Dear President Obama: It Will Take True Leadership to Get Us Out of Afghanistan

Posted by Malou Innocent

At a recent town hall meeting, [via Ryan Jaroncyk at The Humble Libertarian], U.S. Rep. Tim Johnson (R-IL) explained why he wants a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan:

I’m suggesting to you that there is no end game. I believe that our men and women are there in a mission that is ill-defined… I think we’re losing people by the day, here and over there, with no even indirect relationship to our national security.

Within a couple of weeks, I’m going to be looking at legislation and issuing a definitive statement on my position on Afghanistan, which at this point I would suggest would call for our withdrawal of troops forthwith.

We’ve had a succession from Vietnam to Iraq to Afghanistan, and the net result has been thousands of lives lost, and very little progress made… I’m in favor of doing everything we can to make America secure, to make sure we don’t have another 9/11 or even anything analogous to that, but I’m also convinced that our continued presence in Afghanistan is not serving that role. And we need to seriously re-examine where we’re at.

As I mentioned back in February of this year, “There is immense pressure to infuse greater troops in the region, but there is no objective in mind — and before you deploy the troops, you want to have a strategy.” The Obama administration is still stuck at a crossroads: either send more troops to protect the villages of Afghanistan from the Taliban, or stay at present levels (or decrease U.S. troop commitments) to go after al Qaeda cells in Pakistan.

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