Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan

The pathetic laughable state of our national discourse was on full display on the respectable-serious Washington Journal on C-Span Sunday morning. The final guest on the show was the esteemed president of the Nixon Center, Dimitri Simes who argued for more troops in Afghanistan while repeatedly justifying it by invoking the usual suspects of Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and 9/11. Not surprisingly the host of WJ did nothing to challenge any of the assumptions being made my Mr. Simes, instead accepting the premise that military action in Afghanistan is justified because of the WTC attack.
My friends: this is a big lie.
Each of the reasons they give for a continued US presence in Afghanistan are shown to be completely false. Early this year, the head of US Central Command, General Petreaus clearly stated that Al-Qaeda was no longer operating in Afghanistan. This despite the fact that Taliban has had control of the vast majority of the country for some time. If war hawks like Mr. Simes are concerned about the country from which the 9/11 attacks issued from, then when can we expect a similar fervor for an attack on Saudi Arabia, the country the 9/11 terrorists were from. There are three very specific reasons which are given as justification for the continued US occupation of Afghanistan, each one of those reasons can easily be shown to have little, if no, significance, and certainly do not warrant the continued expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars, the lives of innocent civilians, or the lives of US soldiers.
It is immoral to continue to spend resources on a pointless war while there are people starving, undereducated, unemployed, and in need of health care at home and around the world. Every bomb needs to become a school, every gun transformed into a box of food.