Foreign Policy

Dear Mr. President,

Tonight is the last debate between you and Mitt, this one on foreign policy. Since the 2 prior debates have provided no real information for voters, I doubt this one will either so I’ll watch game 7 between the Giants and Cardinals. As reported in The New York Times this morning—“Candidates Facing Hard Choices in Afghanistan”—Mitt’s stance toward foreign policy is summed up this way “We should not negotiate with the Taliban, we should defeat the Taliban… We go anywhere they are, and we kill them.” So much for all those wimpy teachings of Christianity. And stupid me. I thought that’s what we’ve been doing the past 11 years. In spite of all the generals and their medals and ribbons and buzz cuts and the most powerful military force in the history of the world, we still can’t seem to defeat that rag-tag bunch of home-grown insurgents. In fact, in the above article, a quote from one of your senior officials (unidentified of course): “When you look at the map in two years, the Taliban are going to be controlling big rural swaths of the south. And that’s something no one wants to talk about…” Another quote from a senior military official: “…before the troop increase [your 38,000 “surge”] there were roughly 2,000 insurgents moving regularly across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And after the increase was over, there are still about 2.000.” It might be informative if the American public knew why we still have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan killing and being killed every day, propping up one of the most corrupt and inept governments in the world—the Karzai government. The war in Afghanistan is over Mr. President. We lost in Afghanistan as surely as we lost in Vietnam and Iraq and all the other wars based on lies, ignorance and an unjust foreign policy. Do you have a foreign policy beyond your Kill Lists? beyond wars without end? You set a withdrawal date from Afghanistan for the end of 2014 but even the generals know the war is lost so what difference does it make if we leave tomorrow or December 31, 2014? Except for the number of additional lives lost, the number of innocent men, women and children killed, the enmity and hatred our presence and our violence creates. I suspect tonight’s debate will be nothing more than entertainment, charges and countercharges and the illusion of debate, and that our foreign policy will still not be clear. Except in war-ravaged countries where our foreign policy is very clear, indeed.