NPR (All Things Considered) is devoting an entire hour of programming today to the war in Afghanistan. The show was prefaced with a comment something like “We don’t have all the answers.” Well, I have the answer: Get out! Get out now before one more Afghan dies, before one more U.S. soldier dies, before one more dollar is spent. Get out now. Like Vietnam, we will eventually get out. The question is how many more Afghans will die before we do? How many more U.S. soldiers will die before we do? How many more billions of dollars will be wasted before we do? And how many more terrorists will we create before we leave? As Daniel Ellsberg recently said, sending more troops to Afghanistan will only increase the Taliban’s strength:
The more troops we put in Vietnam, the more Vietcong were recruited. And, the more troops we put in Afghanistan, the curve shows very clearly from 2005 on, the Taliban has come back having been, as you say, despised and reviled by most of the country. How can it be that they get the degree of support that they do now? One reason only: the number of troops, of US troops that they are fighting.