I have been reading with interest about the so called zero option in Afghanistan. That is, after the end of the war to have 0 American troops in the country. I don’t know if it’s serious or an attempt to wring concessions out of Karzai or if there’s some other plan at work. But I hope you’ll use whatever space you have in the Senate to make the zero option more viable.
America’s longest war has gone on long enough. It’s time, frankly it’s well past time, to bring all of the troops home. They have done their jobs admirably, but the mission was never clear and has only managed to get more muddled with time. So I hope we leave that country a clean break.
Thank You
Carl Ballard
HorsesAss.org
You can write them about this or whatever you want here.
Bush sent U.S. troops to Afghanistan to terminate Al Qaeda’s use of the country as a sanctuary, staging area, and training base in response to the 9/11/01 attacks. This involved toppling the Taliban, chasing bin Laden, and propping up the Karzai government to prevent the Taliban and Al Qaeda from returning. That part of the mission was pretty clear.
Our government’s half-hearted attempts at nation-building, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, have been muddled and largely unproductive. We should get out of that business post-haste.
Afghanistan is one of the worst places in the world to be a woman. The Taliban treat women like chattels, hardly better than sheep or goats. For that and other reasons, I’m not a fan of adopting an isolationist policy under which we simply walk away, abandon Karzai to his fate, and let the Taliban retake control of Afghanistan. I think it’s worth some amount of effort and commitment on our part to continue supporting Afghanistan’s government in some manner to help them fend off the Taliban insurgency.
It needs to be understood that Afghanistan is a fragmented and divided society with decentralized government. Afghans half-jokingly refer to their president as “the mayor of Kabul.”
Afghan society is fundamentally dividend between the urban centers, where educated elites are concentrated, and the countryside, which is illiterate, impoverished, and intensely traditional and religious. Afghanistan has at least 28 major tribal groupings, some of which are at serious odds with each other, and in the agrarian countryside life is organized along family and clan lines, and village chiefs and Muslim clerics constitute the only effective government there is. It’s extremely difficult for outsiders to come in and introduce changes.
The Afghan communists and their Soviet backers were actually social reformers and pro-development. They wanted to bring schools to the villages and improve the standing and treatment of women in Afghan traditional society. They also wanted to modernize Afghanistan’s economy. They tried to do all this at gunpoint and failed miserably. Afghan tribal society is extremely resistant to change, and when the communists began killing people who stood in the way of change, the ordinary peasant population fiercely fought back. It’s useless to fight those people; you either work with them, or get nowhere.
How to delineate a role for the U.S. government in all this is problematical. If our government focuses only on Afghan’s drug trade, which supplies 90% of the world’s heroin, and fighting the Taliban, while neglecting Afghanistan’s underlying needs, then we’ll probably get nowhere, too.
Afghanistan has been leveled by 30 years of continuous war, that also has left the country filled with impoverished widows and orphans. Its food production is almost nil because irrigation system, which are necessary to grow anything because Afghanistan receives almost no rainfall, have been destroyed and also because most of the agricultural land can’t be worked because of landmines. Consequently, Afghanistan would starve without international food aid. The country has no industry to speak of, no railroad, and only a few roads in poor condition. Apart from the large social questions and conflicts involving Afghan society and tribal relations, the country has enormous material needs which countries like the United States can and should help fulfill while the country rebuilds and tries to create a sustainable economy.
In short, it would be a mistake to disengage and leave the Afghan people to whatever fate befalls them. That is contrary to the humane ideals that motivate us as liberals and isn’t good policy because it just sets up a situation where someday we’ll have to go back in militarily to resolve some new damn problem we can’t ignore.
Comment deleted by poster; it was a duplicate of #1, I don’t know why it posted twice.
Carl,
I refer to it as the Zero More Dead and Zero More Injured Service Members plan.
That’s a plan we should all support and endorse.
@1 Roger, in short we never should have involved ourselves in Afghanistan in the 1980s and recruited and trained Bin Laden.
The sooner we get the FK out the easier it will be over time to stay out.
I remember well how we were warned not to “abandon” Vietnam. Dominoes and all.
Bullshit then, bullshit now.
Bring ALL home now.