Friday, February 25, 2011

Dear Mr. President,

Just over two months ago you said you were seeing significant progress in Afghanistan. Today I read that the U.S. military is pulling out of the Pech Valley completely, a place that, a few years ago was “central to the campaign against the Taliban and al Qaeda.” So much for significant progress and so much for winning the hearts and minds of the Afghan people. An internal assessment by the military concludes that we shouldn’t have entered the valley in the first place and one military official said, “What we finally figured out is that people in the Pech… just want to be left alone. Our presence is what’s destabilizing this area.” Well, duh!! How many years and how many lives did it take to figure that out, Mr. President? This is true in every town, every village, every valley everywhere. What a waste of lives and money and false hope, to invade another country under any pretext. We never learn that you can’t force democracy on people with bombs and bullets and disregard for human life and human dignity. I take no joy in saying this, Mr. President, but your decision to make Afghanistan ‘your’ war, send additional troops and show how you could do what Bush failed to do, was one stupid decision. The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, the so-called War on Terror is unwinnable and the smartest thing we could do now is pull out and quit supporting that corrupt Karzai regime. Karzai and his cronies are draining the country’s resources to line their own pockets, making a joke of democracy, conducting rigged elections, and doing nothing for their countrymen or their country. They’re playing us for suckers and the longer we go along with it, the stupider we appear and the more hatred we engender. Are you still seeing significant progress, Mr. President? I sure don’t. Even your generals are having a hard time putting a smiley face on our retreat from the Pech: “I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better security for the Afghan people,” Major General John F. Campbell is quoted as saying. Ha! What bullshit! Let’s take a new tack: let’s get out and leave them alone. It may be chaos for awhile and it may not have the outcome we want, but we ought to take a lesson from Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Middle East countries: people have to decide their own fate which may be slow in coming, and painful, but when they do it’s always a better solution than one imposed by an outside force, the military or any other bully.