What happened today in Washington was, as Senator Russ Feingold called it, "historic." Thirty-eight years nearly to the day when a young John Kerry shocked the nation with his fiery anti-Vietnam war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rick Reyes, a former US Marine Corporal, delivered an equally puissant testimony in which he expressed his disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan. How appropriate Kerry should be sitting directly across from Reyes as Committee Chairman, listening attentively as Congress heard one of the first major voices of dissent on this war.
The son of Mexican immigrants who joined the Marines to escape a violent gang life in Los Angeles, Reyes served as an infantry rifleman in Afghanistan and Iraq. He upheld his duty to serve our country honorably, and immediately after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan "with the conviction of fighting for justice and the American way." All of that changed when Reyes realized US military forces faced the impossible task of fighting militant Taliban members who blended in with the local Afghan population, routinely resulting in the injuries or deaths of innocent civilians.
As Reyes told Congress:
"We weren't fulfilling our objective of capturing terrorists, but instead creating enemies out of civilians. As a Marine trying to ensure justice, I began losing sight of why I was there and the conviction began to fade.
"Because our mission was to capture suspected Taliban and had no successful way of being able to distinguish them, we had no other choice but to suspect the entire civilian population, innocent or not."One day we stopped at gun point, detaining, beating, and nearly killing an innocent man only to find he was just traveling down a road to deliver milk to his children. Because of us, that day those kids went without a father. There were hundreds of incidents like this one.
"Almost 100 percent of the time we would find that suspected terrorists turned out to be innocent civilians. I began to feel like we were chasing ghosts, fighting an enemy that we could not see or that didn't allow itself to be seen. How can you tell the difference between the Taliban and Afghan civilians? The answer is that you can't. it all stopped making sense."
As the casualty rate of US soldiers in Afghanistan nears 700--with violence at its worst in the history of this war--we must also consider more and more troops returning home injured and in dire need of psychological help. And that only begins to scratch the surface of why Reyes believes Congress should reconsider plans for escalation. "Sending more troops will not make the US safer; it will only build more opposition against us. I urge you on behalf of truth and patriotism to consider carefully and Rethink Afghanistan."
Kerry, who couldn't help but draw parallels between the Vietnam War and the escalating conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan, stressed the importance of hearing soldiers testify about the conditions in Afghanistan. "History proves that soldiers on the ground have an intimate knowledge that is vital to their commanders and us as policymakers," Kerry said. "Most recently, it was soldiers who sounded the early warnings that our mission in Iraq had some problems."
We should be seeing more soldiers like Reyes sitting before Congress, if not to channel Kerry's anti-war passion from 38 years ago, then to alert the nation to what's really going on in this war and compel the public to question policymakers, as Kerry once did. That absolutely must happen now, as Congress will soon consider a war funding bill in excess of $83 billion, with ten times more for expanding military operations than humanitarian aid. Take a minute to call your Representatives (if you're not sure who represents you, it's time you found out). Tell them not to vote on the war funding bill until they have heard from more soldiers like Reyes, and certainly not until they've started explaining what escalation will mean for us and the people of Afghanistan.
Trying to convert Muslims to any other faith is a crime in Afghanistan. The fact that the video footage is being broadcast on Al Jazeera guarantees that it will be seen throughout the Muslim world.
Paul Fitzgerald: Afghanistan: Eight Years On and No Direction Home
That failure has finally occurred in Afghanistan and the consequences will be devastating, yet Washington continues along in a dreamlike haze, narrowing the argument to simplistic Vietnam era clichés while the world moves on without it.
Semper fi
Deal with it.
Semper fi
I thought our initial objective after 9/11 was to get Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, who were at the time hiding
in the mountains of Afghanistan, WHAT HAPPENED TO THAT PLAN???
now were fighting the TALIBAN???....wtf do they have to do with 9/11...we went from Iraq to the Taliban,
neither of which have any relevancy to 9/11, this quagmire is WORSE than Vietnam.
For all intensive pruposes, BIn Laden is well protected in Pakistan, which has terrorist networks working in tandum with those in Afghanistan. President Obama has good intentions but because Bush took the focus off the war in Afghanistan, it's probably too late to effectively save that country now, especially with neighboring Pakistan spiralling out of control.
I said back then, this looks like Vietnam..... I told everyone that I knew, and no one would listen to me except my father and grandmother. Everyone else seemed to think that I was insane!
I am....
This is not Vietnam!
Meanwhile, the horror plays out in Iraq and Afghanistan, the economy craters, and health care and education are neglected, mostly forgotten in our disordered state.
Once we could walk and chew gum at the same time.
To this topic, the errors of Afghanistan are manifest. That 9/11 criminals trained, finalized their plot, and launched their attack, all from within the U.S., was swept aside so we could focus our short attention span on the politically expedient (and pipeline enabling?) strategy of blaming Afghani’s in general, and Taliban specifically, for the crime of 9/11. We forget that we armed the Taliban (as mujahaddin), and funded their madrassas and training camps. Buried in our brief clamor for prosecution is the likelihood that torture was used to justify our attack on Afghanistan and to sustain that justification. Neglected is the obvious, that war on these people is expanding the pool of angry young men ready for suicide missions, and now threatens (with nuclear implications) regional instability.
There are better options. They are political and diplomatic. This is the 21st Century. We must forever abandon the military option, focus on police response to crimes of terror, spend our money on pressing economic and social issues, and return to diplomacy.
Yes we can!
as johnny the war 'hero' was running for president, he was quite excited about some endosements.
First of all, in case you haven’t heard, foreign leaders from across the globe have endorsed John Kerry. Well, that is, if you ask the Senator. You see, several days ago, Kerry, when speaking before a group of Floridians on the campaign trail, decided it was time to announce this stinging revelation. “They [unnamed foreign leaders] look at you [Kerry] and say, ‘Boy, you’ve got to win this. You’ve got to beat this guy [President Bush]. We need a new policy.’”
I have been able to find two key endorsements for John Kerry by foreign leaders. One came from Iran—and the other from North Korea. I’ll even stipulate that Spain’s newly elected socialist government will follow suit. So, Kerry may have the socialists and already has two despotic regimes behind him? Well, I guess they are foreign leaders.
No, that would be the death rate
Casualty rates are both dead and wounded combined
I'm sorry but in the scheme of things 700 is not many casualties. A state or region descending into chaos would certainly cause much more death. Many people wanted to give up on Iraq when it looked bleak and leaving Iraq during their civil war would have been a disaster. All I heard for years was Bush took his eye off the ball in Afghanistan, it was the just war. Well we're rectifying that mistake. Some things are worth fighting for. In the absence of world government it is up to us and our allies to finish the job.
Second, Iraq is going better not because of anything we've done (except in the buying off of warlords) but because of the combined facts of several MILLION refugees, and the more homogenized neighborhoods.
Third, so if we had just stayed in Vietnam that would have turned out all roses and sunshine too??
And fourth, those 700 deaths have bought an area for the "government" of Afghanistan that is smaller than the capital city!
Sometimes the greater good is worth the cost. Rwanda wouldn't have been without risk either. Sudan isn't going to get better through concerts and UN resolutions. Thousands have died because of Mugabe in Zimbabwe.
Arguably we should have stayed in Somalia and made sure they had a functioning government. Do you want tens of thousands to die in Afghanistan because of anarchy?
You have to be consistant. Rwanda is a good intervention and Afghanistan isn't? What if we were tied down in Rwanda? Would we leave? Us doing nothing let almost 1 million people to be murdered.
10% of Darfur is already dead, thats the equivalient to 30 million here. Intervention may not run perfectly but it's better than counting the mass graves.
Obama understands this and the left does not.
What has happened is terrible, but that's a fact of life. We'll make mistakes and try to improve for the future but we can't be deterred from doing what is necessary just because it has a price.
Of course, in Afghanistan, the overthrow of the government was not a mistake like it was in South Vietnam. The mistake was Little George's attention deficit neglect of strategic objectives.
If we are not to kill in God's name, why should we kill in Bush's?
If we are not to kill in God's name, why should we kill in Obama's?
I wish there was a way to eradicate evil without killing innocent civilians. If we go after evil and kill civilians, we are the bad guys. If we do nothing and evil kills civilians, we are the bad guys for doing nothing about it (Darfur). We are damned if we do, damned if we don't.
I say bring all of our troops home and put them on our borders. When evil rears it's ugly head, and surely it will, we tell the UN we are right behind you in going after them. We will be your Air Force, tell us where you want the bombs and we will do our best to hit the target, BUT you have to make the call, otherwise, we'll be right here protecting our borders.
Don't ask us to put boots on the ground, that's for the rest of the world to do, we will control the air.