[Congressional Record Volume 156, Number 91 (Thursday, June 17, 2010)]
[House]
[Page H4620]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  JULY 2011 IS NOT SOON ENOUGH: ACCELERATE TROOP REDEPLOYMENT OUT OF 
                              AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Ms. WOOLSEY. Madam Speaker, General Petraeus was in Washington this 
week to testify before the House and Senate Armed Services Committee. 
And while his intent was to endorse the July 2011 Afghanistan 
redeployment date set by the Commander in Chief, it was not the kind of 
clear, unambiguous statement that inspires very much confidence.
  According to an editorial in today's Washington Post, the General 
describes next July as ``the point at which a process begins to 
transition security tasks to Afghan forces at a rate to be determined 
by conditions at the time.'' With all due respect, Madam Speaker, could 
there be any more qualifiers and escape hatches in that sentence?
  The American people, who have 1,000 fewer fellow citizens and 278 
billion fewer dollars than they did when this war began, aren't looking 
for the beginning of a process. They're looking for an end to this, an 
end to this miserable war.
  Shouldn't we be at the end or at least in the middle of the process 
of transitioning security tasks to Afghanistan forces? Shouldn't the 
beginning of the process have come at some point over the last 8\1/2\ 
years that we've been fighting this war?
  My concern, Madam Speaker, is that statements like this one are 
laying the predicate for an extension of President Obama's deadline, 
which is exactly the wrong lesson and the wrong approach. The problem 
is that, if you're locked into a certain mindset, it will never seem 
like the right moment to remove our troops from Afghanistan, because 
the mission as currently defined will never be complete and conditions 
on the ground will forever remain bad. But the reason for that is the 
underlying policy of a military invasion and occupation that is fatally 
flawed in the first place.
  So, in a twisted, paradoxical way, Madam Speaker, the more we fail, 
the more we try to succeed with the same misguided approach, and then 
we just fail some more. That's how you end up with perpetual war. If we 
had adopted smart security principles and invested in a humanitarian 
rather than a military approach, we'd be a lot closer to our goals of a 
peaceful, stable, and secure Afghanistan.
  For my part, Madam Speaker--and I am not alone in this belief--the 
July 2011 date is not nearly ambitious enough. That's yet one more year 
in which Americans will be asked to sacrifice blood and treasure for a 
failed counterterrorism strategy that is doing nothing to advance our 
national security objectives. I believe General Petraeus is moving in 
the wrong direction and being cautious where he should be bold. It's 
time to accelerate the timetable, not push it back. It's time, Madam 
Speaker, to bring our troops home.

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