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Afghanistan: 630, 117, 155 -- and the count continues to add up. I'll detail those horrible numbers in more detail in a moment.
I hesitate to upset my Democratic friends. I'm as pleased as any of us that we're seeing such wonderful change in Washington. The next two and three weeks leading up to the Inauguration, and then the afterglow of the beginning of a new Administration, is an exciting time for all of us who have worked long and hard in many different ways for "change."
But I'm worried that Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton have been pushed into a corner concerning Afghanistan, not unlike the way President John Kennedy was pushed into Vietnam. During the past few years, many elected and prospectively elected Democrats had to come across as willing to "fight the war on terrorism," so our rhetoric since 2003 or so has been that Iraq was a war we had to end, but Afghanistan was a war we are willing to wage. After all, that's where the Taliban are.
The Taliban? None of the 19 terrorists who were on the planes attacking the World Trade Center or the Pentagon on September 11th were Taliban. We decided to attack the Taliban. We invaded Afghanistan. We were looking for Osama bin Laden, who somehow hasn't been in the news in recent weeks. He was once the object of our anger and mind set. We don't even know he's in Afghanistan, but we're stuck there, as we got stuck in Vietnam looking for communists. So much for learning History 101.
Vice President-Elect Joe Biden has been touring Afghanistan this past week, being fed the usual military dribble that American leaders from Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to Tom McIntyre and George Romney had been told during the Vietnam War.
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Yes, U.S. Senator Tom McIntyre of New Hampshire was a strong supporter of the Vietnam War. I remember our face-to-face arguments -- yelling matches, really -- I was quite passionate on Vietnam because my friends were dying in Vietnam. And you might recall George "I was brainwashed" Romney. They were all told: Just a few thousand more troops, and we'll do the job. Just some more military hardware, and we'll do the job. Just a bit more of a political and financial commitment and we'll do the job. Victory is within our reach. "We must win."
The United States already has about 33,000 troops in Afghanistan, about half of the 70,000 international commitment. The Obama/Biden Administration appears ready to follow-through on sending another 30,000 soldiers by the Spring. Joe Biden has been voicing praise of the build-up policy there, and repeating the phrases of the Pentagon. He's no George Romney, but -- and okay, be critical of my observation if you wish: he IS sounding like him. It reflects the power of military story-telling that a President from the 1950s warned us about. I'll mention him in a moment.
Estimates are that about 8,000 people of Afghanistan were killed in various fights and bombings last year, and that includes about 2,000 civilians -- many from American "mistakes." While a large portion of those 8,000 people of Afghanistan were Taliban, let's remember that most of the Taliban are Afghanistan people too. We've taken up sides. We're anti-Taliban. Yes, they do seem like bad people, but we can't get into every nation's civil war, nor can we kill everyone who we want to hate, or who hate us. That way, we just make more people hate us, so there are more who kill us. We're making the future generations of terrorists who will kill future generations of Americans. It's a crazy thing to do. It's history repeated. Those mistakes repeated.
But right now, with the cheerleading of the war I saw Joe Biden participating in on television and in news interviews, we're planning on more killing. We're not getting out, we're going in more. The "change" we voted for in November was to kill more people in Afghanistan, and ship more of our kids there to die?
Now about those tragic numbers in my opening sentence: so far, 630 brave American soldiers have died in Afghanistan, with far many more badly wounded. In 2007, we lost 117 soldiers. In 2008, the worst year yet, we lost 155 soldiers in a conflict that is resulting in more "fresh insurgents" replacing the "killed insurgents," as our intelligence and the media reports. No wonder there is a lot of American hate in parts of the world.
More "fresh insurgents" replacing the "killed insurgents." That reminds me of the slush I tried to shovel the other day when rain melted some of the snow -- the more I shoveled, the more I figured out that I wasn't doing much more than getting my feet wetter and making more of a mess.
Something's wrong here. The military-industrial complex that President Dwight Eisenhower warned us about and the story-telling they can do is still alive and well, and they need a war to fight. They now appear to have found willing allies in the next White House. But I still have enough confidence in Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Hillary Clinton to believe that they will wake up and avoid expanding a war that will become theirs. We as Democrats cannot become the step-parents of a new expanded war which will embolden current terrorists and make more future terrorists day-by-day with every bomb we drop, every missile we launch, and every bullet we fire. It makes no sense. That strategy isn't in Dale Carnegie's book, "How To Make Friends And Influence People."
Democrats and the Obama/Biden Administration should commit to a smart war on terrorism. Afghanistan isn't smart. The longer we're there, the longer we create more of the next generation of terrorists. This isn't our war. At least, it shouldn't be. Now is the time for an exit strategy, not sending more resources that will further drain our finances at home, will result in more body bags of Americans, and more burials in Afghanistan. When will we learn that shoveling slush just doesn't make sense?.
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