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Published by The Kansas City Star.
I support a phased withdrawal of U.S. and allied troops from Afghanistan, starting Jan. 1 and ending no later than Dec. 31, 2012. The Afghan people have suffered enough and the U.S. government should promote a negotiated settlement to the war.
Afghanistan has been at war almost continually since 1979. We’ve been over there since 2001. At the end of 2012 we’ll have been there 11 years. That’s more than long enough to achieve our mission. And 32 years of war is too long for the Afghans.
Afghanistan is an impoverished country. Sixty-eight percent of its population has never known peace. The country has experienced an almost continuous state of civil war, complicated by two foreign occupations, since the late 1970s. The average life expectancy of an Afghan is 44 years.
The Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in December 1979 and didn’t leave until nine years later. Loss of life in that war has been estimated at more than one million people. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan had a major impact on Kansas farmers when President Carter prohibited the sale of U.S. wheat to Russia. The price of U.S. wheat plummeted in the aftermath and the Russians looked to more stable world markets.
When the Soviets finally left Afghanistan, a civil war broke out and the brutal Taliban took over. Then, after 9/11, a U.S.-led invasion sought to destroy al-Qaida training camps and we toppled the Taliban government. After that the U.S. got diverted into Iraq, seeking the “weapons of mass destruction” that weren’t there.
We started out with fewer than 10,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2001, which gradually grew to the 68,000 troops at present. Now Gen. Stanley McChrystal is believed to be advising the president that 10,000 to 40,000 more are needed.
Our servicemen and women are dying and being injured in a conflict that appears to have no end. According to the National Priorities Project, our estimated total expenditures in Afghanistan stand at more than $230 billion. They’re running about $5 billion a month. That’s money that could be better spent at home.
As a person who grew up in the Vietnam era, I see our involvement in Afghanistan beginning to look a lot like the start of another Vietnam War. In Vietnam we started with 3,000 troops in 1961 and ended up with more than 500,000 in 1968, the peak year. There is legitimate concern that we may be entering another major conflict.
Should the president fail to be re-elected in 2012, do we want an Afghan war still going on, to possibly be continued and escalated by an unknown successor, as Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam? Now is the time to start ending the Afghan war—while we still have the power and the will in Washington to do it. And if we pursue a phased withdrawal, we’ll be totally out of Afghanistan one month before the president is inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2013—no matter who that may be.
Charles Schollenberger, of Prairie Village, is a communications executive, former journalist and teacher who is seeking the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Kansas next year.
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