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July 2011 Is Not Soon Enough: Accelerate Troop Redeployment Out of Afghanistan (#365)
Watch Video | | June 17, 2010 | |
| Madam Speaker, General Petraeus was in Washington this week to testify before the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. And while his intent was to endorse the July 2011 Afghanistan redeployment date set by the Commander in Chief, it was not the kind of clear, unambiguous statement that inspires very much confidence.
According to an editorial in today's Washington Post, the General describes next July as ``the point at which a process begins to transition security tasks to Afghan forces at a rate to be determined by conditions at the time.'' With all due respect, Madam Speaker, could there be any more qualifiers and escape hatches in that sentence?
The American people, who have 1,000 fewer fellow citizens and 278 billion fewer dollars than they did when this war began, aren't looking for the beginning of a process. They're looking for an end to this, an end to this miserable war.
Shouldn't we be at the end or at least in the middle of the process of transitioning security tasks to Afghanistan forces? Shouldn't the beginning of the process have come at some point over the last 8 1/2 years that we've been fighting this war?
My concern, Madam Speaker, is that statements like this one are laying the predicate for an extension of President Obama's deadline, which is exactly the wrong lesson and the wrong approach. The problem is that, if you're locked into a certain mindset, it will never seem like the right moment to remove our troops from Afghanistan, because the mission as currently defined will never be complete and conditions on the ground will forever remain bad. But the reason for that is the underlying policy of a military invasion and occupation that is fatally flawed in the first place.
So, in a twisted, paradoxical way, Madam Speaker, the more we fail, the more we try to succeed with the same misguided approach, and then we just fail some more. That's how you end up with perpetual war. If we had adopted smart security principles and invested in a humanitarian rather than a military approach, we'd be a lot closer to our goals of a peaceful, stable, and secure Afghanistan.
For my part, Madam Speaker--and I am not alone in this belief--the July 2011 date is not nearly ambitious enough. That's yet one more year in which Americans will be asked to sacrifice blood and treasure for a failed counter-terrorism strategy that is doing nothing to advance our national security objectives. I believe General Petraeus is moving in the wrong direction and being cautious where he should be bold. It's time to accelerate the timetable, not push it back. It's time, Madam Speaker, to bring our troops home. |
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