâ? and warned that â??a failure to send them is a guarantee of failure.â?

Then, McCain appeared on CNN (10/11/09), to warn that â??The great danger now is not an American pullout. The great danger is a half-measureâ?--that sending anything less than 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistanâ??would be an error of historic proportions.â?

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:

â??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.â?--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.

• â??War...should only be declared by the authority of the people...instead of the government which is to reap its fruits.â?--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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Please... Please... Please, take five minutes to call the White House at 202-456-1111. Let President Obama know that you want him to end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and bring our troops home.

President Obama is the Commander-in-Chief. He is now â??The Deciderâ?. He doesn't have to argue with Congress or the Pentagon. He has the power to stop the wars and bring our troops home.

If Obama will end the wars that Bush started, he will have earned that Nobel Peace Prize.

Authors Bio:

Mick Youther is an American citizen, an independent voter, a veteran, a parent, a scientist, a writer, and all-around nice guy who has been roused from a comfortable apathy by the high crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush Administration.