Afghanistan – When In Hell Are We Getting Out!

A Commentary by Doug Draper

That’s right when are we getting our brave young Canadian and American people the hell out of there!

One sign of the times.

Never mind this nonsense from the federal governments of Canada and the United States that in Canada’s sake for example, we are going to end “combat operations” there later this year and keep our troops there for some kind of peace-keeping or nation-building exercise, or that the U.S. is going to be out by 2014.

Why are we risking any more of our young peoples limbs and lives, not to mention billions of dollars that could be spent on education, health-care and other nation-building exercises at home, on a country run by a bunch of drug lords that seem to get the support of the majority of the population to keep them back in the Stone Age?
Do you wonder why we are not seeing the same popular uprising among the populace for democracy in Afghanistan as the world has witnessed in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other parts of the Middle East? Maybe it’s because the people of Afghanistan, despite having one of the most corrupt governments in that region of the world, don’t have enough will of their own to have an uprising. They haven’t, in the past nine years, had the will to build up an army to stand on its own against the so-called “insurgents.” It is becoming painfully obvious that the insurgents, whether they be the Taliban or a combination of the Taliban and others, have more will than anyone else to fight for the future of that country.

Even Afghanistan’s own corrupt leader and brother of the country’s heroin king, Hamid Karzai, has made it clear he doesn’t want foreign troops there. And just recently he all but rejected an apology from the U.S. when yet another stray bomb killed nine children in the country.

So once again, what in hell are we still doing there and why don’t we get out now?

Sometimes some of the best pieces one can read on any given subject are letters to the editor. In this particular case, I want to share a slightly abbreviated version of a letter to the editor that appeared this February 27 in The New York Times, signed by one H. David Teitelbaum from Redwood City, California. It reads; “After sacrificing so much blood and treasure there for almost 10 years, is it not obvious that our mission there has failed and that to remain until 2014 (in the case of the U.S.) is scandalous? ….

“Our mission was to find Osama bin Laden, and we failed,” continued the letter. “Our mission was to curtail the growth and distribution of opium, which strengthens the Taliban and we failed. …. My heart breaks every time I see the names of our valiant troops killed in Afghanistan. Our presence there is not worth the life of one more. If we had had a draft, millions of us would be marching in Washington demand that we get out now.”

I would go so far as to argue that if we had a draft in the United States and Canada, and young people, including those among the families of our political leaders, were picked randomly to go there to fight and possibly die, we would have been out of that place a long time ago. There would be marches in the streets reminiscent of the Vietnam War era.

Some may respond by saying; ‘What about the women in that country who will be forced to go back and live by rules that are pre-medieval?’ Obviously that is tragic. But there is no indication this place is going to change and there are other regions of the world where women are being mutilated. Are we going to send troops to those regions too, or only to ones where there is a strategic gas pipe running to an accessible sea?

There comes a time when we have got to say that even if we tried our best, it isn’t worth the life of one more of our young people. Nor is it worth going on spending billions of dollars that could be invested in health care, education and other needed services in our own country.

It is long past time we got out of Afghanistan.

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