Mr. President: Pull out of Afghanistan!

The only valid objective for our invasion of Afghanistan was to root out Al Qaida and bring its leaders to justice for perpetrating the tragedy of 9/11. After 8 years we haven’t done it and Al Qaida’s leaders are in Pakistan. As it was for Richard Nixon in Vietnam, it is time for us to fold our busted hand, admit we screwed up, and learn from our mistakes. The world did not fall to Communism when we left Vietnam, and we will not be more vulnerable to terrorism when we leave Afghanistan.

In early 2002 there was a window of time and an unused set of tactics― the rapid application of overwhelming force and blocking escape routes from Tora Bora― that might have achieved our objective of bringing Al Quaida to justice. Instead, we sent in too few troops, counted on Afghan proxies to do much of our work and thereby allowed Ben Laden, his cadre of leaders and Taliban leaders to escape into Pakistan. Then the Bush Administration compounded its mistake with mission creep and an unnecessary and unjust second front in Iraq. It put the Afghan mission on hold for 7 years because it was unwilling to develop adequate resources to suppress two sets of insurgencies and to rebuild both nations as Democracies.

President Bush chose to skimp on manpower, borrow well over $1 trillion to pay for these wars―instead of raising taxes― and kept battle weary soldiers in the fields of battle long past their expected terms by extending tours of duty, cutting short their R&R back home and by using “stop loss” provisions to prevent them from leaving when their enlistments expired.  He also built up a set of mercenary armies (Blackwater, etc. ) to fill non-combat roles in Iraq, Afghanistan and other countries. These corporate armies and their money grubbing managers have not sworn to defend the Constitution of the United States and are rapidly becoming a clear and present economic and political danger to the future of our own democracy. We can cut off funding to them only when we have troops to redeploy.

Bush’s political tactics minimized the immediate pain for the American public by shifting the economic pain to future generations and the pain of warfare to those patriots who signed up to defend our nation and to Iraqi civilians. These tactics kept the public passive and enabled Bush to be re-elected, but they weakened our military, mired our government in debt and became a fruitful recruiting tool for Al Qaida and other radical Islamic movements.

In choosing to invade Iraq, George Bush made a strategic blunder like the one Adolph Hitler made when he chose to invade the Soviet Union in July of 1941 before he had conquered Great Britain.  As summarized in Wikipedia “Hitler believed that the Soviets would quickly capitulate after an overwhelming German offensive and that the war could largely end before the onset of the fierce Russian winter” while George Bush thought the Iraq war would be quickly over with the fall of Saddam Hussein. 

Hitler’s misjudgment enabled the Allies to use Britain as the staging area for a counter offensive while Germany’s military was stretched to the breaking point by a Russian front which produced over 70% of its casualties. Bush stretched our military to the breaking point while starving the Afghan front of the troops and supplies it needed thus allowing the Taliban to regroup and re-conquer much of Afghanistan.

All that is in the past, but it leaves us with a mess in Afghanistan; a Taliban movement which has retaken most of the country, a corrupt and currently illegitimate government in Kabul, the resurgence of the heroin trade and the loss of popular support in Afghanistan for any central government. Our political leadership blew its original mission and has poisoned the well for establishing democratic institutions and central governments; an objective that was particularly questionable in tribal cultures surrounded by nations that invested in having us fail. It’s time to leave, lick our wounds, learn our lessons and begin to operate from pro-active strategic principles rather than re-active, convenient tactics.

Mr. President, you are under tremendous pressure to sustain or escalate our presence in Afghanistan. Some misguided people actually think it is in our country’s best interests, and they can be educated. But the most vehement advocates have motives which include: self-justification, continued personal enrichment, a sophomoric view of how to solve problems and a desire to see you fail at any cost to this nation. Don’t continue Bush’s course of political expediency. Do what is best for our country and pull out of Afghanistan.

Edwin Lee