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Sanders’ Call for Afghanistan Exit Strategy Draws Cheers
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has joined Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold in declaring that the United States needs to start thinking about how to extract its military from Afghanistan.
While almost 100 members of the House (including many conservative Republicans) have signed on to Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern's call for the development of an Afghanistan exit strategy, Feingold has been a relatively lonely Senate advocate for a rethink of the eight-year occupation.
At the annual Fighting Bob Fest gathering in Baraboo, however, Sanders drew cheers from the crowd of 8,000 when he said, "We need to take a very, very hard look at our war in Afghanistan. We need to be clear in our goals and we need a real discussion about an exit strategy to bring our troops home."
Sanders made his statement at the largest annual gathering of grass-roots activists in the Midwest, where there was no question of the crowd's enthusiasm for the "Health Care Not Warfare" message promoted by activists with Progressive Democrats of America.
Prior to coming to Wisconsin for the event, Sanders explained his views on the need to rethink Afghanistan in a video produced as part of the Brave New Films "Senator Sanders Unfiltered" project.
In it, he said:
"My major concern about the war in Afghanistan, and why I voted against the recent defense authorization bill, is that we seem to be getting sucked into a quagmire without the kind of debate, without the kind of discussion that this country desperately needs and that the people of our country are entitled. What we know now is that the number of troops that the generals are requesting is going up and up. We know that we ... have already poured several hundred billion dollars into Afghanistan; that number is going to go up. But we don't know what the goals of our efforts in Afghanistan are or what kind of exit strategy we have.
"I worry that Afghanistan will be another Vietnam. I worry that Afghanistan will be another Iraq. We've been there eight years already, and how many more years are we supposed to be there? How many more American troops are supposed to die? How many more tens and tens of billions of dollars are we supposed to be spending at a time when we have a record-breaking deficit? I find it amusing that some of my more conservative friends are saying, 'Well, we can't afford to spend more money on health care in this country. We can't afford to spend more money on education or environmental protection. But, yes, we can afford to pump tens and tens of billions more into the war in Afghanistan.' "
Sanders says: "We need a real national discussion of an exit strategy, a real national discussion about what our goals are. We haven't had that and the American people should be demanding it."
Sanders is doing his part to open the discussion. And the muscular reaction to his statements made it clear that the American people are making the demand.
22 Comments so far
Show AllVermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold and Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern seem to be amoung the few most legitimate members of congress these days but certainly my 2 senators and my representative are not in that group by any stretch of any imagination as they are part of the problems and crises in this country.
Just a statement, that's all.
An "exit strategy" is all very good, but we need to leave Afghanistan NOW. Not tomorrow; not six months from now; not a year from now -- NOW!
If we stay, all we have to look forward to is pain, travail, wasted lives and money, and ultimately, the humiliation of failure in a country which has successfully resisted every would-be conqueror throughout its history.
We must also craft an exit policy for our neo-liberal economic policies. As has been noted by one American journalist, the US government is forcing this economic model on Afghanistan, including opposing a protective tariff that would assure Afghanistan farmers can provide food for their own people.
this is the same old DISASTER CAPITALISM that the USA has practiced upon other nations for generations.
it's no different from the way it treated Latin America...asia..africa..and now also eastern europe and central asia.
"We've been there eight years already, and how many more years are we supposed to be there? "
As long as it takes to wear out your stock of humvees so the taxpayers can order some more, of course.
I really like and have come to respect Sen. Sanders. He seems to be willing to speak the truth. We need more Progressive Independents elected to political office. If we could loosen the hold of the corporate parties on the government we might just have a chance to bring the real change that people want.
Will be another Vietnam?
Will be?
Alright, the deaths are fewer, even counting Iraq and Pakistan as we reasonably should. But we have not stopped killing, we have made no move to leave, and this has gone on for 8 years so far.
Was Vietnam not yet Vietnam in 1964?
Bravo to Bernie Sanders and Russ Feingold, all rhetoric aside. Bravo too to all who vote with them, including the conservative Republicans.
Admiral Mullen spoketh today like an idiot. He said we could win. He's mad as a hatter! Sorry, the ancient Scythians would do to him as to all other proponents of the Afghan war. From Michel de Montaigne:
"Divination is a gift of God, and therefore to abuse it, ought to be a punishable imposture. Among the Scythians, where their diviners failed in the promised effect, they were laid, bound hand and foot, upon carts loaded with furze and bavins, and drawn by oxen, on which they were burned to death. Such as only meddle with things subject to the conduct of human capacity, are excusable in doing the best they can: but those other fellows that come to delude us with assurances of an extraordinary faculty, beyond our understanding, ought they not to be punished, when they do not make good the effect of their promise, and for the temerity of their imposture?"
These war-mongers make statements like Mullen's only because they think, that, later, nobody will hold their feet to the fire.
My question to the guys that think we "win" in Afghanistan is: "How do we know when we won?"
I don't think there is going to be a surrender treaty singing on a battleship somewhere. We are not even fighting a government, so who is going to surrender? If we get one group of Taliban to surrender in one province will all the other ones surrender in all the other provinces and Pakistan also surrender?
Why do you think that those 'terrorists' were convenieantly trained and holding up in Afghanistan so we could fight that 'global war on terrorism', like terrorists really have a country of origin to return to so's to rest up and fly more bombing missions over the U.S. again?
Look no further than the military industrial congressional complex and wall street for the real terrorists in this world.
Bottle: Unfortunate perhaps that we today don't have oxcarts and oxen, not to mention any idea of where to find some furze and bavins, to drive our lying prognosticators to their personal conflagrations. Even if we had these facilities would we have the Scythian will to take miscreants to the place to which their feet are to be held to the fire? Seem to remember I've heard the same agenda of "Progressives for Obama" that we'll make him "accountable" for the promises we (believe) he made before his election. Whose feet are getting roasted for non-delivery of health care reform before Congress recessed in August, now re-adjusted to Thanksgiving to Christmas to the date when hell freezes over? John Nichols himself is one of those Nation-types who make up the leadership of the Ps for O." It's great to lionize Sanders and Feingold for their rare shows of statesman responsibility but, having put the impeachment of war crimes for Bush administration people "off the table," what prospect do we have that anybody will hold the feet of Obama and his administration to the fire for their continuation of the Afghan insanity?
This is a far bigger issue than health care.
Obama immediately stagnated himself in the more contentious issue of health care reform while following the exact same war policy of his predecessors.
He surely didn't campaign that way.
What a farce this talk of an exit strategy is.
Just leave.
It only gets worse with every passing day.
Every day it's pretty much the same stories. No health care reform of any kind, after a year of Obama's hollow grandstanding, as he sells out the whole damn farm to Pharma and Insurance. As if he ever intended otherwise. No exit from Afghanistan or Iraq, probably ever, with lame rationalizations protecting war profiteers like Cheney, Halliburton, CACI, Xe and all the rest.
It's the neverending Bush nightmare in sheep's clothing, where all we can do is count the sheep and wish we could just sleep thru it all. March on Washington! And be ignored for the thousandth time. Email and phone your war-enabling Congressman, and be tallied up on his for/against lists. The more glaringly obvious it is that we MUST get the hell out of Afghanistan, or Iraq, the more certain that we'll stay forfuckingever.
As Sanders says, no one ever seriously asks how the hell we're supposed to pay for these illegal, imperialist wars, but they never stop squawking about how we just can't pay for health care, even when it's as bland and meaningless as the current non-plan. We can pay to kill innocents and dirt-poor peasants for the good of corporate bottom lines but there's just no way we can pay to keep OURSELVES even marginally healthy.
It's a culture of death, and Obama is the current warden of the insane asylum and its chief apologist. He's like Reagan, he's like Clinton, he's like Bush, he's like Nixon. We'd be better off with Aleister Crowley--and no, we wouldn't be in good hands with him either. Except he's dead. Why not go with someone already long dead for president. He couldn't possibly do any more damage than the present occupant.
"It's a culture of death, and Obama is the current warden of the insane asylum and its chief apologist."
Yup that pretty much sums things up.
Why not ask Gorbachev to take the job for 5 years? He at least has what it takes to lead.
Mr. Sanders, I think you ask your questions of the wrong people -- you would be more effective asking the President and the lobbyists who seem to control your peers in the corrupted Congress.
Please keep this in mind: All of Afghanistan and everything in it is not worth one American life.
Ask those who so love war if any of their children are at risk.
Remember the callous spenders of our lives, all together, don't have the combat experience of a garden slug.
Over 4000 US dead and they don't even bother counting the millions killed on the sidelines.
It's time to start a new party that actually stands up for Americans and the world instead of big money, but even that would be corrupted like everything else.
Afghanistan is just a money maker plain and simple billed to the US population. They act as if they can stop terrorism by fixing Afghanistan when nearly any idiot given enough money could start blowing up buildings and people in the US and be based in any neighborhood here. I could be building bombs and nobody would know the better even though I wouldn't dream of such.
The problem about billing us is that it's all being borrowed from China so in essence China is funding the wars around the world then sending the big credit card bill to our kids. When our kids default guess what? They won't be able to fund an army to defend us against China who WILL eventually invade us because we've been lulled into a false sense of security buying bombs for multinational corporations who have utterly NO allegiances to anyone except their stock holders who can pick up and live anywhere in the world because they'
re rich enough to do so.
Everyone else pays and suffers and they simply don't give a damned. Obama's no different than any politician. He, like every single one of them have been bought and paid for. He no longer has a voice. The only voice now is corporate, multinational money and fuck everyone else.
The PTB's purposeful degradation/destruction of our economy has become quite obvious, but is this also what they're trying to bring about for the U.S. military?
Who do we suppose would like to see almost ALL U.S. forces deployed overseas, and very severely degraded over the next couple years? And why would they want this?
If another staged false flag attack were to occur on U.S. soil, or a series of IED's started going off and claiming lives all over the nation, I can't help but wonder what foreign country might volunteer a massive deployment of their troops to "help maintain/restore order" here in the States with all our troops tied up in the M.E., and be invited to come right over by our shadow Zionist Occupied Government (ZOG).
And I also wonder what might be the real mission of these supposedly friendly foreign troops.
What country do we know of that specializes exclusively in the slaughter of defenseless populations, and only fights so long as they don't have to take any casualties?
Ten years ago I would have laughed at anybody even hinting at such a scenario as I posit here -- I'm not laughing now.
Congratulations!
Obama has opened up a war on another front!
And the lucky country is....DRUMROLL PLEASE!
SOMALIA!
Please, everybody stand up and turn towards the nearest flag while I sing my special version of GOD BLESS AMERICA!
http://news.antiwar.com/2009/09/14/us-troops-attack-somalia/
It may be a semantic quibble, but isn't the concept of a "front" obsolete?
Our present Unitary Warlord accepted the Mace of the "Global War on Terror" (vulgarly called the "War Boner") from his nefarious predecessor, and has ceaselessly swung it forthwith.
If I understand the premises of the GWOT, the "war" exists everywhere and nowhere. It's a bit of a will-o-the-wisp in that regard.
It's in Iraq, Af-Pak; it's in the Homeland; it's INSIDE the hearts and minds of humanity.
Thus, our Warlord stands ready to hurl thunderbolts wherever and whenever the occasion presents itself.
That's why Amerika builds multi-billion dollar citadels everywhere it strikes, and divides the world into Imperial satraps, aka "commands".
Today Afcom, tomorrow the world!
· Yr Obd't Servant
Healthcare, not Warfare!
I'm glad Bernie is mentioning war and other government programs like education and healthcare in the same sentence. This needs to be done over and over.
Afghanistan is and will remain ungovernable and a disaster. It has to do with the geography, which is not going to change.
I read the other day that it costs up to $100 per gallon to provide our military forces with fuel in Afghanistan. The same article, I think it was on TomDispatch, related that we used over 400,000 gallons of fuel air conditioning tents in the Afghan desert last year.
I hate neo colonialism and imperialism. So I am glad, in a way, that these knuckleheads are too blind to understand that Afghanistan is the graveyard of empires. Empires that started next door in Iran and Russia failed repeatedly to control the incredibly barren deserts and impenetrably high and rugged mountains of Afghanistan. It's way more crazy to try and dominate it from a country 12 times zones away across the world's oceans. Failure is assured.
And I don't believe the official B.S. that the World Trade Center Towers were blown up by a guy in a cave in Afghanistan. What rubbish!