The good war?

[IndianaGreen]

EDITORIAL: The good war?

Author: PWW/NM Editorial Board
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 07/25/08 14:42

The good news is Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama continues to project withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010. The bad news is, he is proposing to transfer a significant number of those troops to Afghanistan.

Obama has repeatedly called for getting out of what he has termed an “unnecessary” war in Iraq in order to refocus on the “real battleground” to eliminate Al Qaeda and win the “battle against terrorism.”

But if there is a lesson to be learned from the experience of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan over the last seven years, it is that relying on military force will not root out terrorism or set the stage for the Afghan people to overcome the severe and worsening economic and social difficulties they face.

A few things to keep in mind:

• Al Qaeda and its ally, the extreme fundamentalist Taliban, originated in earlier U.S. Cold War interventions in Afghanistan during the 1980s.

• The Bush administration’s policy toward Afghanistan following the Sept. 11 tragedy has only served to continue the country’s fragmentation and polarization.

• Afghanistan has among the world’s lowest living standards, life expectancy and literacy, and those indicators are sinking further.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/13424/

[unhappycamper]

1. Sometimes I wish someone (in power) would read some history.

The Russians had over 200,000 troops in Afghanistan before they went broke and went home.