Congressional Record, Volume 157 Issue 41 (Thursday, March 17, 2011)

[Congressional Record Volume 157, Number 41 (Thursday, March 17, 2011)]
[House]
[Pages H1920-H1953]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

AFGHANISTAN WAR POWERS RESOLUTION

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, pursuant to the order of the House of
March 16, 2011, I call up the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 28)
directing the President, pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers
Resolution, to remove the United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan,
and ask for its immediate consideration.
The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Womack). Pursuant to the order of the
House of Wednesday, March 16, 2011, the concurrent resolution is
considered read.
The text of the concurrent resolution is as follows:

H. Con. Res. 28

Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate
concurring),

SECTION 1. REMOVAL OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES FROM
AFGHANISTAN.

Pursuant to section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution (50
U.S.C. 1544(c)), Congress directs the President to remove the
United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan--
(1) by no later than the end of the period of 30 days
beginning on the day on which this concurrent resolution is
adopted; or
(2) if the President determines that it is not safe to
remove the United States Armed Forces before the end of that
period, by no later than December 31, 2011, or such earlier
date as the President determines that the Armed Forces can
safely be removed.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The concurrent resolution shall be debatable
for 2 hours, with 1 hour controlled by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr.
Kucinich) or his designee and 1 hour equally divided and controlled by
the chair and ranking minority member of the Committee on Foreign
Affairs.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that the gentleman
from North Carolina (Mr. Jones) be allowed to control half of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the gentleman from North
Carolina (Mr. Jones) will control half the time allocated to the
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich).
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentlewoman from
Florida.

{time} 1100

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong opposition to this resolution, as it
would undermine the efforts of our military and our international
partners in Afghanistan and would gravely harm our Nation's security.
Insanity has been described as doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results. Three thousand people died on
September 11 because we walked away once from Afghanistan, thinking
that it didn't matter who controlled that country. We were wrong then.
Let us not make the same mistake twice. Completing our mission in
Afghanistan is essential to keeping our homeland safe.
As Under Secretary of Defense Michele Flournoy stated in testimony to
the Senate Armed Services Committee earlier this week, ``The threat to
our national security and the security of our friends and allies that
emanates from the borderland of Afghanistan and Pakistan is not
hypothetical.

[[Page H1921]]

There is simply no other place in the world that contains such a
concentration of al Qaeda senior leaders and operational commanders. To
allow these hostile organizations to flourish in this region is to put
the security of the United States and our friends and allies at grave
risk.''
To quit the area before we have routed out the terrorists would not
only hand al Qaeda a propaganda victory of immeasurable value, it would
cede them a sanctuary from which they could mount fresh strikes at the
west with virtual immunity. To withdraw from Afghanistan at this point,
before we finish the job, is to pave the way for the next 9/11.
Therefore, the question that we must consider is, Can we afford to
abandon our mission in Afghanistan? General David Petraeus, commander,
International Security Assistance Force, ISAF, commander, U.S. Forces
Afghanistan, stated, ``I can understand the frustration. We have been
at this for 10 years. We have spent an enormous amount of money. We
have sustained very tough losses and difficult, life-changing wounds.
But I think it is important to remember why we are there.''
This is about our vital national security interests, Mr. Speaker. It
is about doing what is necessary to ensure that al Qaeda and other
extremists cannot reestablish safe havens such as the ones they had in
Afghanistan when the 9/11 attacks were planned against our Nation and
our people. The enemy, indeed, is on the run. It is demoralized and
divided. Let us not give up now.
Let us not betray the sacrifices of our men and women serving in
harm's way, and they ask for nothing in return, except our full
support. Dedicated servants such as my stepson Douglas and daughter-in-
law Lindsay, who served in Iraq--and Lindsay also served in
Afghanistan. Dedicated servants such as Matt Zweig and Greg McCarthy of
our Foreign Affairs Committee majority staff, who just returned from
serving a year in Kandahar and Kabul. And we thank them for their
service. Let us follow the lead of our wounded warriors who, after long
and arduous recoveries, volunteer to return to the battlefield to
finish their mission. I urge our colleagues to oppose this dangerous
resolution.
Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield myself 2 minutes.
In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that the American
people oppose this war by a margin of two to one. I will enter into the
Record this Washington Post poll that was published on March 15 which
says that nearly two-thirds of Americans say the war isn't worth
fighting.
In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that we are spending
$100 billion per year on this war. There are those who are saying the
war could last at least another 10 years. Are we willing to spend
another $1 trillion on a war that doesn't have any exit plan, for which
there is no timeframe to get out, no endgame, where we haven't defined
our mission? The question is not whether we can afford to leave. The
question is, can we afford to stay? And I submit we cannot afford to
stay.
In the next 2 hours, we are going to demonstrate that the
counterintelligence strategy of General Petraeus is an abysmal failure,
and it needs to be called as such. So I want to conclude this part of
my presentation with an article by Thomas Friedman in The New York
Times, which says, ``What are we doing spending $110 billion this year
supporting corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan
that are almost identical to the governments we are applauding the Arab
people for overthrowing?''

[From The Washington Post, Mar. 15, 2011]

Poll: Nearly Two-Thirds of Americans Say Afghan War Isn't Worth
Fighting

(By Scott Wilson and Jon Cohen)

Nearly two-thirds of Americans now say the war in
Afghanistan is no longer worth fighting, the highest
proportion yet opposed to the conflict, according to a new
Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The finding signals a growing challenge for President Obama
as he decides how quickly to pull U.S. forces from the
country beginning this summer. After nearly a decade of
conflict, political opposition to the battle breaks sharply
along partisan lines, with only 19 percent of Democratic
respondents and half of Republicans surveyed saying the war
continues to be worth fighting.
Nearly three-quarters of Americans say Obama should
withdraw a ``substantial number'' of combat troops from
Afghanistan this summer, the deadline he set to begin pulling
out some forces. Only 39 percent of respondents, however, say
they expect him to withdraw large numbers.
The Post-ABC News poll results come as Gen. David H.
Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, prepares to
testify before Congress on Tuesday about the course of the
war. He is expected to face tough questioning about a
conflict that is increasingly unpopular among a broad cross
section of Americans.
Petraeus will tell Congress that ``things are progressing
very well,'' Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Monday.
But because of battlefield gains made by U.S. and coalition
forces since last year, Morrell told MSNBC, ``it's going to
be heavy and intensive in terms of fighting'' once the winter
cold passes.
The poll began asking only in 2007 whether the Afghan war
is worth fighting, but support has almost certainly never
been as low as it is in the most recent survey.
The growing opposition presents Obama with a difficult
political challenge ahead of his 2012 reelection effort,
especially in his pursuit of independent voters.
Since Democrats took a beating in last year's midterm
elections, Obama has appealed to independents with a middle-
of-the-road approach to George W. Bush-era tax cuts and
budget negotiations with Republican leaders on Capitol Hil1.
He called a news conference last week to express concern
about rising gasoline prices, an economically pressing issue
for many independent voters.
But his approach to the Afghan war has not won over the
independents or liberal Democrats who propelled his campaign
two years ago, and the most recent Post-ABC News poll
reinforces the importance of Republicans as the chief
constituency supporting his strategy. The results suggest
that the war will be an awkward issue for the president as he
looks for ways to end it. Nearly 1,500 U.S. troops have died
since the fighting began in 2001.
During his 2008 campaign, Obama promised to withdraw
American forces from the Iraq war, which he opposed, and
devote more resources to the flagging effort in Afghanistan,
which he has called an essential front in combating Islamist
terrorism targeting the United States.
After a months-long strategy review in the fall of 2009, he
announced the deployment of an additional 30,000 U.S. troops
to Afghanistan--taking the total to more than 100,000--and a
July 2011 deadline for the start of their withdrawal.
The number of respondents to the Post-ABC News poll who say
the war is not worth fighting has risen from 44 percent in
late 2009 to 64 percent in the survey conducted last week.
Two-thirds of independents hold that position, according to
the poll, and nearly 80 percent said Obama should withdraw a
``substantial number'' of troops from Afghanistan this
summer. Barely more than a quarter of independents say the
war is worth its costs, and for the first time a majority
feel ``strongly'' that it is not.
Obama, who met with Petraeus on Monday at the White House,
has said he will determine the pace of the withdrawal by
assessing conditions on the ground.
At the same time, U.S. and NATO forces have come under
sharp criticism from the Afghan government. Over the weekend,
after a NATO bombing killed nine children, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai demanded that international troops ``stop their
operations in our land,'' a more pointed call than previous
ones he has made following such deadly NATO mistakes.
The telephone poll was conducted March 10 to 13 among a
random national sample of 1,005 adults. Results from the full
poll have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3.5
percentage points.
The survey also asked respondents to assess Obama's
performance in managing the political changes sweeping across
the Middle East and North Africa. Overall, 45 percent of
respondents approve of his handling of the situation, and 44
percent disapprove.
In Libya, where Moammar Gaddafi is battling a rebel force
seeking to end his 41-year rule, Obama is under increasing
pressure to implement a no-fly zone over the country to
prevent the Libyan leader from taking back lost territory and
to protect civilians from government reprisals.
Nearly six in 10 Americans say they would support U.S.
participation in a no-fly zone over Libya, the poll found,
despite recent warnings from Defense Secretary Robert M.
Gates that doing so would be a ``major operation.''
But the survey found that American support dips under 50
percent when it comes to unilateral U.S. action, as Democrats
and independents peel away.
When told that such a mission would entail U.S. warplanes
bombing Libyan antiaircraft positions and ``continuous
patrols,'' about a quarter of those initially advocating U.S.
participation turn into opponents.
After a meeting Monday with Danish Prime Minister Lars
Loekke Rasmussen, Obama said, ``We will be continuing to
coordinate closely both through NATO as well as the United
Nations and other international fora to look at every single
option that's available to us in bringing about a better
outcome for the Libyan people.''
In general, Americans do not think that the changes in the
Middle East and North Africa will prove beneficial to U.S.
economic and security interests.

[[Page H1922]]

More than seven in 10 respondents said demonstrators are
interested in building new governments, although not
necessarily democratic ones. Almost half of those surveyed
view the turmoil as undermining the United States' ability to
fight terrorist groups in the region.
____

[From the New York Times, March 6, 2011]

The $110 Billion Question

(By Thomas L. Friedman)

When one looks across the Arab world today at the stunning
spontaneous democracy uprisings, it is impossible to not ask:
What are we doing spending $110 billion this year supporting
corrupt and unpopular regimes in Afghanistan and Pakistan
that are almost identical to the governments we're applauding
the Arab people for overthrowing?
Ever since 9/11, the West has hoped for a war of ideas
within the Muslim world that would feature an internal
challenge to the violent radical Islamic ideology of Osama
bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That contest, though, never really
materialized because the regimes we counted on to promote it
found violent Muslim extremism a convenient foil, so they
allowed it to persist. Moreover, these corrupt, crony
capitalist Arab regimes were hardly the ideal carriers for an
alternative to bin Ladenism. To the contrary, it was their
abusive behavior and vicious suffocation of any kind of
independent moderate centrist parties that fueled the
extremism even more.
Now the people themselves have taken down those regimes in
Egypt and Tunisia, and they're rattling the ones in Libya,
Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Iran. They are not doing it for us,
or to answer bin Laden. They are doing it by themselves for
themselves--because they want their freedom and to control
their own destinies. But in doing so they have created a
hugely powerful, modernizing challenge to bin Ladenism, which
is why Al Qaeda today is tongue-tied. It's a beautiful thing
to watch.
Al Qaeda's answer to modern-day autocracy was its version
of the seventh-century Caliphate. But the people--from
Tunisia to Yemen--have come up with their own answer to
violent extremism and the abusive regimes we've been propping
up. It's called democracy. They have a long way to go to lock
it in. It may yet be hijacked by religious forces. But, for
now, it is clear that the majority wants to build a future in
the 21st century, not the seventh.
In other words, the Arab peoples have done for free, on
their own and for their own reasons, everything that we were
paying their regimes to do in the ``war on terrorism'' but
they never did.
And that brings me back to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Last
October, Transparency International rated the regime of
President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan as the second most
corrupt in the world after Somalia's. That is the Afghan
regime we will spend more than $110 billion in 2011 to
support.
And tell me that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI,
which dominates Pakistani politics, isn't the twin of Hosni
Mubarak's security service. Pakistan's military leaders play
the same game Mubarak played with us for years. First, they
whisper in our ears: ``Psst, without us, the radical
Islamists will rule. So we may not be perfect, but we're the
only thing standing in the way of the devil.'' In reality,
though, they are nurturing the devil. The ISI is long alleged
to have been fostering anti-Indian radical Muslim groups and
masterminding the Afghan Taliban.
Apart from radical Islam, the other pretext the Pakistani
military uses for its inordinate grip on power is the
external enemy. Just as Arab regimes used the conflict with
Israel for years to keep their people distracted and to
justify huge military budgets, Pakistan's ISI tells itself,
the Pakistani people and us that it can't stop sponsoring
proxies in Afghanistan because of the ``threat'' from India.
Here's a secret: India is not going to invade Pakistan. It
is an utterly bogus argument. India wants to focus on its own
development, not owning Pakistan's problems. India has the
second-largest Muslim population on the planet, more even
than Pakistan. And while Indian Muslims are not without their
economic and political grievances, they are, on the whole,
integrated into India's democracy because it is a democracy.
There are no Indian Muslims in Guantanamo Bay.
Finally, you did not need to dig very far in Egypt or
Jordan to hear that one reason for the rebellion in Egypt and
protests in Jordan was the in-your-face corruption and crony
capitalism that everyone in the public knew about.
That same kind of pillaging of assets--natural resources,
development aid, the meager savings of a million Kabul Bank
depositors and crony contracts--has fueled a similar anger
against the regime in Afghanistan and undermined our nation-
building efforts there.
The truth is we can't do much to consolidate the democracy
movements in Egypt and Tunisia. They'll have to make it work
themselves. But we could do what we can, which is divert some
of the $110 billion we're lavishing on the Afghan regime and
the Pakistani Army and use it for debt relief, schools and
scholarships to U.S. universities for young Egyptians and
Tunisians who had the courage to take down the very kind of
regimes we're still holding up in Kabul and Islamabad.
I know we can't just walk out of Afghanistan and Pakistan;
there are good people, too, in both places. But our
involvement in these two countries--150,000 troops to
confront Al Qaeda--is totally out of proportion today with
our interests and out of all sync with our values.

I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from Washington (Mr. Smith), the ranking member of the Armed
Services Committee.
Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this
resolution, and I do so as one who does firmly believe that we need to,
as soon as we responsibly can, end our military engagement in
Afghanistan. The cost is very real.
I represent Joint Base Lewis-McChord, which includes Fort Lewis Army
Base, and we have lost many soldiers in Afghanistan. The families
understand the cost. We need to wind down this war as quickly and as
responsibly as we can. Unfortunately, this resolution does not give us
the opportunity to do that. And we have clear national security
interests in Afghanistan.
While I may agree with many of the statements about the troubles and
challenges that we face in that region, the one thing that you will
hear today that I cannot agree with is the idea that we have no
national security interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan, or that we
somehow do not have a clear mission. We have a clear mission. We do not
want the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies back in charge of
Afghanistan or any significant part of Afghanistan from which they
could plot attacks against us, as they are still trying to do in the
parts of Pakistan that they are in.
We need to get an Afghanistan Government that can stand up, and they
are going to need our help to get there. Now there are many who have
argued--and I am sure some on both sides of the aisle would be
sympathetic with the notion that we need to reduce our commitment
there--that a full-scale counterinsurgency effort, or 100,000 U.S.
troops and 150,000 NATO and U.S. troops combined, is too much. Let's go
with a much lighter footprint. Many have advocated that. Focuses on
counterterrorism, focuses on going after the terrorists, and allows the
Afghans to take the lead on everything else. And there is a plausible
argument for that. This resolution does not allow that.
I want the Members of this Chamber to understand this resolution
requires complete withdrawal of all U.S. forces by the end of this
year. And I can tell you, as the ranking member on the Armed Services
Committee, that is not in the national security interest of this
country.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. BERMAN. I yield the gentleman 1 additional minute.
Mr. SMITH of Washington. We may have a legitimate debate about what
our presence should be, how we should change it, but the notion that we
can simply walk away from this problem, as Ms. Ros-Lehtinen pointed
out, is simply not true. And it is a problem that, believe me, I, as
much as anyone in this body, would love to be able to walk away from.
It is an enormous challenge. And what Mr. Friedman has to say about the
governments of Afghanistan and Pakistan is spot on. But the problem is,
we can't simply walk away from them and let them fall because of the
national security implications that that has for us right here at home,
given what the Taliban and al Qaeda would plan. I am all in favor of a
more reasonable plan for how we go forward in Afghanistan, but simply
heading for the hills and leaving is not a responsible plan. It's not
even really a plan for how to deal with the very difficult challenges
that we face in that region, and I urge this body to oppose this
resolution.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I want to thank the gentleman from Ohio (Mr.
Kucinich) for yielding me half of his time, and I yield myself such
time as I may consume.

{time} 1110

Mr. Speaker, we are debating how long we are going to be in
Afghanistan. Recently, Secretary Gates testified before the Armed
Services Committee, which I serve on, and said that he thought by 2014
we could start substantial reduction in our troop strength in

[[Page H1923]]

Afghanistan, 2014, that it might be 2015, 2016.
That's why this debate and this resolution is so important, not
important for those of us in the House, but important for our military
and the American people.
And Mr. Kucinich did make reference to The Washington Post-ABC poll
that was taken a couple of days ago that said 73 percent of the
American people said it's time, this year, to bring our troops home.
In addition, I would like to share a quote from the leader of
Afghanistan, Mr. Karzai. He's our man in Afghanistan. All right, now,
he's our man. This was his quote 3 days ago: ``I request that NATO and
America should stop these operations on our soil,'' Karzai said. ``This
war is not on our soil. If this war is against terror, then this war is
not here. Terror is not here.''
The number of al Qaeda and their presence in Afghanistan is about 20
or 30. Most of them are in Pakistan. I would agree with that. But this
debate is critical.
Before I reserve the balance of my time, I want to share very quickly
a letter from a retired colonel who's a marine that lives in my
district: ``I am writing this letter to express my concern over the
current Afghanistan war. I am a retired marine officer with 31-plus
years of active duty. I retired in 2004 due to service limitations, or
I am sure I would have been on my third or fourth deployment by now to
a war that has gone on too long.''
And I'll go to the bottom of this: ``It makes no sense if we're there
4 years or 40. The results will be the same.''
And he closed his letter this way: ``This war is costing the United
States billions of dollars a month to wage, and we still continue to
get more young Americans killed. The Afghan war has no end state for
us.
``I urge you to make contact with all the current and newly elected
men and women in Congress and ask them to end this war and bring our
young men and women home. If any of my comments will assist in this
effort, you are welcome to use them and my name.
``Respectfully, Dennis G. Adams, Lieutenant Colonel retired, United
States Marine Corps.''
I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California
(Ms. Woolsey).
Ms. WOOLSEY. Mr. Speaker, I rise in absolute support of the
resolution offered by the gentleman from Ohio.
The war in Afghanistan, almost 10 years old, has been an utter
failure in every possible way. It hasn't eliminated the terrorist
threat. It hasn't destroyed the Taliban. It hasn't advanced national
security objectives. It hasn't promoted a vibrant democracy in
Afghanistan. It hasn't done any of the things it was supposed to do.
And General Petraeus' testimony this week didn't inspire much
confidence either. He continues to offer the same vague reassurances
about progress we've supposedly made, while being sure to say that
challenges remain so he can continue justifying a substantial troop
presence in Afghanistan. But I'm not reassured in the least. And much
more importantly, the American people aren't reassured.
After 9\1/2\ years, after seeing 1,500 of their fellow citizens
killed, after writing a check to the tune of $386 billion, they've had
enough. They are angry, they are frustrated, as well they should be.
A new poll shows that nearly two-thirds of Americans, 64 percent,
think the war isn't worth fighting. This is one of the least popular
things our government is doing, and yet it's just about the only one
Republicans don't want to cut.
I think it's about time the people's House listened to the people on
the issue of war and peace and life and death. We need to negotiate,
and we need to sign the Status of Forces Agreement, SOFA, with
Afghanistan.
We need to move quickly toward the massive redeployment in July, as
the President promised more than a year ago. In the name of moral
decency, fiscal sanity and constitutional integrity, it's time to bring
our troops home.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, before I yield to the gentleman from
California (Mr. McKeon), the chairman of the House Armed Services
Committee, it is important to underscore, as the Under Secretary of
Defense Michele Flournoy has, that to withdraw from Afghanistan at this
time, before we finish the job, is to pave the way for the next 9/11.
She and other U.S. and allied officials note that we need look no
further than the example of Ahmad Siddiqui, a 36-year-old German of
Afghan origin who U.S. interrogators talked to, and he revealed Osama
bin Laden was planning an attack on Europe. Without our boots on the
ground in Afghanistan the plot against Europe might never have been
uncovered. Without our boots on the ground, we will not be able to stop
the next wave of attacks against our homeland, our citizens, our
families, and ourselves.
Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr.
McKeon), the esteemed chairman of the House Armed Services Committee.
Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, I join with my colleagues from the Foreign
Services Committee, Foreign Affairs Committee, and my colleagues from
the Armed Services Committee in opposition to this resolution. This
resolution would undermine the efforts of our military commanders and
troops as they work side by side with their Afghan and coalition
partners.
Yesterday, in his testimony before the House Armed Services
Committee, General Petraeus, commander of the U.S. and allied forces in
Afghanistan, described significant progress made by our troops and
Afghan forces. But while the United States is on track to accomplish
our objectives by 2014, the general also warned that this hard-fought
progress is fragile and reversible; and he urged that continued support
from this Congress for our mission in Afghanistan is vital to success.
When asked specifically how our troops and enemies would view the
resolution before us today, General Petraeus stated: The Taliban and al
Qaeda obviously would trumpet this as a victory. Needless to say, it
would completely undermine everything our troopers have fought so much
and sacrificed so much for.
Mr. Speaker, when the President authorized a surge of 30,000
additional troops, he reminded us of why we are in Afghanistan. It's
the epicenter of where al Qaeda planned and launched the 9/11 attacks
against innocent Americans. It remains vital to the national security
of this country to prohibit the Taliban from once again providing
sanctuary to al Qaeda leaders.
Moreover, withdrawing before completing our mission would reinforce
extremist propaganda that Americans are weak and unreliable allies and
could facilitate extremist recruiting and future attacks.
Like most Republicans, I supported the President's decision to surge
in Afghanistan. I believe that with additional forces, combined with
giving General Petraeus the time, space and resources he needs, we can
win this conflict.
During a visit last week with our troops in Afghanistan, Secretary
Gates observed the closer you get to this fight, the better it looks.
Having just returned myself from Afghanistan a few weeks ago, I
couldn't agree more.
Our delegation to Afghanistan met with senior military commanders and
diplomats, talked to airmen at Bagram, marines in Helmand and soldiers
in Kandahar. It was clear to our delegation that our forces have made
significant gains and have reversed the Taliban's momentum.

{time} 1120

Our forces and their Afghan partners have cleared enemy strongholds,
swept up significant weapons caches, and given more Afghans the
confidence to defy the Taliban. We have made considerable progress in
growing and professionalizing Afghanistan's army and police so these
forces are more capable and reliable partners to our own troops.
As significant as our troops' achievements in the fields are, they
can easily be undone by poor decisions made here in Washington. Today's
debate is not being conducted in a vacuum. Our troops are listening.
Our allies are listening.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. McKEON. The Taliban and al Qaeda are also listening. And,
finally, the Afghan people are listening.

[[Page H1924]]

Mr. Speaker, I want to send a clear message to the Afghan people and
government, our coalition partners, our military men and women that
this Congress will stand firm in our commitment to free us from the
problems that the Taliban created for us on 9/11. We will not have this
sanctuary ever happen again.
I urge my colleagues to vote ``no'' on this resolution.
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I rise in opposition to the resolution.
Mr. Speaker, this is the third debate we have had pursuant to a war
powers resolution in the last year.
I completely agree with the gentleman from Ohio that as we are moving
into the 10th year of this conflict, it is critical--not just nice, it
is really critical for the House to have an open and honest debate on
the merits of our ongoing military operations in Afghanistan, and that
debate should be outside of the context of a defense spending bill.
But what I also do is take strong issue with the invocation of
section 5(c) of the War Powers Act as the basis for this debate. If we
are here to respect the law and the procedures, you have to remember
that it is that section which authorizes a privileged resolution, like
the one we have before us today, to require the withdrawal of U.S.
Forces when they are engaged in hostilities and Congress has not
authorized the use of military force.
There may be aspects of our operations around the world that people
can claim under section 5(c) have not been authorized. No one can make
a contention that what we are now doing in Afghanistan was not
authorized by the Congress. There can be no doubt this military action
in Afghanistan was authorized. It was authorized in 2001, soon after 9/
11.
But let's set aside the procedure and the specific dictates of the
statute. I do think and share my concerns, well articulated by the
ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, that it is not
responsible to demand a complete withdrawal of our troops from
Afghanistan by the end of the year without regard to the consequence of
our withdrawal, without regard to the situation on the ground,
including efforts to promote economic development and expand the rule
of law, and without any measurement of whether the current strategy is
indeed working.
I am very sensitive to the arguments posed by the gentleman from
Ohio. The cost of human life due to the war and the heavy costs
incurred by our country at a time of great economic hardship should
give any Member of Congress pause.
I am also keenly aware of the concerns regarding our overall U.S.
strategy in Afghanistan. It remains to be seen whether a
counterinsurgency strategy will succeed there and, equally important,
whether the Afghans are taking sufficient responsibility for this war.
I am troubled that the war very much remains an American-led effort and
that the U.S. presence has created a culture of dependency in
Afghanistan.
Notwithstanding all that, I won't support a call for a full
withdrawal until we give the President's strategy additional time, at
least through the spring, to show results or, without a responsible
withdrawal strategy, to ensure gains made thus far will not be lost.
A number of positive developments make me unwilling to throw in the
towel just yet. For example, as noted by General Petraeus in testimony
yesterday, coalition forces have been making some progress against
Taliban forces in southern Afghanistan. In addition, the training of
Afghan security forces has exceeded targets, and we are inching slowly
toward the point at which they may be able to secure their own borders.
A final plea to my colleagues, and that is to some of my colleagues
who are joining me in opposing this resolution. I am sure we are not
going to succeed in Afghanistan unless our civilian efforts are fully
resourced. When I traveled to Afghanistan last April, I was encouraged
to see our military forces, diplomats, and development experts working
closely together in the field.
General Petraeus couldn't have been more clear in his testimony: We
are setting ourselves up for failure if we fully fund the clear part of
the President's counterinsurgency strategy, the part carried out by the
military, but shortchange the hold-and-build portions of the strategy,
like economic development and building good governance. These are the
keys to lasting success in Afghanistan. These are the keys to a
successful counterinsurgency strategy. And when we meet those tests and
do those works, we may be able to create the environment that will
allow our troops to return home.
For all these reasons, I oppose the resolution.
I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, we will be debating this probably in 2015 or
2016. If I am not here, somebody else will be, because that is how long
we are going to be there.
This general that served in the Marine Corps that has advised me for
11 months, back in November I asked: ``What do you think about 4 more
years?''
I am just going to read part of his email:
``I do not believe that 40 more years would guarantee victory,
whatever that is; so 4 will do nothing. The war is costing money and
lives, all in short supply.''
I yield 4 minutes to the gentleman from Tennessee (Mr. Duncan).
Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of
this resolution.
First, I want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina for yielding
me this time. And I want to pay tribute to the gentleman from North
Carolina (Mr. Jones), who is one of the kindest, most sincere, and most
courageous Members that we have in this body.
I voted, Mr. Speaker, for this war, but I sure didn't vote for a 10-
year war or a forever or a permanent or an endless war.
There is nothing fiscally conservative about this war, and I think
conservatives should be the people most horrified by this war.
Alfred Regnery, the publisher of the Conservative American Spectator
magazine, wrote last October: ``Afghanistan has little strategic value,
and the war is one of choice rather than necessity.'' And he added that
it has been a ``wasteful and frustrating decade.''
The worst thing about Iraq and Afghanistan is all the young people
who have been killed. But it is also very sad, Mr. Speaker, that we
have spent hundreds of billions of dollars--in fact, some estimates are
$2 trillion or $3 trillion now in indirect costs--to carry on these two
very unnecessary wars.
Our Constitution does not give us the authority to run another
country, and that is basically what we have been doing. We have been
doing more nation building and more civilian functions than anything
else, and we have been turning the Department of Defense, at least in
Iraq and Afghanistan, into the Department of Foreign Aid.
I had a conservative Republican elected official from my district in
my office this past Monday. His son is in Afghanistan in the Army, and
he said he asked his son recently what we were accomplishing there, and
he said his son said, ``Dad, we're accomplishing nothing.''
We seem to be making the same mistakes in our policies toward
Afghanistan that we made in Iraq. Even General Petraeus has said some
time ago that we should never forget that Afghanistan has been known as
the ``graveyard of empires.''
George C. Wilson, a military columnist for the Congress Daily, wrote
a few months ago: ``The American military's mission to pacify the
40,000 tiny villages in Afghanistan will look like mission impossible,
especially if our bombings keep killing Afghan civilians and
infuriating the ones who survive.''
The Center for Defense Information said late last year we have now
spent $439.8 billion on war and war-related costs in Afghanistan, and
$1.63 trillion so far on the war and war-related costs in Iraq. As I
said a moment ago, these figures should astound fiscal conservatives.
Georgie Anne Geyer, a syndicated columnist, wrote a few years ago:
``Critics of the war have said since the beginning of the conflict that
Americans, still strangely complacent about overseas wars being waged
by minorities in their name, will inevitably come to a point where they
will see they have to have a government that provides services at home
or one that seeks empire across the globe.''

[[Page H1925]]

I just finished, Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago doing field hearings
around the country in relation to the transportation and highway bill.
These were done in Oklahoma, Arkansas, West Virginia, and west
Tennessee--very conservative districts. And in each of those places, I
said that it's time that we stop spending hundreds of billions on these
unnecessary foreign wars and stop rebuilding in Iraq and Afghanistan
and start rebuilding the United States of America.

{time} 1130

In each of those conservative districts, the people erupted into
applause. Only 31 percent of the American people, according to the
latest ABC/Newsweek poll that just came out, think this war is still
worth it.
William F. Buckley, the conservative icon, wrote a few years ago that
he supported the war in Iraq and then he became disillusioned by it,
and he wrote these words:
``A respect for the power of the United States is engendered by our
success in engagements in which we take part.''
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. JONES. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. William Buckley said:
``A point is reached when tenacity conveys steadfastness of purpose
but misapplication of pride.''
President Karzai last year told ABC News he wanted us to stay there
another 15 or 20 more years. That's because he wants our money. This
war is more about money and power. Every gigantic bureaucracy always
wants more money, but this war has gone too far and too long, and I
support this resolution.

General Leave

Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all
Members may have 5 legislative days in which to revise and extend their
remarks and include extraneous material on House Concurrent Resolution
28.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentlewoman from Florida?
There was no objection.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. With that, Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the
gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Chabot), the chairman of the Foreign Affairs
Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia.
Mr. CHABOT. Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for your steadfast
commitment to the men and women who gallantly serve our country on the
battlefield.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to the resolution. First, let me
get one argument out of the way. I've heard before some of my
colleagues who support an American retreat from Afghanistan describe
this effort as a fiscal matter. I would respond to that argument by
simply stating that it's not a question of whether we can afford to
fund a military presence in Afghanistan, it's a matter of whether we
can afford not to, particularly at this point.
I think my colleagues know that I'm very uncomfortable spending
taxpayer dollars without a solid justification, and I would match my
fiscal conservative credentials with anybody in this body. But when it
comes to national security and when it comes to the care and protection
of our troops in harm's way, we must not be, to use a phrase that you
often hear on this floor, penny wise and pound foolish.
Further, a premature withdrawal of American troops from the Afghan
theater would send a terrible message to both our friends and also to
our adversaries. To our allies in the war on terrorism whom we would
leave essentially twisting in the wind, to those 47 other nations that
have joined the coalition in Afghanistan, we would essentially be
saying, ``Good luck. You're on your own.'' Not exactly what they had in
mind when they joined us in this fight.
And, of course, to al Qaeda and to the Taliban, whom we would
embolden by adopting this ill-advised resolution, we would be
providing, once again, the sanctuary which they enjoyed in Afghanistan
before our Armed Forces reversed their momentum.
I don't often find myself in agreement with President Obama's
policies, but I did agree with him when he said a little more than a
year ago, ``I am convinced that our security is at risk in Afghanistan
and Pakistan. This is the epicenter of violent extremism practiced by
al Qaeda. It is from here that we were attacked on 9/11, and it is here
that new attacks are being plotted as I speak.'' That was President
Obama.
I also agree with General Petraeus who said last week that ``our core
objective in Afghanistan, needless to say, is to ensure that the
country does not become a sanctuary once again for al Qaeda, the way it
was prior to 9/11.''
I know memories fade with time, but it's been not quite 10 years
since 3,000 lives were lost on American soil--in New York, in
Pennsylvania, and just minutes from here down the street at the
Pentagon. Let's not forget what al Qaeda did then and let's keep
working to prevent it from happening again. Let's not quit until the
job is done.
Vote ``no'' on this resolution.
Mr. KUCINICH. I would like to insert into the Record a report from
the United Nations that says that 2010 was the worst year for civilian
casualties in Afghanistan with nearly 3,000 civilians killed.

Afghanistan--Annual Report on Protection of Civilians in Armed Conflict
2010

Kabul, Afghanistan, March 2011

Executive Summary
The human cost of the armed conflict in Afghanistan grew in
2010. The Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and
UNAMA Human Rights recorded 2,777 civilian deaths in 2010, an
increase of 15 per cent compared to 2009. Over the past four
years, 8,832 civilians have been killed in the conflict, with
civilian deaths increasing each year. The worsening human
impact of the conflict reinforces the urgent need for parties
to the conflict to do more to protect Afghan civilians, who,
in 2010, were killed and injured in their homes and
communities in even greater numbers. UNAMA Human Rights and
the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission urge the
Anti-Government Elements and Pro-Government Forces to
strengthen civilian protection and fully comply legal
obligations to minimize civilian casualties.

civilian deaths

Of the total number of 2,777 civilians killed in 2010,
2,080 deaths (75 per cent of total civilian deaths) were
attributed to Anti-Government Elements, up 28 per cent from
2009. Suicide attacks and improvised explosive devices (IEDs)
caused the most civilian deaths, totaling 1,141 deaths (55
per cent of civilian deaths attributed to Anti-Government
Elements). The most alarming trend in 2010 was the huge
number of civilians assassinated by Anti-Government Elements.
Four hundred and sixty two civilians were assassinated
representing an increase of more than 105 per cent compared
to 2009. Half of all civilian assassinations occurred in
southern Afghanistan. Helmand province saw a 588 per cent
increase in the number of civilians assassinated by Anti-
Government Elements and Kandahar province experienced a 248
per cent increase compared to 2009.
Afghan national security and international military forces
(Pro-Government Forces) were linked to 440 deaths or 16 per
cent of total civilian deaths, a reduction of 26 per cent
from 2009. Aerial attacks claimed the largest percentage of
civilian deaths caused by Pro-Government Forces in 2010,
causing 171 deaths (39 per cent of the total number of
civilian deaths attributed to Pro-Government Forces).
Notably, there was a 52 per cent decline in civilian deaths
from air attacks compared to 2009. Nine per cent of civilian
deaths in 2010 could not be attributed to any party to the
conflict.

I would like to put into the Record a report from the Afghanistan
Rights Monitor relating to the number of civilians killed and wounded
and displaced.

ARM Annual Report

Civilian Casualties of War

January--December 2010

Kabul, Afghanistan, February 2011

Executive Summary
Over nine years after the internationally-celebrated demise
of the repressive Taliban regime in Afghanistan, civilian
Afghans increasingly suffer from the armed violence and
rights violations committed by various internal and external
armed actors. More ordinary Afghans were killed and injured
in 2010 than a year before. And while US officials dubbed
Afghanistan as their longest foreign war, Afghans suffered it
for 32 years relentlessly.
Almost everything related to the war surged in 2010: the
combined numbers of Afghan and foreign forces surpassed
350,000; security incidents mounted to over 100 per week;
more fighters from all warring side were killed; and the
number of civilian people killed, wounded and displaced hit
record levels.
Collecting information about every security incident and
verifying the often conflicting reports about their impacts
on civilian people were extremely difficult and risky. The
war was as heatedly fought

[[Page H1926]]

through propaganda and misinformation as it was in the
battlefields thus making independent and impartial war
reporting tricky and complex.
Despite all the challenges, we spared no efforts in
gathering genuine information, facts and figures about the
impacts of war on civilian communities. Our resources were
limited and we lacked the luxury of strategic/political
support from one or another side of the conflict because we
stood by our professional integrity. We, however, managed to
use our indigenous knowledge and delved into a wealth of
local information available in the conflict-affected villages
in order to seek more reliable facts about the war.
From 1 January to 31 December 2010, at least 2,421 civilian
Afghans were killed and over 3,270 were injured in conflict-
related security incidents across Afghanistan. This means
everyday 6-7 noncombatants were killed and 8-9 were wounded
in the war.
ARM does not claim that these numbers--although collected
and verified to the best of our efforts--are comprehensive
and perfect. Actual numbers of the civilian victims of war in
2010 could be higher than what we gathered and present in
this report.
Unsurprisingly, about 63 percent of the reported civilian
deaths and 70 percent of the injuries were attributed to the
Armed Opposition Groups (AOGs) (Taliban, Hezb-e-Islami and
the Haqqani Group); 21 percent of deaths (512 individuals)
and 22 percent of injuries (655) were attributed to US/NATO
forces; and 12 percent of deaths (278 individuals) and 7
percent (239) injuries were caused by pro-government Afghan
troops and their allied local militia forces.
In addition to civilian casualties, hundreds of thousands
of people were affected in various ways by the intensified
armed violence in Afghanistan in 2010. Tens of thousands of
people were forced out of their homes or deprived of
healthcare and education services and livelihood
opportunities due to the continuation of war in their home
areas.
In November 2010, ARM was the first organization to voice
concerns about the destruction of hundreds of houses,
pomegranate trees and orchards in several districts in
Kandahar Province by US-led forces as part of their
counterinsurgency operations. In January 2011, an Afghan
Government delegation reported the damage costs at over
US$100 million. In compensation, US/NATO forces have doled
out less than $2 million.
Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) are widely considered
as the most lethal tools which killed over 690 civilians in
2010. However, as you will read in this report, there is
virtually no information about the use of cluster munitions
by US/NATO forces. Despite Afghanistan's accession to the
international Anti-Cluster Bomb Treaty in 2008, the US
military has allegedly maintained stockpiles of cluster
munitions in Afghanistan.
A second key issue highlighted in this report is the
emergence of the irregular armed groups in parts of
Afghanistan which are backed by the Afghan Government and its
foreign allies. These groups have been deplored as criminal
and predatory by many Afghans and have already been accused
of severe human rights violations such as child recruitment
and sexual abuse.

I would like to put into the Record a report from the Congressional
Research Service that the war in Afghanistan has cost over $454 billion
to date.

Introduction: War Funding to Date

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the
United States has initiated three military operations:
Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) covering primarily
Afghanistan and other small Global War on Terror (GWOT)
operations ranging from the Philippines to Djibouti that
began immediately after the 9/11 attacks and continues;
Operation Noble Eagle (ONE) providing enhanced security for
U.S. military bases and other homeland security that was
launched in response to the attacks and continues at a modest
level; and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) that began in the
fall of 2002 with the buildup of troops for the March 2003
invasion of Iraq, continued with counter-insurgency and
stability operations, and is slated to be renamed Operation
New Dawn as U.S. troops focus on an advisory and assistance
role.
In the ninth year of operations since the 9/11 attacks
while troops are being withdrawn in Iraq and increased in
Afghanistan, the cost of war continues to be a major issue
including the total amount appropriated, the amount for each
operation, average monthly spending rates, and the scope and
duration of future costs. Information on costs is useful to
Congress to assess the FY2010 Supplemental for war costs for
the Department of Defense (DOD) and State/USAID, FY2011 war
requests, conduct oversight of past war costs, and consider
the longer-term costs implications of the buildup of troops
in Afghanistan and potential problems in the withdrawal of
U.S. troops from Iraq. This report analyzes war funding for
the Defense Department and tracks funding for USAID and VA
Medical funding.

Total War Funding by Operation

Based on DOD estimates and budget submissions, the
cumulative total for funds appropriated from the 9/11 attacks
through the FY2010 Supplemental Appropriations Acts for DOD,
State/USAID and VA for medical costs for the wars in Iraq,
Afghanistan and enhanced security is $1,121 billion
including: $751 billion for Iraq; $336 billion for
Afghanistan; $29 billion for enhanced security; and $6
billion unallocated.
Of this total, 67% is for Iraq, 30% for Afghanistan, 3% for
enhanced security and 1/2% unallocated. Almost all of the
funding for Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) is for
Afghanistan.
This total includes funding provided in H.R. 4899/P.L. 111-
212, the FY2010 Supplemental Appropriations Act enacted July
29, 2010.
Some 94% of this funding goes to the Department of Defense
(DOD) to cover primarily incremental war-related costs, that
is, costs that are in addition to DOD's normal peacetime
activities. These costs include: military personnel funds to
provide special pay for deployed personnel such as hostile
fire or separation pay and to cover the additional cost of
activating reservists, as well pay for expanding the Army and
Marine Corps to reduce stress on troops; Operation and
Maintenance (O&M) funds to transport troops and their
equipment to Iraq and Afghanistan, conduct military
operations, provide in-country support at bases, and
repairing war-worn equipment; Procurement funding to cover
buying new weapons systems to replace war losses, and upgrade
equipment, pay modernization costs associated with expanding
and changing the structure of the size of the Army and Marine
Corps; Research, Development, Test & Evaluation costs to
develop more effective ways to combat war threats such as
roadside bombs; Working Capital Funds to cover expanding the
size of inventories of spare parts and fuel to provide
wartime support; and Military construction primarily to
construct facilities in bases in Iraq or Afghanistan or
neighboring countries.
In addition, the Administration initiated several programs
specifically targeted at problems that developed in the
Afghan and Iraq wars: Coalition support to cover the
logistical costs of allies, primarily Pakistan, conducting
counter-terror operations in support of U.S. efforts;
Commanders Emergency Response Program (CERP) providing funds
to individual commanders for small reconstruction projects
and to pay local militias in Iraq and Afghanistan to counter
insurgent or Taliban groups; Afghan Security Forces Fund and
the Iraq Security Forces Fund to pay the cost of training,
equipping and expanding the size of the Afghan and Iraqi
armies and police forces; and Joint Improvised Explosive
Device (IEDs) Defeat Fund to develop, buy, and deploy new
devices to improve force protection for soldiers against
roadside bombs or IEDs.

I would like to put into the Record an article by Nobel prize-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes in the Washington Post that
says there is no question the Iraq war added substantially to the
Federal debt.

[From the Times, Feb. 23, 2008]

The Three Trillion Dollar War--The Cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan
Conflicts Have Grown to Staggering Proportions

(By Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes)

The Bush Administration was wrong about the benefits of the
war and it was wrong about the costs of the war. The
president and his advisers expected a quick, inexpensive
conflict. Instead, we have a war that is costing more than
anyone could have imagined.
The cost of direct US military operations--not even
including long-term costs such as taking care of wounded
veterans--already exceeds the cost of the 12-year war in
Vietnam and is more than double the cost of the Korean War.
And, even in the best case scenario, these costs are
projected to be almost ten times the cost of the first Gulf
War, almost a third more than the cost of the Vietnam War,
and twice that of the First World War. The only war in our
history which cost more was the Second World War, when 16.3
million U.S. troops fought in a campaign lasting four years,
at a total cost (in 2007 dollars, after adjusting for
inflation) of about $5 trillion (that's $5 million million,
or K2.5 million million). With virtually the entire armed
forces committed to fighting the Germans and Japanese, the
cost per troop (in today's dollars) was less than $100,000 in
2007 dollars. By contrast, the Iraq war is costing upward of
$400,000 per troop.
Most Americans have yet to feel these costs. The price in
blood has been paid by our voluntary military and by hired
contractors. The price in treasure has, in a sense, been
financed entirely by borrowing. Taxes have not been raised to
pay for it--in fact, taxes on the rich have actually fallen.
Deficit spending gives the illusion that the laws of
economics can be repealed, that we can have both guns and
butter. But of course the laws are not repealed. The costs of
the war are real even if they have been deferred, possibly to
another generation.
Background
American voters must choose: more benefits or more defence;
$3 trillion budget leaves little for Bush to bank on; MoD
forced to cut budget by K1.5bn; they're running our tanks on
empty.
On the eve of war, there were discussions of the likely
costs. Larry Lindsey, President Bush's economic adviser and
head of the National Economic Council, suggested that they
might reach $200 billion. But this estimate was dismissed as
``baloney'' by the Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. His
deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, suggested that postwar reconstruction
could pay for itself

[[Page H1927]]

through increased oil revenues. Mitch Daniels, the Office of
Management and Budget director, and Secretary Rumsfeld
estimated the costs in the range of $50 to $60 billion, a
portion of which they believed would be financed by other
countries. (Adjusting for inflation, in 2007 dollars, they
were projecting costs of between $57 and $69 billion.) The
tone of the entire administration was cavalier, as if the
sums involved were minimal.
Even Lindsey, after noting that the war could cost $200
billion, went on to say: ``The successful prosecution of the
war would be good for the economy.'' In retrospect, Lindsey
grossly underestimated both the costs of the war itself and
the costs to the economy. Assuming that Congress approves the
rest of the $200 billion war supplemental requested for
fiscal year 2008, as this book goes to press Congress will
have appropriated a total of over $845 billion for military
operations, reconstruction, embassy costs, enhanced security
at US bases, and foreign aid programmes in Iraq and
Afghanistan.
As the fifth year of the war draws to a close, operating
costs (spending on the war itself, what you might call
``running expenses'') for 2008 are projected to exceed $12.5
billion a month for Iraq alone, up from $4.4 billion in 2003,
and with Afghanistan the total is $16 billion a month.
Sixteen billion dollars is equal to the annual budget of the
United Nations, or of all but 13 of the US states. Even so,
it does not include the $500 billion we already spend per
year on the regular expenses of the Defence Department. Nor
does it include other hidden expenditures, such as
intelligence gathering, or funds mixed in with the budgets of
other departments.
Because there are so many costs that the Administration
does not count, the total cost of the war is higher than the
official number. For example, government officials frequently
talk about the lives of our soldiers as priceless. But from a
cost perspective, these ``priceless'' lives show up on the
Pentagon ledger simply as $500,000--the amount paid out to
survivors in death benefits and life insurance. After the war
began, these were increased from $12,240 to $100,000 (death
benefit) and from $250,000 to $400,000 (life insurance). Even
these increased amounts are a fraction of what the survivors
might have received had these individuals lost their lives in
a senseless automobile accident. In areas such as health and
safety regulation, the US Government values a life of a young
man at the peak of his future earnings capacity in excess of
$7 million--far greater than the amount that the military
pays in death benefits. Using this figure, the cost of the
nearly 4,000 American troops killed in Iraq adds up to some
$28 billion.
The costs to society are obviously far larger than the
numbers that show up on the government's budget. Another
example of hidden costs is the understating of U.S. military
casualties. The Defense Department's casualty statistics
focus on casualties that result from hostile (combat)
action--as determined by the military. Yet if a soldier is
injured or dies in a night-time vehicle accident, this is
officially dubbed ``noncombat related''--even though it may
be too unsafe for soldiers to travel during daytime.
In fact, the Pentagon keeps two sets of books. The first is
the official casualty list posted on the DOD Web site. The
second, hard-to-find, set of data is available only on a
different website and can be obtained under the Freedom of
Information Act. This data shows that the total number of
soldiers who have been wounded, injured, or suffered from
disease is double the number wounded in combat. Some will
argue that a percentage of these noncombat injuries might
have happened even if the soldiers were not in Iraq. Our new
research shows that the majority of these injuries and
illnesses can be tied directly to service in the war.
From the unhealthy brew of emergency funding, multiple sets
of books, and chronic underestimates of the resources
required to prosecute the war, we have attempted to identify
how much we have been spending--and how much we will, in the
end, likely have to spend. The figure we arrive at is more
than $3 trillion. Our calculations are based on conservative
assumptions. They are conceptually simple, even if
occasionally technically complicated. A $3 trillion figure
for the total cost strikes us as judicious, and probably errs
on the low side. Needless to say, this number represents the
cost only to the United States. It does not reflect the
enormous cost to the rest of the world, or to Iraq.
From the beginning, the United Kingdom has played a pivotal
role--strategic, military, and political--in the Iraq
conflict. Militarily, the UK contributed 46,000 troops, 10
per cent of the total. Unsurprisingly, then, the British
experience in Iraq has paralleled that of America: rising
casualties, increasing operating costs, poor transparency
over where the money is going, overstretched military
resources, and scandals over the squalid conditions and
inadequate medical care for some severely wounded veterans.
Before the war, Gordon Brown set aside 1
billion for war spending. As of late 2007, the UK had spent
an estimated 7 billion in direct operating
expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan (76 per cent of it in
Iraq). This includes money from a supplemental ``special
reserve'', plus additional spending from the Ministry of
Defense.
The special reserve comes on top of the UK's regular
defense budget. The British system is particularly opaque:
funds from the special reserve are ``drawn down'' by the
Ministry of Defense when required, without specific approval
by Parliament. As a result, British citizens have little
clarity about how much is actually being spent.
In addition, the social costs in the UK are similar to
those in the U.S.--families who leave jobs to care for
wounded soldiers, and diminished quality of life for those
thousands left with disabilities.
By the same token, there are macroeconomic costs to the UK
as there have been to America, though the long-term costs may
be less, for two reasons. First, Britain did not have the
same policy of fiscal profligacy; and second, until 2005, the
United Kingdom was a net oil exporter.
We have assumed that British forces in Iraq are reduced to
2,500 this year and remain at that level until 2010. We
expect that British forces in Afghanistan will increase
slightly, from 7,000 to 8,000 in 2008, and remain stable for
three years. The House of Commons Defense Committee has
recently found that despite the cut in troop levels, Iraq war
costs will increase by 2 per cent this year and personnel
costs will decrease by only 5 per cent. Meanwhile, the cost
of military operations in Afghanistan is due to rise by 39
per cent. The estimates in our model may be significantly too
low if these patterns continue.
Based on assumptions set out in our book, the budgetary
cost to the UK of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through
2010 will total more than 18 billion. If we
include the social costs, the total impact on the UK will
exceed 20 billion.

I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts, Mr. Barney
Frank.
Mr. FRANK of Massachusetts. Mr. Speaker, first, any suggestion that
this is any way disrespectful of the sacrifice of our troops is
nonsense. Saying that we do not want brave Americans to continue in a
very difficult situation in which they are at a great disadvantage and
that in fact we would like to bring them home is no criticism of them
at all, and nothing undermines their ability to be there. There is a
policy decision as to whether they should be there.
Now my friend from Washington and my friend from California have
said, well, this isn't the right forum parliamentarily, and my friend
from Washington said, yes, we should have a change in strategy but not
this way. But this is all we've got.
Right now, the Members have a choice, and that's the way this place
is now being run: Either you vote for this resolution or you vote it
down and you give an implicit and, in some cases, explicit approval to
the administration to stay there indefinitely. General Petraeus said
the other day he sees us jointly there with the Afghans well after
2014.
Now, yes, there is some gain we could get in deterring terrorism
there, although the notion that if we stop terrorism in Afghanistan,
that's going to be the end of it when there are unfortunately other
places in the world--Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, elsewhere. We can't plug
every hole in the world. And in fact this is an effort that, having
been tried for 10 years, has not, unfortunately, looked to me like it's
going to succeed.
We're told, well, but this was important because we deterred an
attack on Europe. But where are the Europeans? The thing that most
astounded me today was when my friend from Ohio (Mr. Chabot) said,
well, what about our 47 coalition partners? What about them? They're
sitting this one out. They're pulling out. This is a virtually
unilateral American action with a couple of flags that we fly for a few
other countries. Some of them did have people there and they've
suffered casualties, but they're all withdrawing, leaving us alone.
And then let's talk about the cost of this war. The gentleman from
Ohio said it's not a fiscal issue. Of course it is. This war costs us
well over $100 billion a year. You will see Americans die from a lack
of police and fire and public safety here if you continue to fund this
futile war.
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I am grateful that we are having this debate from both sides, those
that want to stay there for another 4 or 5 years versus those of us who
would like to bring our troops home. I want to put a face on this
debate if I may, Mr. Speaker.
This young man's name is Tyler Jordan from Cincinnati, Ohio. He is
attending his father's funeral. He was a gunnery sergeant, Phillip
Jordan, who was killed for this country. The 6-year-

[[Page H1928]]

old little boy, you can't see his eyes, but they hurt. They're pained.
How many more Tyler Jordans are going to be waiting for their daddy
or mom to come home to be buried if we stay there 4, 5, 6, or 7 more
years? And that is what has been indicated by the leadership of the
military and this administration.

{time} 1140

How many more moms and dads and wives and husbands are going to be at
Dover Air Force Base to receive the remains of their loved ones? That
is why this debate is so important, and why we need to have a date and
a time to start bringing them home.
My last poster: this absolutely handsome couple. The marine went out
with PTSD. His beautiful wife, Katie, and his little boy. Last year at
Camp Lejeune, McHugh Boulevard, he pulls his car over in the middle of
the day, and he shoots himself in the head and kills himself.
How many more Tom Bagosys will commit suicide? How many Tyler Jordans
will not have their daddies coming home? How many moms and dads, wives
and husbands will be at Dover to see those in a flag-draped coffin?
I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from Utah (Mr. Chaffetz).
Mr. CHAFFETZ. Mr. Speaker, I am going to be voting in favor of this
resolution.
The United States military is the greatest fighting force on the face
of the planet. I could not be more proud of our troops who have served
our country with such valor and such vigor.
This is the longest war in the history of the United States of
America. And let there be no mistake, the global war on terror is real.
It is very real.
I reject the notion that polls should matter in any way, shape, or
form in this debate. That is not how the United States operates. This
is not how we decide whether or not we go to war or we bring our troops
home.
I reject the notion that bringing our troops home at some point,
which I consider to be victory, is somehow a pathway or paving a
pathway to another 9/11. I think that is offensive, and I think it is
inaccurate.
Now, in many ways we have had success over the course of the years.
Let's understand that according to the National Intelligence Estimate,
which has been printed in many newspapers, that the Taliban poses no
clear and present danger to the current Afghan Government, nor do they
pose a danger to the United States of America. Further, we have had our
CIA Director state that there are less than 50 al-Qaeda in the entire
boundaries of Afghanistan.
I believe it should be the policy of the United States of America
that if we send our troops to war, we go with everything we have. We do
not hold back. A politically correct war is a lost war, and at the
present time we are playing politics. We aren't going with everything
we have. If we are serious about doing it, Mr. President, you go with
everything. And until this President attends more funerals than he does
rounds of golf, this person will be highly offended.
We have to define the mission. The President of the United States has
failed to define success in Afghanistan. We are participating in the
business of nation building, and I reject that. We are propping up a
government that is fundamentally corrupt, and we all know it. It will
not get us to where we want to go.
We must redefine the rules of engagement. Even when I was in
Afghanistan visiting with General Petraeus, he admitted that we are
using smaller caliber rounds. Again, we are trying to be more
politically correct instead of actually protecting American lives.
Let me also say again that terrorism is a global threat. We must use
our forces around the world when there is a direct threat on the United
States of America. That is not confined to just the boundaries of
Afghanistan. It is happening globally, and it is real. We have to deal
with the threats in Iran and not take our eye off the ball.
Finally, I would say that our national debt is a clear and present
danger to the United States of America, and we must pay attention to
that.

Announcement By the Speaker Pro Tempore

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair notes a disturbance in the gallery
in contravention of the law and rules of the House. The Sergeant-at-
Arms will remove those persons responsible for the disturbance and
restore order to the gallery.
The gentleman may continue.
Mr. CHAFFETZ. Mr. Speaker, before I continue, may I inquire as to how
much time I have left?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman has 15 seconds remaining.
Mr. CHAFFETZ. May I ask the gentleman to yield me an additional 15
seconds?
Mr. JONES. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. CHAFFETZ. Aaron Nemelka, Carlos Aragon, Nigel Olsen, Matthew
Wagstaff: Since I have been in office, these are the gentleman who have
lost their lives in Afghanistan. I honor them. I thank them. And as I
have talked to each of their parents, they want those rules of
engagement changed, and they want to end this war in Afghanistan, with
victory. With victory.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from Texas (Mr. Thornberry), the chairman of the Armed
Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities.
Mr. THORNBERRY. I thank the gentlelady for yielding.
Mr. Speaker, this week General Petraeus testified before Congress,
and the essence of his testimony was that we are just now getting the
necessary assets in place to make a difference in Afghanistan; that our
troops and coalition partners are making a significant difference; that
the progress is fragile and reversible; but that it is essential that
we keep it up because vital national interests are at stake.
I fear that as time has passed over the last 10 years and so many
other events come and go in our Nation's life, that it is all too easy
to forget that this country was attacked on 9/11 and that 3,000
Americans lost their lives. And we could come to the floor and hold up
their pictures and the pictures of their children, of those who were
killed on that day by terrorists, the attacks that were launched from
Afghanistan, that were planned in Afghanistan and directed from
Afghanistan.
This Congress at the time voted virtually unanimously that we would
take military action to go make sure that Afghanistan would no longer
be used as a launching pad for attacks against us and that from
Afghanistan, people would no longer come here to kill Americans. That
is the reason we are still there today, and that is the purpose of our
military actions there today.
It is true that we may have a hard time plugging all the holes that
could develop somewhere in the world where terrorist groups could
squirt out to, but it is also true, in my view, that if we don't plug
this hole, if we don't fulfill the mission that we have set out to
fulfill in Afghanistan, we are going to have more holes all over the
world developing, because people will know that we are not serious
about doing what we say, and our security will be severely affected if
that happens.
There have clearly been ups and downs in our military efforts there,
just as there were in Iraq. But I believe that from General Petraeus on
down, we have our best. They deserve our support to fulfill the mission
the country has given them.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record a report from the
Afghanistan Study Group that says that the current U.S. military effort
is helping to fuel the very insurgency we are attempting to defeat.

SUMMARY

At nine years and counting, the U.S. war in Afghanistan is
the longest in our history, surpassing even the Vietnam War,
and it will shortly surpass the Soviet Union's own extended
military campaign there. With the surge, it will cost the
U.S. taxpayers nearly $100 billion per year, a sum roughly
seven times larger than Afghanistan's annual gross national
product (GNP) of $14 billion and greater than the total
annual cost of the new U.S. health insurance program.
Thousands of American and allied personnel have been killed
or gravely wounded.
The U.S. interests at stake in Afghanistan do not warrant
this level of sacrifice. President Obama justified expanding
our commitment by saying the goal was eradicating Al Qaeda.
Yet Al Qaeda is no longer a significant presence in
Afghanistan, and there are only some 400 hard-core Al Qaeda
members remaining in the entire Af/Pak theater, most of them
hiding in Pakistan's northwest provinces.

[[Page H1929]]

America's armed forces have fought bravely and well, and
their dedication is unquestioned. But we should not ask them
to make sacrifices unnecessary to our core national
interests, particularly when doing so threatens long-term
needs and priorities both at home and abroad.
Instead of toppling terrorists, America's Afghan war has
become an ambitious and fruitless effort at ``nation-
building.'' We are mired in a civil war in Afghanistan and
are struggling to establish an effective central government
in a country that has long been fragmented and decentralized.
No matter how desirable this objective might be in the
abstract, it is not essential to U.S. security and it is not
a goal for which the U.S. military is well suited. There is
no clear definition of what would comprise ``success'' in
this endeavor. Creating a unified Afghan state would require
committing many more American lives and hundreds of billions
of additional U.S. dollars for many years to come.
As the WikiLeaks war diary comprised of more than 91,000
secret reports on the Afghanistan War makes clear, any sense
of American and allied progress in the conflict has been
undermined by revelations that many more civilian deaths have
occurred than have been officially acknowledged as the result
of U.S. and allied strike accidents. The Pakistan Inter-
Services Intelligence continued to provide logistics and
financial support to the Afghan Taliban even as U.S. soldiers
were fighting these units. It is clear that Karzai government
affiliates and appointees in rural Afghanistan have often
proven to be more corrupt and ruthless than the Taliban.
Prospects for success are dim. As former Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger recently warned, ``Afghanistan has never been
pacified by foreign forces.'' The 2010 spring offensive in
Marjah was inconclusive, and a supposedly ``decisive'' summer
offensive in Kandahar has been delayed and the expectations
downgraded. U.S. and allied casualties reached an all-time
high in July, and several NATO allies have announced plans to
withdraw their own forces.
The conflict in Afghanistan is commonly perceived as a
struggle between the Karzai government and an insurgent
Taliban movement, allied with international terrorists, that
is seeking to overthrow that government. In fact, the
conflict is a civil war about power-sharing with lines of
contention that are 1) partly ethnic, chiefly, but not
exclusively, between Pashtuns who dominate the south and
other ethnicities such as Tajiks and Uzbeks who are more
prevalent in the north, 2) partly rural vs. urban,
particularly within the Pashtun community, and 3) partly
sectarian.
The Afghanistan conflict also includes the influence of
surrounding nations with a desire to advance their own
interests--including India, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and
others. And with the U.S. intervention in force, the conflict
includes resistance to what is seen as foreign military
occupation.
Resolving the conflict in Afghanistan has primarily to do
with resolving the distribution of power among these factions
and between the central government and the provinces, and
with appropriately decentralizing authority.
Negotiated resolution of these conflicts will reduce the
influence of extremists more readily than military action
will. The Taliban itself is not a unified movement but
instead a label that is applied to many armed groups and
individuals that are only loosely aligned and do not
necessarily have a fondness for the fundamentalist ideology
of the most prominent Taliban leaders.
The Study Group believes the war in Afghanistan has reached
a critical crossroads. Our current path promises to have
limited impact on the civil war while taking more American
lives and contributing to skyrocketing taxpayer debt. We
conclude that a fundamentally new direction is needed, one
that recognizes the United States' legitimate interests in
Central Asia and is fashioned to advance them. Far from
admitting ``defeat,'' the new way forward acknowledges the
manifold limitations of a military solution in a region where
our interests lie in political stability. Our recommended
policy shifts our resources to focus on U.S. foreign policy
strengths in concert with the international community to
promote reconciliation among the warring parties, advance
economic development, and encourage region-wide diplomatic
engagement.
We base these conclusions on the following key points
raised in the Study Group's research and discussions:
The United States has only two vital interests in the Af/
Pak region: 1) preventing Afghanistan from being a ``safe
haven'' from which Al Qaeda or other extremists can organize
more effective attacks on the U.S. homeland; and 2) ensuring
that Pakistan's nuclear arsenal does not fall into hostile
hands.
Protecting our interests does not require a U.S. military
victory over the Taliban. A Taliban takeover is unlikely even
if the United States reduces its military commitment. The
Taliban is a rural insurgency rooted primarily in
Afghanistan's Pashtun population, and succeeded due in some
part to the disenfranchisement of rural Pashtuns. The
Taliban's seizure of power in the 1990s was due to an unusual
set of circumstances that no longer exist and are unlikely to
be repeated.
There is no significant Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan
today, and the risk of a new ``safe haven'' there under more
``friendly'' Taliban rule is overstated. Should an Al Qaeda
cell regroup in Afghanistan, the U.S. would have residual
military capability in the region sufficient to track and
destroy it.
Al Qaeda sympathizers are now present in many locations
globally, and defeating the Taliban will have little effect
on Al Qaeda's global reach. The ongoing threat from Al Qaeda
is better met via specific counter-terrorism measures, a
reduced U.S. military ``footprint'' in the Islamic world, and
diplomatic efforts to improve America's overall image and
undermine international support for militant extremism.
Given our present economic circumstances, reducing the
staggering costs of the Afghan war is an urgent priority.
Maintaining the long-term health of the U.S. economy is just
as important to American strength and security as protecting
U.S. soil from enemy (including terrorist) attacks.
The continuation of an ambitious U.S. military campaign in
Afghanistan will likely work against U.S. interests. A large
U.S. presence fosters local (especially Pashtun) resentment
and aids Taliban recruiting. It also fosters dependence on
the part of our Afghan partners and encourages closer
cooperation among a disparate array of extremist groups in
Afghanistan and Pakistan alike.
Past efforts to centralize power in Afghanistan have
provoked the same sort of local resistance that is convulsing
Afghanistan today. There is ample evidence that this effort
will join others in a long line of failed incursions.
Although the United States should support democratic rule,
human rights and economic development, its capacity to mold
other societies is inherently limited. The costs of trying
should be weighed against our need to counter global
terrorist threats directly, reduce America's $1.4 trillion
budget deficit, repair eroding U.S. infrastructure, and other
critical national purposes. Our support of these issues will
be better achieved as part of a coordinated international
group with which expenses and burdens can be shared.
The bottom line is clear: Our vital interests in
Afghanistan are limited and military victory is not the key
to achieving them.
On the contrary, waging a lengthy counterinsurgency war in
Afghanistan may well do more to aid Taliban recruiting than
to dismantle the group, help spread conflict further into
Pakistan, unify radical groups that might otherwise be
quarreling amongst themselves, threaten the long-term health
of the U.S. economy, and prevent the U.S. government from
turning its full attention to other pressing problems.
The more promising path for the U.S. in the Af/Pak region
would reverse the recent escalation and move away from a
counterinsurgency effort that is neither necessary nor likely
to succeed. Instead, the U.S. should:
1. Emphasize power-sharing and political inclusion. The
U.S. should fast-track a peace process designed to
decentralize power within Afghanistan and encourage a power-
sharing balance among the principal parties.
2. Downsize and eventually end military operations in
southern Afghanistan, and reduce the U.S. military footprint.
The U.S. should draw down its military presence, which
radicalizes many Pashtuns and is an important aid to Taliban
recruitment.
3. Focus security efforts on Al Qaeda and Domestic
Security. Special forces, intelligence assets, and other U.S.
capabilities should continue to seek out and target known Al
Qaeda cells in the region. They can be ready to go after Al
Qaeda should they attempt to relocate elsewhere or build new
training facilities. In addition, part of the savings from
our drawdown should be reallocated to bolster U.S. domestic
security efforts and to track nuclear weapons globally.
4. Encourage economic development. Because destitute states
can become incubators for terrorism, drug and human
trafficking, and other illicit activities, efforts at
reconciliation should be paired with an internationally-led
effort to develop Afghanistan's economy.
5. Engage regional and global stakeholders in a diplomatic
effort designed to guarantee Afghan neutrality and foster
regional stability. Despite their considerable differences,
neighboring states such as India, Pakistan, China, Iran and
Saudi Arabia share a common interest in preventing
Afghanistan from being dominated by any single power or being
a permanently failed state that exports instability to
others.
We believe this strategy will best serve the interests of
women in Afghanistan as well. The worst thing for women is
for Afghanistan to remain paralyzed in a civil war in which
there evolves no organically rooted support for their social
advancement.
The remainder of this report elaborates the logic behind
these recommendations. It begins by summarizing U.S. vital
interests, including our limited interests in Afghanistan
itself and in the region more broadly. It then considers why
the current strategy is failing and why the situation is
unlikely to improve even under a new commander. The final
section outlines ``A New Way Forward'' and explains how a
radically different approach can achieve core U.S. goals at
an acceptable cost.

AMERICA'S INTERESTS

The central goal of U.S. foreign and defense policy is to
ensure the safety and prosperity of the American people. In
practical terms, this means deterring or thwarting direct
attacks on the U.S. homeland, while at the same time
maintaining the long-term

[[Page H1930]]

health of the U.S. economy. A sound economy is the foundation
of all national power, and it is critical to our ability to
shape the global order and preserve our core values and
independence over the long-term. The United States must
therefore avoid an open-ended commitment in Afghanistan,
especially when the costs of military engagement exceed the
likely benefits.
What Is at Stake in Afghanistan?
The United States has only two vital strategic interests in
Afghanistan. Its first strategic interest is to reduce the
threat of successful terrorist attacks against the United
States. In operational terms, the goal is to prevent
Afghanistan from again becoming a ``safe haven'' that could
significantly enhance Al Qaeda's ability to organize and
conduct attacks on the United States.
The United States drove Al Qaeda out of Afghanistan in
2002, and Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is now
negligible. Al Qaeda's remaining founders are believed to be
in hiding in northwest Pakistan, though affiliated cells are
now active in Somalia, Yemen, and several other countries.
These developments suggest that even a successful
counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan would have only a
limited effect on Al Qaeda's ability to conduct terrorist
attacks against the United States and its allies. To the
extent that our presence facilitates jihadi recruitment and
draws resources away from focused counter-terror efforts, it
may even be counterproductive.
The second vital U.S. interest is to keep the conflict in
Afghanistan from sowing instability elsewhere in Central
Asia. Such discord might one day threaten the stability of
the Pakistani state and the security of Pakistan's nuclear
arsenal. If the Pakistani government were to fall to radical
extremists, or if terrorists were able to steal or seize
either a weapon or sufficient nuclear material, then the
danger of a nuclear terrorist incident would increase
significantly. It is therefore important that our strategy in
Afghanistan avoids making the situation in Pakistan worse.
Fortunately, the danger of a radical takeover of the
Pakistani government is small. Islamist extremism in Pakistan
is concentrated within the tribal areas in its northwest
frontier, and largely confined to its Pashtun minority (which
comprises about 15 percent of the population). The Pakistani
army is primarily Punjabi (roughly 44 percent of the
population) and remains loyal. At present, therefore, this
second strategic interest is not seriously threatened.
Beyond these vital strategic interests, the United States
also favors democratic rule, human rights, and economic
development. These goals are consistent with traditional U.S.
values and reflect a longstanding belief that democracy and
the rule of law are preferable to authoritarianism. The U.S.
believes that stable and prosperous democracies are less
likely to threaten their neighbors or to challenge core U.S.
interests. Helping the Afghan people rebuild after decades of
war is also appealing on purely moral grounds.
Yet these latter goals, however worthy in themselves, do
not justify a costly and open-ended commitment to war in
Afghanistan. Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries
in the world and is of little intrinsic strategic value to
the United States. (Recent reports of sizeable mineral
resources do not alter this basic reality.) Afghan society is
divided into several distinct ethnic groups with a long
history of conflict, it lacks strong democratic traditions,
and there is a deeply rooted suspicion of foreign
interference.
It follows that a strategy for Afghanistan must rest on a
clear-eyed assessment of U.S. interests and a realistic
appraisal of what outside help can and cannot accomplish. It
must also take care to ensure that specific policy actions do
not undermine the vital interests identified above. The
current U.S. strategy has lost sight of these considerations,
which is why our war effort there is faltering.

Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record an article by Amanda Terkel of
the Huffington Post that says that military commanders expect the
United States to have a significant presence in Afghanistan for another
8 to 10 years, this according to a Member of Congress who was there.

[From huffingtonpost.com, Mar. 10, 2011]

Commanders Expect a `Significant' U.S. Presence in Afghanistan for 8 to
10 More Years: Dem Rep

(By Amanda Terkel)

Washington.--Military commanders expect the United States
to have a ``significant presence'' in Afghanistan for another
eight to 10 years, according to a member of Congress who just
returned from a trip to the region and has introduced
legislation calling for a full accounting of the costs of the
war.
Rep. Bruce Braley (D-Iowa) spent his congressional four-day
weekend on a fact-finding trip to Afghanistan, meeting with
Gen. David Petraeus, Amb. Karl Eikenberry and members of the
Iowa National Guard. In an interview with The Huffington Post
on Wednesday, Braley said that while there has clearly been
some significant progress, challenges will remain even after
2014, when combat operations are supposed to end.
``It was very clear that under the best-case scenario,
there will be some significant U.S. presence, according to
them, for the next eight to 10 years,'' Braley said, adding
that he expected that presence to include both military and
civilian personnel. ``That includes a very clear commitment
that the drawdown will begin on schedule in July, and that
the targeted date of being out with most combat forces by
2014 will be met. They continue to maintain that they are on
pace to maintain those objectives.''
The key transition benchmark, Braley said, will be the
readiness of local law enforcement to assume principal
responsibility of what are now largely U.S. security
operations. ``I think that the whole point is to transition
the burden of maintaining security to the Afghan army and
Afghan police, but there would be an obviously advisory role,
they anticipate, for the U.S. military for the foreseeable
future,'' he said. ``The big question right now is when they
start drawing down in July, where they're going to do that
and the size of the redeployment.''
Pentagon spokespersons told The Huffington Post that the
Defense Department is not ready to discuss specific timelines
at this point, and so far, no U.S. military or NATO official
has publicly cited the time frame mentioned by Braley.
On Monday, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who was also in
Afghanistan to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, said
that both countries agree U.S. involvement should continue
beyond 2014, although he didn't specify at what levels or for
how long.
``I would say that if the Afghan people and the Afghan
government are interested in an ongoing security relationship
and some sort of an ongoing security presence--with the
permission of the Afghan government--the United States, I
think, is open to the possibility of having some presence
here in terms of training and assistance, perhaps making use
of facilities made available to us by the Afghan government
for those purposes,'' said Gates. ``We have no interest in
permanent bases, but if the Afghans want us here, we are
certainly prepared to contemplate that,''
While in Afghanistan, Gates also said that there were
unlikely to be U.S. withdrawals in July from the hard-fought
areas of the south--Helmand and Kandahar provinces. But he
added, ``While no decisions on numbers have been made, in my
view, we will be well-positioned to begin drawing down some
U.S. and coalition forces this July, even as we redeploy
others to different areas of the country.''
Braley said that one of the most profound comments made by
Petraeus during their meeting was that there wasn't the
``right combination at play'' in Afghanistan until the fall
of last year, which accounts for the slow pace of progress.
Incidentally, Petraeus took command in Afghanistan from
ousted Gen. Stanley McChrystal in June.
``One of the significant challenges that you face is
dealing with a sovereign state that was sovereign in name
only, which was a comment that Ambassador Eikenberry made,''
said Braley. ``You've got a country with a high illiteracy
rate, so that when Afghan army and police are trained, they
are also being taught to read and basic math skills. It's a
very long-term project to get Afghanistan to the point where
it can sustain itself economically. That doesn't even take
into account the activities that are going on in Pakistan,
which have enormous implications in Afghanistan.''
On Wednesday, Braley, a member of the House Committee on
Veterans. Affairs, introduced the True Cost of War Act, which
would require the president and pertinent cabinet members to
submit a written report to Congress on the long-term human
and financial costs of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan
through 2020.
Braley said this legislation has been a priority of his
since he came to Congress in 2006, in large part because of
the toll the Iraq war was taking on the country.
``The whole point of my legislation is that the American
people--especially at a time when Republicans have been
pushing all these budget cuts--are entitled to know what the
true costs are, because the young men and women coming back
with these injuries certainly have a clear understanding of
what they are,'' he said.
Braley added that on his trip, he brought up this issue at
nearly every single briefing he attended, recounting the
experiences he had just before his trip visiting wounded
soldiers and their families who had been treated at the
National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md. and the Walter
Reed Army Medical Center in D.C.
``I wanted them to realize that in a single congressional
district in Iowa, the implications of this war were
enormous,'' said Braley. ``I have to tell you that I was very
impressed by how moved the people I shared those experiences
with were. They tend to get caught up in talking policies,
numbers and long-term objectives, and I think they
appreciated the fact that I brought it down to a very real,
human level.''
On Monday, Rasmussen released a poll finding that for the
first time, a majority of Americans want U.S. troops
withdrawn from Afghanistan within one year.

I include for the Record a statement relating to a challenging of the
claims of progress in Afghanistan that I issued 2 days ago.

Dear Colleague: Today, many of us are hearing from General
Petraeus that ``significant'' progress is being made in
Afghanistan. We have heard it before. Military and civilian
leaders have, for years, told lawmakers and the public that
they were making ``progress'' in Afghanistan. For instance:

[[Page H1931]]

In a speech to a joint session of Congress in 2004,
President Karzai said, ``You [Americans] came to Afghanistan
to defeat terrorism, and we Afghans welcomed and embraced you
for the liberation of our country. . . . This road, this
journey is one of success and victory.''
In a joint press conference with President Karzai after
that speech, President Bush said, ``Today we witness the
rebirth of a vibrant Afghan culture. Music fills the
marketplaces and people are free to come together to
celebrate in open. . . . Years of war and tyranny have eroded
Afghanistan's economy and infrastructure, yet a revival is
under way.''
At another joint press conference with President Karzai in
March of 2006, President Bush said, ``We are impressed by the
progress that your country is making, Mr. President [Karzai],
a lot of it has to do with your leadership.''
In February of 2007, Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry told National
Public Radio that Afghanistan was ``on the steady path, right
now . . . to, I believe, success.''
In April 2008, President Bush told news reporters, ``I
think we're making good progress in Afghanistan.''
October 2008, General McKiernan, Commander of NATO forces
in Afghanistan, told the press ``We are not losing in
Afghanistan.'' In May 2009, he was replaced by General
McChrystal.
October 2008, President Bush said Afghanistan is ``a
situation where there's been progress and there are
difficulties.''
November 2009, President Obama, visiting troops in
Afghanistan, reportedly said, ``Because of the progress we're
making, we look forward to a new phase next year, the
beginning of the transition to Afghan responsibility.''
December 2009, General Stanley McChrystal, the top
commander, predicted that the U.S. troop buildup in
Afghanistan will make ``significant progress'' in turning
back the Taliban and securing the country by the coming
summer. ``By next summer I expect there to be significant
progress that is evident to us,'' McChrystal said in
congressional testimony.
In January 2010, General McChrystal was asked by Diane
Sawyer, ``Have you turned the tide?'' McChrystal answered,
``I believe we are doing that now.''
In May 2010, General McChrystal told Congress that he saw
``progress'' in Afghanistan.
In May 2010, President Obama told the press that ``we've
begun to reverse the momentum'' in Afghanistan.
In June 2010, Secretary Gates told a Congressional
committee that we are ``making headway'' in Afghanistan. In
June 2010, General McChrystal was replaced by General
Petraeus.
In August 2010, General Petraeus said, ``there's progress
being made'' in Afghanistan.
In February 2011, General Petraeus said, ``We have achieved
what we set out to achieve in 2010'' which was to reverse the
insurgency momentum, solidify our accomplishments, and build
on successes. ``We took away safe havens and the
infrastructure that goes with it.''
The President has requested another $113.4 billion to
continue the war in Afghanistan in FY12. That sum will be on
top of $454.7 billion already spent (and borrowed) on the war
to date. On Thursday, March 17, 2011, Congress will have the
opportunity to consider whether all of this ``progress'' has
been worth the money. It is time for Congress to exercise
fiscal responsibility and to assume its Constitutional
responsibilities and end the war in Afghanistan. Vote YES on
H. Con. Res. 28 and direct the President to end this war by
the end of the year.
Sincerely,
Dennis J. Kucinich,
Member of Congress.

Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Michigan (Mr.
Conyers).
Mr. CONYERS. Mr. Speaker, I have a senior member of the Judiciary
Committee on the floor with me, the gentleman from California (Mr.
Berman). I don't see any other members here. But this is an important
matter for the Judiciary Committee in that article I, section 8, says
only Congress has the right to declare war.
Obviously, we haven't declared war in a very, very long time, so I
think that we have to find out what is the constitutional basis that we
are operating under in--well, I will skip Iraq. We all know that was
based on false information promulgated from the President of the United
States.

{time} 1150

But, now, getting to Afghanistan, we find that we have a resolution
dating back to September 14, 2011, a use of force resolution. But that
has expired, by any rational investigation of it. It was designed to
respond to the 9/11 terrorist attack and to fight al Qaeda. But today
we're in Afghanistan on a long-term effort at rebuilding the nation.
Nation building is unrelated to that original resolution. And now we're
in Afghanistan and an unlawful incursion into Pakistan.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. CONYERS. So now we're in Pakistan and the CIA is operating covert
combat activities there, and those are unlawful. We're violating the UN
Charter, which we are supposed to be a leader in. And so the Obama
administration is carrying on the same military operations of its
predecessor.
Mr. BERMAN. May I inquire how much time is remaining on the time
allotted to me?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California has 22 minutes
remaining.
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask unanimous consent that 8
of those 22 minutes be yielded to the gentleman from Indiana (Mr.
Burton), who is now controlling the time for the majority on the
committee.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from California?
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Burton) will
control 8 minutes.
Mr. BERMAN. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
I just want to take a couple of minutes to talk about one point. That
part of the majority party that is urging the same position I am on
this resolution, which is a ``no'' vote, has made the argument a number
of times that when you're dealing with fundamental issues of national
security, you spend money, even under difficult times, a point that I
have no disagreement with. And they argue the issue of what the
alternatives will be and the potential for providing new safe havens
for terrorists or more safe havens for terrorists or a return of
Afghanistan as a safe haven for terrorists if we pass this resolution,
and I don't disagree with that point.
What I find upsetting about the majority's position is their denial
of the fundamental point. They quote General Petraeus for every
position that they find philosophically and factually satisfying and
ignore General Petraeus and Secretary Gates on the fundamental concept
of how we hope to change the course of what is happening in
Afghanistan. Because if we don't change it, then we have to come and
address the fundamental question of what we're doing there through a
counterinsurgency strategy.
So we talk about clear and hold and build. And it is the military's
job to clear and, for a time, to hold, but build is fundamentally a
civilian program. General Petraeus over and over again has said this
conflict in Afghanistan cannot be won unless we strengthen the
governance of a very flawed government in Afghanistan, unless we
provide economic opportunities for that society to progress and win the
hearts and minds of the people of Afghanistan to the cause for which we
are fighting.
It's also a view of Afghanistan as if it's isolated from the rest of
the world. I can go through countries around the world--failed states,
nearly failing states, terrible problems--which are certainly becoming
safe harbors for terrorism.
So when the same party that makes a strong case for our national
security interests here at the same time passes legislation which
slashes every aspect of efforts to strengthen governance and
development assistance and to provide the kinds of opportunities that
serve our national security interests, I find it a strange kind of
logic and a flaw in their approach to this.
I understand the economic hardships we have. If one wanted to look at
the foreign assistance budget and take specific things that aren't
working and get rid of them, I understand that, and if one wanted to
make proportional cuts in the foreign assistance budget. But to come
with the argument of, ``We're broke; we've got to cut spending,'' and
then disproportionately focus on that aspect of our national security
strategy which will do a tremendous amount and will be fundamental to
any effort to stop them from being safe harbors for terrorism, and that
is to massively slash disproportionately foreign assistance, it's a
terrible mistake. It terribly undermines the national security strategy
that we're trying to achieve through our operations and our presence
and the money we're spending

[[Page H1932]]

in Afghanistan. It's not thinking, I think, as clearly as needs to be
thought. And I urge those in the majority to think again about how much
the cuts that we need to make should be coming from that part of the
budget that constitutes 1 percent of the Federal budget.
I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from California, I have great
respect for him in many, many ways. We talk about we've got to enhance
the governance of Afghanistan. Well, this is President Karzai's quote
from March 12, 2001. I have read it before, but I want to submit it for
the Record:
``I request that NATO and America should stop these operations on our
soil,'' Karzai said. ``This war is not on our soil. If this war is
against terror, then this war is not here. Terror is not here.''
I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from Arkansas (Mr. Griffin), the vice chair of the Foreign
Affairs Subcommittee on Europe and Eurasia, and an Iraq war veteran who
continues to serve as a major in the U.S. Army Reserves.
Mr. GRIFFIN of Arkansas. I rise today in opposition to H. Con. Res.
28 because it would undermine our national security and our ability to
keep us safe right here at home. I understand that many Americans are
frustrated with the length of this war. I also understand the American
people have demanded the U.S. Government get its fiscal house in order.
I know we cannot afford to fund this war indefinitely. But some think
that cutting and running immediately from Afghanistan is the solution.
That's simply not an option.
This is a reckless resolution. We've made progress in Afghanistan,
and we cannot afford to abandon that progress by immediately
withdrawing our troops. What we must do, however, is demand that our
military and civilian leaders set clear and definable goals for our
military efforts in Afghanistan. We also must listen to our military
commanders who are there on the ground day in and day out.
General Petraeus has testified to our military's substantial progress
in impeding the Taliban's influence and increasing the number of Afghan
security forces. He cautioned, however, that this recent success is
fragile and reversible.
We must allow our troops to remain in Afghanistan to defeat the
Taliban and al Qaeda so that we can keep Americans safe here. We must
continue to train and support local security forces because this will
bring about the safe and successful full transition of the country's
security to the Afghan people.

{time} 1200

To withdraw now, to withdraw immediately, would be to forfeit that
progress and allow the Taliban and other extremists to regain their
footing in Afghanistan.
We must honor the men and women of our Armed Forces, who have fought
so hard. We must honor the men and women of the international armed
forces, who have fought so hard. We must honor the men and women of the
Afghan forces, who have fought hard to defend their own country. They
have sacrificed so much, and we cannot abandon them now. Most
importantly, it is not in our national interest to do so.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to thank Mr. Berman for
giving us 8 minutes of his time, and I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. KUCINICH. May I ask, Mr. Speaker, how much time each group has
remaining.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from Florida controls 22
minutes; the gentleman from Ohio controls 22 minutes; the gentleman
from California controls 9\1/2\ minutes; and the gentleman from North
Carolina controls 16 minutes.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield myself 1 minute.
Mr. Speaker, Members of this House are talking about cutting $100
billion from the budget. Well, we can trim the Federal budget of more
than $100 billion in out-of-control spending.
Members have been very concerned about out-of-control spending. They
are calling for a reduction in the Federal budget. Cutting spending on
the war in Afghanistan would solve their concerns. Spending on the war
is greater than the minimum amount of Federal spending certain Members
believe must be cut from the budget for fiscal responsibility.
In the fiscal year 2012 budget request, the President has requested
$113.4 billion to continue the war. In fact, congressional
appropriations of over $100 billion for the Afghanistan war has been
the rule in recent years; and as we've seen, there is talk of extending
this war for another 10 years. $1 trillion, perhaps?
Spending on the Afghanistan war has increased much faster than
overall government spending in recent years. Consider a comparison of
the average annual rates of growth of government spending versus the
Afghanistan war spending from 2008 through 2011.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield myself 10 more seconds.
Overall government spending has increased 9 percent from 2008 through
2011, but Afghanistan war spending has increased 25 percent. If you
want to save $100 billion, then vote for this resolution.
I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from California (Mr. Filner).
(Mr. FILNER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. FILNER. Mr. Kucinich, I thank you for your courage in bringing
this debate to the floor. It's like the 600-pound elephant in the
Nation. This war has gone on and on--and we never discuss it.
I want to applaud the courage of Mr. Jones from North Carolina. He
has taken more than a lot of grief from his own party, and he has stood
up to that with courage that is admirable.
I want to look at this debate, my colleagues, from the point of view
of former chairman of the Veterans' Affairs Committee, a position in
which I was honored to serve.
Mr. Kucinich, I think you underestimate the cost of this war. I've
never seen you so conservative.
I had a hearing last year before the Veterans' Affairs Committee in
which Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stigleitz testified. He said
these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will be $5 trillion to $7 trillion
wars over their whole course. Let us not forget--and that's not
calculated in your costs. Mr. Kucinich--the veterans, those who have
served in this war with great courage, with great professionalism.
Treating these veterans costs hundreds of billions of dollars more, and
we're not considering that when we talk about ending this war.
We've been told that there have been about 45,000 casualties in these
two wars in the last 10 years. Then why have almost 1 million people
shown up at the Veterans Administration hospitals for war-related
injuries? One million. This is not a rounding error. This is a
deliberate attempt to misguide us on the cost of this war. This war is
costing, in addition to what the budget says, hundreds of billions more
for treating our veterans. We must calculate that into the cost of this
war.
When you guys say, ``deficit and debt,'' we are going to say,
``Afghanistan.''
In recent weeks, we have heard much from our Republican colleagues
about out-of-control Federal spending. They want to cut $100 billion
from our budget.
If my friends are serious about cutting the budget, they should vote
for H. Con. Res. 28.
Since 2001, our Nation has wasted $1.121 trillion on the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. We are spending $5.4 billion a month in Iraq and $5.7
billion a month in Afghanistan. This is a waste of our national
resources and taxpayer funding!
For FY2012, the President has requested $113.4 billion to continue
the war in Afghanistan.
Between 2008 through 2011, overall government spending went up 9
percent annually. But this is nothing compared to the 25 percent annual
increase in spending in Afghanistan.
Furthermore, spending on the Afghanistan war is rising at an
accelerating rate. Over just three years (2010, 2011, and 2012), we
will spend 45 percent more on the war in Afghanistan than we did in the
preceding 8 years!
There is no better example of out-of-control Federal spending.
If Congress is really serious about being fiscally responsible and
about cutting the Federal budget by three figures, then cutting
spending on the out-of-control, hundred billion dollar a

[[Page H1933]]

year war in Afghanistan must be a serious consideration.
Today, we have an opportunity to do just that! A Yes vote will cut
the 2012 budget by at least $113.4 billion.
If you are serious about reducing the deficit, then vote ``yes'' on
H. Con. Res. 28!
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman from
California (Mr. Rohrabacher).
Mr. ROHRABACHER. You're someone who says ``billions of dollars'' and
``Afghanistan'' both.
Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the resolution and in support of
our military personnel who are putting their lives in jeopardy in
Afghanistan. They are doing their duty for us, for which every American
should be eternally grateful. Now we must do our duty to them. If our
military is engaged in a dangerous mission that we believe cannot be
successful and but for face-saving we are keeping them there, we are
doing a disservice to our defenders and to our Nation.
The people of Afghanistan are as courageous and independent as any on
Earth. They are indomitable and unconquerable--a lesson invaders have
learned the hard way for centuries. The liberation of Afghanistan from
the Taliban was accomplished, not by a massive influx of American
troops, but instead by fighters of the Northern Alliance militia and
the air support that we provided them. It was a tremendous success.
When they were doing the fighting, it was a success. When we try to
do the fighting all over the world, we lose. We cannot be a Nation that
occupies the rest of the world. We cannot be a country that sends its
troops all over the world to handle every problem.
After the great success of eliminating the Taliban from Afghanistan,
our foreign policy bureaucracy, not our troops, set in place a
government structure totally inconsistent with the village and tribal
culture of the Afghan people. That information is no surprise to
anybody. Most of us understand that.
They have a tribal culture there in Afghanistan and a village system.
That is what works for them. Our State Department has tried to foist
upon them a centralized system in which they don't even elect their
provincial governors. After being liberated from the Taliban by
Afghans, our troops are now there to force the Afghan people to accept
an overly centralized and corrupt system which was put in place by our
State Department bureaucracy.
I'm sorry, it won't work. It will not work. Any attempt to subjugate
these people and to force them to acquiesce to our vision of
Afghanistan will fail. We all understand that. If we are honest with
ourselves, we know that that tactic won't succeed. To keep our troops
over there any longer is sinful. It is a disservice to our country, and
it is also sinful to those young men who are willing to give their legs
and their lives for us.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. JONES. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. ROHRABACHER. It is now up to us in Congress to stand up for those
Americans in uniform who will be needlessly giving their lives to
accomplish a mission that cannot be accomplished. If it can't be done,
we should not be sending them over there.
The most responsible course of action is to, as quickly as possible,
get our people out of this predicament, not to dig us in deeper and not
to wait until this bloody quagmire kills even more Americans and we
have to leave without success. If we can't win, we should pull out now.
Mr. JONES. I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 3 minutes to a
gentleman who knows a lot about the threats that are facing our Nation,
the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Rogers), the chairman of the House
Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

{time} 1210

Mr. ROGERS of Michigan. Mr. Speaker, there is a lot of power and
emotion in this debate today, and I'm glad for that. There should be.
I recall the first time I had the chance to get to Afghanistan in
late 2003. I met a woman there who had been trained as a doctor in the
United States. She went to practice medicine in her home country of
Afghanistan. When the Taliban took over, they stripped her of her
medical duties. They sent her home. She was imprisoned in her own home
for 6 years. I met her at a children's hospital, and in the days of the
first conflict, she stripped off her burka, she walked 10 miles to the
town to show up to provide medical care for the first time to these
children as a woman in Afghanistan. With tears in her eyes she said,
Thank you. These children have no chance. Afghanistan has no future.
And we saw the soccer field where they took people down and summarily
executed them for violations that they deemed to be executable offenses
under no law of their own, the burned buses where the modern
conveniences were burned to get them out of the system when the Taliban
took over to apply sharia law. And none of that would matter from the
pain and the loss if you've attended one of these fine soldier's
funerals; it is an emotional thing, and there is pain, and hurt, and
sorrow, and something lost in all of us.
So none of those other things would be alone a reason to send our
soldiers to risk their lives in defense of this country, but because of
the things I talked about, because they have imprisoned women in
Afghanistan, because of the things that they've done to the people
there, it created hate and ignorance and brutality, and al Qaeda saw an
advantage, and they took it. They established there a safe haven where
they recruited, where they financed, where they planned, where they
armed themselves, where they recruited people around the world from
other countries to come to train, and they sent some of them to the
United States of America to slaughter 3,000 people.
And if you want to talk about money, the trillion-plus dollars that
9/11 has cost us just in economic loss, that's why we're there. We
should not forget the mission today and why they risk their lives. If
you want to talk about the State Department policies, I'm all in. I'd
love to have that debate. If you want to talk about rules of
engagement, I'm in, that's a place, let's do it, let's have that
debate.
But if you want to tell the enemy today--and by the way, for the
first time, we've got information that their commanders are saying we
don't want to go fight. The spring offensive is being planned now,
right now. Our soldiers are preparing for battle right now. This may be
that last great battle in Afghanistan on behalf of our soldiers to
eliminate the major components of the Taliban taking over their
country.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. ROGERS of Michigan. So if that woman doctor who trained here,
taking care of kids, who cried for help and support doesn't move you,
and maybe it shouldn't; for the pain of that funeral, that loss, that
soldier who gave it all for this country doesn't move; then what ought
to move you is the fact that these folks are gearing up and hoping and
praying that we give up and we pull these troops out before the mission
is done.
We all want them home. We want them home with no safe haven and a way
that we can continue to put pressure on al Qaeda and its supporting
affiliates.
Mr. KUCINICH. I would like to include in the Record an article on
AlterNet by Tom Engelhardt which discusses the open-ended nature of the
Afghanistan war.

How To Schedule a War: The Incredible Shrinking Withdrawal Date

(By Tom Engelhardt)

Going, going, gone! You can almost hear the announcer's
voice throbbing with excitement, only we're not talking about
home runs here, but about the disappearing date on which, for
the United States and its military, the Afghan War will
officially end.
Practically speaking, the answer to when it will be over
is: just this side of never. If you take the word of our
Afghan War commander, the secretary of defense, and top
officials of the Obama administration and NATO, we're not
leaving any time soon. As with any clever time traveler,
every date that's set always contains a verbal escape hatch
into the future.
In my 1950s childhood, there was a cheesy (if thrilling)
sci-fi flick, The Incredible Shrinking Man, about a fellow
who passed

[[Page H1934]]

through a radioactive cloud in the Pacific Ocean and soon
noticed that his suits were too big for him. Next thing you
knew, he was living in a doll house, holding off his pet cat,
and fighting an ordinary spider transformed into a monster.
Finally, he disappeared entirely leaving behind only a
sonorous voice to tell us that he had entered a universe
where ``the unbelievably small and the unbelievably vast
eventually meet, like the closing of a gigantic circle.''
In recent weeks, without a radioactive cloud in sight, the
date for serious drawdowns of American troops in Afghanistan
has followed a similar path toward the vanishing point and is
now threatening to disappear ``over the horizon'' (a place
where, we are regularly told, American troops will lurk once
they have finally handed their duties over to the Afghan
forces they are training).
If you remember, back in December 2009 President Obama
spoke of July 2011 as a firm date to ``begin the transfer of
our forces out of Afghanistan,'' the moment assumedly when
the beginning of the end of the war would come into sight. In
July of this year, Afghan President Hamid Karzai spoke of
2014 as the date when Afghan security forces ``will be
responsible for all military and law enforcement operations
throughout our country.''
Administration officials, anxious about the effect that
2011 date was having on an American public grown weary of an
unpopular war and on an enemy waiting for us to depart,
grabbed Karzai's date and ran with it (leaving many of his
caveats about the war the Americans were fighting,
particularly his desire to reduce the American presence, in
the dust). Now, 2014 is hyped as the new 2011.
It has, in fact, been widely reported that Obama officials
have been working in concert to ``play down'' the president's
2011 date, while refocusing attention on 2014. In recent
weeks, top administration officials have been little short of
voluble on the subject. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
(``We're not getting out. We're talking about probably a
years-long process.''), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton,
and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen,
attending a security conference in Australia, all ``cited
2014 . . . as the key date for handing over the defense of
Afghanistan to the Afghans themselves.'' The New York Times
headlined its report on the suddenly prominent change in
timing this way: ``U.S. Tweaks Message on Troops in
Afghanistan.''
Quite a tweak. Added Times reporter Elisabeth Bumiller:
``The message shift is effectively a victory for the
military, which has long said the July 2011 deadline
undermined its mission by making Afghans reluctant to work
with troops perceived to be leaving shortly.''

Inflection Points and Aspirational Goals

Barely had 2014 risen into the headlines, however, before
that date, too, began to be chipped away. As a start, it
turned out that American planners weren't talking about just
any old day in 2014, but its last one. As Lieutenant General
William Caldwell, head of the NATO training program for
Afghan security forces, put it while holding a Q&A with a
group of bloggers, ``They're talking about December 31st,
2014. It's the end of December in 2014 . . . that [Afghan]
President Karzai has said they want Afghan security forces in
the lead.''
Nor, officials rushed to say, was anyone talking about 2014
as a date for all American troops to head for the exits, just
``combat troops''--and maybe not even all of them. Possibly
tens of thousands of trainers and other so-called non-combat
forces would stay on to help with the ``transition process.''
This follows the Iraq pattern where 50,000 American troops
remain after the departure of U.S. ``combat'' forces to great
media fanfare. Richard Holbrooke, Obama's Special
Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was typical in
calling for ``the substantial combat forces [to] be phased
out at the end of 2014, four years from now.'' (Note the
usual verbal escape hatch, in this case ``substantial,''
lurking in his statement.)
Last Saturday, behind ``closed doors'' at a NATO summit in
Lisbon, Portugal, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus
presented European leaders with a ``phased four-year plan''
to ``wind down American and allied fighting in Afghanistan.''
Not surprisingly, it had the end of 2014 in its sights and
the president quickly confirmed that ``transition'' date,
even while opening plenty of post-2014 wiggle room. By then,
as he described it, ``our footprint'' would only be
``significantly reduced.'' (He also claimed that, post-2014,
the U.S. would be maintaining a ``counterterrorism
capability'' in Afghanistan--and Iraq--for which ``platforms
to . . . execute . . . counterterrorism operations,''
assumedly bases, would be needed.)
Meanwhile, unnamed ``senior U.S. officials'' in Lisbon were
clearly buttonholing reporters to ``cast doubt on whether the
United States, the dominant power in the 28-nation alliance,
would end its own combat mission before 2015.'' As always,
the usual qualifying phrases were profusely in evidence.
Throughout these weeks, the ``tweaking''--that is, the
further chipping away at 2014 as a hard and fast date for
anything--only continued. Mark Sedwill, NATO's civilian
counterpart to U.S. commander General David Petraeus,
insisted that 2014 was nothing more than ``an inflection
point'' in an ever more drawn-out drawdown process. That
process, he insisted, would likely extend to ``2015 and
beyond,'' which, of course, put 2016 officially into play.
And keep in mind that this is only for combat troops, not
those assigned to ``train and support'' or keep ``a strategic
over watch'' on Afghan forces.
On the eve of NATO's Lisbon meeting, Pentagon spokesman
Geoff Morrell, waxing near poetic, declared 2014 nothing more
than an ``aspirational goal,'' rather than an actual
deadline. As the conference began, NATO's Secretary General
Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted that the alliance would be
committed in Afghanistan ``as long as it takes.'' And new
British Chief of the Defense Staff General Sir David Richards
suggested that, given the difficulty of ever defeating the
Taliban (or al-Qaeda) militarily, NATO should be preparing
plans to maintain a role for its troops for the next 30 to 40
years.

war extender

Here, then, is a brief history of American time in
Afghanistan. After all, this isn't our first Afghan War, but
our second. The first, the CIA's anti-Soviet jihad (in which
the Agency funded a number of the fundamentalist extremists
we're now fighting in the second), lasted a decade, from 1980
until 1989 when the Soviets withdrew in defeat.
In October 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, the Bush
administration launched America's second Afghan War, taking
Kabul that November as the Taliban dissolved. The power of
the American military to achieve quick and total victory
seemed undeniable, even after Osama bin Laden slipped out of
Tora Bora that December and escaped into Pakistan's tribal
borderlands.
However, it evidently never crossed the minds of President
Bush's top officials to simply declare victory and get out.
Instead, as the U.S. would do in Iraq after the invasion of
2003, the Pentagon started building a new infrastructure of
military bases (in this case, on the ruins of the old Soviet
base infrastructure). At the same time, the former Cold
Warriors in Washington let their dreams about pushing the
former commies of the former Soviet Union out of the former
soviet socialist republics of Central Asia, places where,
everyone knew, you could just about swim in black gold and
run geopolitically wild.
Then, when the invasion of Iraq was launched in March 2003,
Afghanistan, still a ``war'' (if barely) was forgotten, while
the Taliban returned to the field, built up their strength,
and launched an insurgency that has only gained momentum to
this moment. In 2008, before leaving office, George W. Bush
bumped his favorite general, Iraq surge commander Petraeus,
upstairs to become the head of the Central Command which
oversees America's war zones in the Greater Middle East,
including Afghanistan.
Already the guru of counterinsurgency (known familiarly as
COIN), Petraeus had, in 2006, overseen the production of the
military's new war-fighting bible, a how-to manual dusted off
from the Vietnam era's failed version of COIN and made new
and magical again. In June 2010, eight and a half years into
our Second Afghan War, at President Obama's request, Petraeus
took over as Afghan War commander. It was clear then that
time was short--with an administration review of Afghan war
strategy coming up at year's end and results needed quickly.
The American war was also in terrible shape.
In the new COIN-ish U.S. Army, however, it is a dogma of
almost biblical faith that counterinsurgencies don't produce
quick results; that, to be successful, they must be pursued
for years on end. As Petraeus put it back in 2007 when
talking about Iraq, ``[T]ypically, I think historically,
counterinsurgency operations have gone at least nine or 10
years.'' Recently, in an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC
News, he made a nod toward exactly the same timeframe for
Afghanistan, one accepted as bedrock knowledge in the world
of the COINistas.
What this meant was that, whether as CENTCOM commander or
Afghan War commander, Petraeus was looking for two
potentially contradictory results at the same time. Somehow,
he needed to wrest those nine to 10 years of war-fighting
from a president looking for a tighter schedule and, in a war
going terribly sour, he needed almost instant evidence of
``progress'' that would fit the president's coming December
``review'' of the war and might pacify unhappy publics in the
U.S. and Europe.
Now let's do the math. At the moment, depending on how you
care to count, we are in the 10th year of our second Afghan
War or the 20th year of war interruptus. Since June 2009,
Petraeus and various helpers have stretched the schedule to
2014 for (most) American combat troops and at least 2015 or
2016 for the rest. If you were to start counting from the
president's December surge address, that's potentially seven
more years. In other words, we're now talking about either a
15-year war or an on-and-off again quarter-century one. All
evidence shows that the Pentagon's war planners would like to
extend those already vague dates even further into the
future.

On Ticking Clocks in Washington and Kabul

Up to now, only one of General Petraeus's two campaigns has
been under discussion here: the other one, fought out these
last years not in Afghanistan, but in Washington and NATO
capitals, over how to schedule a war. Think of it as the war
for a free hand in determining how long the Afghan War is to
be fought.
It has been run from General Petraeus's headquarters in
Kabul, the giant five-sided

[[Page H1935]]

military headquarters on the Potomac presided over by
Secretary of Defense Gates, and various think-tanks filled
with America's militarized intelligentsia scattered around
Washington--and it has proven a classically successful
``clear, hold, build'' counterinsurgency operation.
Pacification in Washington and a number of European capitals
has occurred with remarkably few casualties. (Former Afghan
war commander General Stanley McChrystal, axed by the
president for insubordination, has been the exception, not
the rule.)
Slowly but decisively, Petraeus and company constricted
President Obama's war-planning choices to two options: more
and yet more. In late 2009, the president agreed to that
second surge of troops (the first had been announced that
March), not to speak of CIA agents, drones, private
contractors, and State Department and other civilian
government employees. In his December ``surge'' address at
West Point (for the nation but visibly to the military),
Obama had the temerity as commander-in-chief to name a
specific, soon-to-arrive date--July 2011--for beginning a
serious troop drawdown. It was then that the COIN campaign in
Washington ramped up into high gear with the goal of driving
the prospective end of the war back by years.
It took bare hours after the president's address for
administration officials to begin leaking to media sources
that his drawdown would be ``conditions based''--a phrase
guaranteed to suck the meaning out of any deadline. (The
president had indeed acknowledged in his address that his
administration would take into account ``conditions on the
ground.'') Soon, the Secretary of Defense and others took to
the airwaves in a months-long campaign emphasizing that
drawdown in Afghanistan didn't really mean drawdown, that
leaving by no means meant leaving, and that the future was
endlessly open to interpretation.
With the ratification in Lisbon of that 2014 date ``and
beyond,'' the political clocks--an image General Petraeus
loves--in Washington, European capitals, and American Kabul
are now ticking more or less in unison.
Two other ``clocks'' are, however, ticking more like bombs.
If counterinsurgency is a hearts and minds campaign, then the
other target of General Petraeus's first COIN campaign has
been the restive hearts and minds of the American and
European publics. Last year a Dutch government fell over
popular opposition to Afghanistan and, even as NATO met last
weekend, thousands of antiwar protestors marched in London
and Lisbon. Europeans generally want out and their
governments know it, but (as has been true since 1945) the
continent's leaders have no idea how to say ``no'' to
Washington. In the U.S., too, the Afghan war grows ever more
unpopular, and while it was forgotten during the election
season, no politician should count on that phenomenon lasting
forever.
And then, of course, there's the literal ticking bomb, the
actual war in Afghanistan. In that campaign, despite a
drumbeat of American/NATO publicity about ``progress,'' the
news has been grim indeed. American and NATO casualties have
been higher this year than at any other moment in the war;
the Taliban seems if anything more entrenched in more parts
of the country; the Afghan public, ever more puzzled and less
happy with foreign troops and contractors traipsing across
the land; and Hamid Karzai, the president of the country,
sensing a situation gone truly sour, has been regularly
challenging the way General Petraeus is fighting the war in
his country. (The nerve!)
No less unsettling, General Petraeus himself has seemed
unnerved. He was declared ``irked'' by Karzai's comments and
was said to have warned Afghan officials that their
president's criticism might be making his ``own position
`untenable,' '' which was taken as a resignation threat.
Meanwhile, the COIN-meister was in the process of imposing a
new battle plan on Afghanistan that leaves counterinsurgency
(at least as usually described) in a roadside ditch. No more
is the byword ``protect the people,'' or ``clear, hold,
build''; now, it's smash, kill, destroy. The war commander
has loosed American firepower in a major way in the Taliban
strongholds of southern Afghanistan.
Early this year, then-commander McChrystal had
significantly cut back on U.S. air strikes as a COIN-ish
measure meant to lessen civilian casualties. No longer. In a
striking reversal, air power has been called in--and in a big
way. In October, U.S. planes launched missiles or bombs on
1,000 separate Afghan missions, numbers seldom seen since the
2001 invasion. The Army has similarly loosed its massively
powerful High Mobility Artillery Rocket System in the area
around the southern city of Kandahar. Civilian deaths are
rising rapidly.

Mr. KUCINICH. I yield myself such time as I may consume.
We keep coming back to 9/11. We're near the eighth anniversary of the
invasion of Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11, and which was
predicated on a lie, no weapons of mass destruction. The war in
Afghanistan is based on a misreading of history. The Soviet Union
understood that at hard cost. The occupation is fueling an insurgency.
Now, Jeremy Scahill in the Nation points out that Taliban leaders
have said they've seen a swelling in Taliban ranks since 9/11 in part
attributed to the widely held perception that the Karzai government is
corrupt and illegitimate, and that Afghans, primarily ethnic Pashtuns,
want foreign occupation forces out. They're only fighting to make
foreigners leave Afghanistan. Occupation fuels insurgency. That is an
ironclad fact.
I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Lee).
Ms. LEE. Thank you very much.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of this resolution, of
which I'm proud to be an original cosponsor, and I'd like to thank
Representative Kucinich for his work on this resolution and also mainly
for his continued and passioned defense of congressional war powers
authority. Also, I, too, want to commend Congressman Jones for his
leadership on this issue and so many other issues.
This resolution is simple and straightforward. It directs the
President to end the near decade-long war in Afghanistan and to
redeploy United States Armed Forces from Afghanistan by the end of this
year. Al Qaeda is not in Afghanistan, and Osama bin Laden still has not
been found. This resolution comes at a time when a growing number of
Members of Congress, military and foreign policy experts, and, in
particular, the American people, are calling for an immediate end to
this war. Enough is enough.
Let me just say something. First of all, we've heard that polls are
showing that nearly three-quarters of the American public favors action
to speed up U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan. Yes, the Congress
authorized the use of force in 2001, which I voted against because it
gave the President, any President, a blank check to use force, anytime,
anyplace, anywhere in the world for any period of time. It was not a
declaration of war, yet this has been the longest war in American
history, the longest war in American history.
As the daughter of a 25-year Army officer who served in two wars, let
me salute our troops, let me honor our troops and just say our
servicemen and -women have performed with incredible courage and
commitment in Afghanistan. But they have been put in an impossible
situation. It's time to bring them home. There is no military solution
in Afghanistan.
As we fight here in Congress to protect investments in education,
health care, public health and safety, the war in Afghanistan will cost
more than $100 billion in 2011 alone.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentlewoman has expired.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield the gentlewoman an additional 30 seconds.
Ms. LEE. No one can deny that the increasing costs of the war in
Afghanistan are constraining our efforts to invest in job creation and
jump-start the economy.
Yesterday, I joined a bipartisan group of 80 Members of Congress in
sending a letter to President Obama calling for a significant and
sizeable reduction in United States troop levels in Afghanistan no
later than July of this year.
This debate that we're having today here should have occurred in 2001
when Congress authorized this blank check. It was barely debated. It
was barely debated, and the rush to war has created not less anger
towards the United States but more hostilities, and it's not in our
national security nor economic interests to continue.
Mr. KUCINICH. I want to point out that for those Members who are
concerned about the finances of this government, U.S. debt soared from
$6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion.
Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Prize winner economist, and his associate,
Linda Bilmes, pointed out that at least a quarter of that increase is
directly attributable to the war in Iraq. As a result of two costly
wars, funded by debt, our fiscal house was in abysmal shape even before
the financial crisis, and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.
The global financial crisis was due at least in part--this is a quote--
to the war.

{time} 1220

Now they continue. The Iraq war didn't just contribute to the
severity of the fiscal crisis, though it kept us from responding to it
effectively. So, my friends, finance is a national security issue. If
we are broke, we can't defend ourselves.

[[Page H1936]]

I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Welch).
Mr. WELCH. I thank the gentleman.
Mr. Speaker, my colleagues on the other side, America does have a
national security interest in protecting American citizens from
terrorist attack. But the question before us is this: Is that national
security interest being served by 10 years of nation building in the
third most corrupt country in the entire world? Is our national
security interest being served by sending 100,000 troops and $454
billion in taxpayer money to a country where there are 50 members of al
Qaeda? Is it a winning and likely successful strategy when al Qaeda
simply moves where we aren't? They move out of Afghanistan into
Pakistan, to Sudan, to wherever they can find a safe haven.
Does it make sense to ask our soldiers and our taxpayers to sacrifice
when our Afghan partner is so profoundly corrupt? And I mean world-
class corrupt: $3 billion in pallets of cash moved out of the Kabul
airport to safe havens for warlords; an Afghan Vice President who flies
to Dubai with $52 million in walking-around money; when the U.S.-backed
Afghan major crimes unit tries to get Karzai to act on corruption and
Karzai gets his buddy out of jail. Yes, we have a national security
interest in protecting America from attack, but this is a losing
strategy.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentlewoman from New York
(Ms. Velazquez).
(Ms. VELAZQUEZ asked and was given permission to revise and extend
her remarks.)
Ms. VELAZQUEZ. Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of this
resolution.
After 10 long years, $336 billion spent, 1,500 American lives lost,
and thousands maimed, it is time to bring our troops home. Our
servicemen and -women and their coalition allies have performed
valiantly. The United States has done everything possible to provide
opportunity for the Afghanistan people and the chance for a democratic
government there to mature and take hold. Afghanistan must now take
responsibility for its own destiny.
The fact of the matter is this: If now is not the time to leave, then
when? Afghanistan has become the longest war in U.S. history, with a
price tag of $100 billion a year. At a time when we are contemplating
cutting services for seniors, educational programs for children, and
tuition assistance for working college students, that money could be
spent more wisely elsewhere.
Mr. Speaker, too much of our country's treasure has gone toward this
war. But more importantly, the cost in human life, American and Afghan,
has been enormous. As the world's greatest democracy, what kind of
message does this war send to other nations? Do as we say, not as we
do?
It is time to make our actions reflect our words. Get out of
Afghanistan now.
Mr. KUCINICH. I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. BERMAN. I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, at the present time, I would like to yield 5
minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Paul).
(Mr. PAUL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. PAUL. I thank the gentleman.
The question we are facing today is, should we leave Afghanistan? I
think the answer is very clear, and it's not complicated. Of course we
should, as soon as we can. This suggests that we can leave by the end
of the year. If we don't, we'll be there for another decade, would be
my prediction.
The American people are now with us. A group of us here in the
Congress, a bipartisan group, for nearly a decade have been talking
about this, arguing not to expand the war, not to be over there, not to
be in nation building. And the American people didn't pay much
attention. Now they are. The large majority of the American people now
say it's time to get out of Afghanistan. It's a fruitless venture. Too
much has been lost. The chance of winning, since we don't even know
what we are going to win, doesn't exist. So they are tired of it.
Financially, there's a good reason to come home as well.
Some argue we have to be there because if we leave under these
circumstances we'll lose face; it will look embarrassing to leave. So
how many more men and women have to die, how many more dollars have to
be spent to save face? That is one of the worst arguments possible.
We are not there under legal conditions. This is a war. Who says it
isn't a war? Everybody talks about the Afghan war. Was the war
declared? Of course not. It wasn't declared. There was a resolution
passed that said that the President at that time, under the emergency
of 9/11, could go and deal with al Qaeda, those who brought upon the 9/
11 bombings. But al Qaeda is not there anymore. So we are fighting the
Taliban.
The Taliban used to be our allies at one time when the Soviets were
there. The Taliban's main goal is to keep the foreign occupation out.
They want foreigners out of their country. They are not al Qaeda. Yet
most Americans--maybe less so now. But the argument here on the floor
is we have got to go after al Qaeda. This is not a war against al
Qaeda. If anything, it gives the incentive for al Qaeda to grow in
numbers rather than dealing with them.
The money issue, we are talking about a lot of money. How much do we
spend a year? Probably about $130 billion, up to $1 trillion now in
this past decade.
Later on in the day, we are going to have two votes. We are going to
have a vote on doing something sensible, making sense out of our
foreign policy, bringing our troops home and saving hundreds of
billions of dollars. Then we also will have a vote against NPR, to cut
the funding of NPR. There is a serious question about whether that will
even cut one penny. But at least the fiscal conservatives are going to
be overwhelmingly in support of slashing NPR, and then go home and brag
about how they are such great fiscal conservatives. And the very most
they might save is $10 million, and that's their claim to fame for
slashing the budget. At the same time, they won't consider for a minute
cutting a real significant amount of money.
All empires end for fiscal reasons because they spread themselves too
far around the world, and that's what we are facing. We are in the
midst of a military conflict that is contributing to this inevitable
crisis and it's financial. And you would think there would be a message
there.
How did the Soviets come down? By doing the very same thing that
we're doing: perpetual occupation of a country.
We don't need to be occupying Afghanistan or any other country. We
don't even need to be considering going into Libya or anywhere else.
Fortunately, I guess for those of us who would like to see less of this
killing, we will have to quit because we won't be able to afford it.
The process that we are going through is following the War Powers
Resolution. This is a proper procedure. It calls attention to how we
slip into these wars.
I have always claimed that it's the way we get into the wars that is
the problem. If we would be precise and only go to war with a
declaration of war, with the people behind us, knowing who the enemy
is, and fight, win, and get it over with, that would be more
legitimate. They don't do it now because the American people wouldn't
support it. Nobody is going to declare war against Afghanistan or Iraq
or Libya.
We now have been so careless for the past 50 or 60 years that, as a
Congress and especially as a House, we have reneged on our
responsibilities. We have avoided our prerogatives of saying that we
have the control. We have control of the purse. We have control of when
we are supposed to go to war. Yet the wars continue. They never stop.
And we are going to be completely brought down to our knees.
We can't change Afghanistan. The people who are bragging about these
changes, even if you could, you are not supposed to. You don't have the
moral authority. You don't have the constitutional authority.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Mr. JONES. I yield the gentleman 30 additional seconds.
Mr. PAUL. So I would say, the sooner, the better, we can come home.
This process says come home. Under the law, it says you should start
bringing troops home within 30 days. This allows up to the end of the
year after

[[Page H1937]]

this would be passed. But this needs to be done. A message needs to be
sent. And some day we have to wake up and say, if you are a fiscal
conservative, you ought to look at the waste.

{time} 1230

This is military Keynesianism to believe that we should do this
forever. So I would say this is the day to be on record and vote for
this resolution.
Mr. JONES. I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am so honored to yield 2 minutes to
the gentleman from California (Mr. Hunter), a member of the Armed
Services Committee and a distinguished combat veteran who has served
our country honorably in Iraq and Afghanistan with the United States
Marine Corps.
Mr. HUNTER. Mr. Speaker, first, I was in the Marine Corps. I did two
tours in Iraq and one in Afghanistan. I didn't do anything exceptional;
but if anybody else has served in Afghanistan, I will yield to you
right now. If anybody in this Congress who has served in a military
capacity in these wars in Afghanistan, I'll be happy to yield to you.
You might have taken a few trips over, and you can tell stories about
the families that are impacted who you know. You can talk about people
who you know that have been impacted. You can talk about those marines
and soldiers and sailors and airmen that we see injured at Bethesda and
Walter Reed; but if you want to quote somebody, you can quote me. I'm
in 223 Cannon.
If you want to talk to a family that's been impacted by three
deployments, two of my kids, all of them 10 or under--I have three--two
of them have been through three deployments. One child, my youngest
daughter, has been through one deployment, the Afghan deployment in
2007.
If you want to talk to somebody, feel free to talk to my family
because they understand what it's like. What they also understand is
the reason that we're there.
Less than 2 percent of America's population serves. The burden from
Afghanistan is on their shoulders. It's on my family's shoulders. They
know what's at stake. That's why they basically allowed me to do it.
They allowed me to go to Iraq and Afghanistan because of the number one
reason that we're there, the number one reason. And it's not to nation-
build. It's to make sure that radicalized Muslims stop killing
Americans. It's to stop them from destroying this country.
They want to murder us. Every single person in this room, every
American, radicalized Muslims want to murder. That's why we have men
and women over there right now fighting. That's it. There's no other
reason for it.
Nation building is a thing we have to do there on the side to get the
people, the Afghan people, on our side. But what we're doing right now
is we're taking out the enemy.
And we have to trust General Petraeus. We have to trust President
Obama, in this case, that they know what's going on. He's the Commander
in Chief, not us. We are not the commanders in chief. There's one of
them, and it's the other side's President.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. HUNTER. If you want to quote somebody who's been there, feel free
to quote me. If you want to talk about it, feel free to come to my
office. And if you want to hold up pictures of families, hold up
pictures of mine because they've been impacted by it.
But I thank the gentleman from Ohio for bringing up this debate
because what has happened is our side has cut defense by $16 billion in
H.R. 1. If we're not going to support our troops while we're fighting,
this type of resolution might need a look at later. I don't think now
is the right time.
I oppose the resolution.

Announcement By the Speaker Pro Tempore

The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. McClintock). All Members are reminded
that remarks in debate should be addressed to the Chair and through the
Chair and not to each other.
Mr. KUCINICH. I would like to insert into the Record a recent report
from The Washington Post that says that we've seen the steepest
increase in lost limbs among soldiers and marines occurring in the last
4 months.

[From the Washington Post, Mar. 9, 2011]

Report Reveals Steep Increase in War Amputations Last Fall

(By David Brown)

The majority of American soldiers undergoing amputation for
war wounds last fall lost more than one limb, according to
data presented Tuesday to the Defense Health Board, a
committee of experts that advises the Defense Department on
medical matters.
Military officials had previously released data showing
that amputations, and especially multiple-limb losses,
increased last year. The information presented to the 20-
member board is the first evidence that the steepest increase
occurred over the last four months of the year.
In September 2010, about two-thirds of all war-theater
amputation operations involved a single limb (usually a leg)
and one-third two or more limbs. The split was roughly 50-50
in October and November. In December, only one-quarter of
amputation surgery involved only one limb; three-quarters
involved the loss of two or more limbs.
The Marines, who make up 20 percent of the forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan, were especially hard hit. Of the 66 wounded
severely enough to be evacuated overseas in October, one-
third lost a limb.
In the first seven years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
about 6 percent of seriously wounded soldiers underwent
amputation.
Wounds to the genitals and lower urinary tract--known as
genitourinary injuries--accounted for 11 percent of wounds
over the last seven months of 2010, up from 4 percent in the
previous 17 months, according to data presented by John B.
Holcomb, a trauma surgeon and retired Army colonel.
The constellation of leg-and-genital wounds are in large
part the consequence of stepping on improvised explosive
devices--homemade mines--and are known as ``dismounted IED
injuries.''
The data were assembled by Holcomb and two physicians at
Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where all
seriously injured soldiers are taken on their way back to the
United States.
The steep increase in both the rate and number of
amputations clearly disturbed both Holcomb and members of the
board, which met at a Hilton hotel near Dulles International
Airport.
Holcomb, who spent two weeks at Landstuhl in December and
is a former head of the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical
Research, said he had heard of ``unwritten pacts among young
Marines that if they get their legs and genitals blown off
they won't put tourniquets on but will let each other die on
the battlefield.''
Richard H. Carmona, who was U.S. surgeon general from 2002
to 2006 and is now on the board, said the information was
``very disturbing.''
He said it has made him ask: ``What is the endgame here? Is
the sacrifice we are asking of our young men and women worth
the potential return? I have questions about that now.''
Carmona, 61, served as an Army medic in Vietnam before
going to college and medical school. He has a son who is an
Army sergeant and is serving in Iraq.
Jay A. Johannigman, an Air Force colonel who has served
multiple deployments as a trauma surgeon, said his stint at
the military hospital at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan last
fall ``was different'' both personally and medically.
``We see the enormous price our young men and women are
paying. It should not be for naught,'' he said. He didn't
want to elaborate.
Why amputation-requiring injuries increased so much in
recent months isn't entirely understood. It is partly a
function of tactics that emphasize more foot patrols in rural
areas. Some people have speculated the mines may be
constructed specifically to cause the devastating wounds.
``Do the Marines know? Probably,'' said Frank Butler, a
doctor and retired Navy captain who has spearheaded
improvements in battlefield first aid over the last decade.
``But they're not releasing a thing. And they shouldn't.''

I would also like to insert into the Record a report from the
``American Conservative'' which says that late last year IED deaths
among our own soldiers were up, not down.

[From The American Conservative, Mar. 10, 2011]

How's That Population-Centric COIN Going?

(Posted by Kelley Vlahos)

If the success or failure of the Afghan military ``surge''
rests on whether the U.S. can bring down the level of
violence and protect the civilian population from the
Taliban--a metric that the now fading COINdinistas had once
insisted could be achieved with the right strategy--then two
new statistics to emerge this week don't bode well for the
prospects of the nearly 2-year-old counterinsurgency
operation in Afghanistan.
First, more of our soldiers today are coming home this year
with amputations than in the previous year, according reports
coming out of the Defense Health Board this week. According
to The Washington Post, which was apparently the only
mainstream news outlet to cover the board's meeting in
Northern Virginia on Tuesday, the steepest increase in lost
limbs among soldiers and Marines occurred in the last four
months.

[[Page H1938]]

The Marines, who make up 20 percent of the forces in Iraq
and Afghanistan, were especially hard hit. Of the 66 wounded
severely enough to be evacuated overseas in October, one-
third lost a limb.
In the first seven years of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars,
about 6 percent of seriously wounded soldiers underwent
amputation.
Wounds to the genitals and lower urinary tract--known as
genitourinary injuries--accounted for 11 percent of wounds
over the last seven months of 2010, up from 4 percent in the
previous 17 months, according to data presented by John B.
Holcomb, a trauma surgeon and retired Army colonel.
The constellation of leg-and-genital wounds are in large
part the consequence of stepping on improvised explosive
devices--homemade mines--and are known as ``dismounted IED
injuries.''
The data regarding the increased amputations were already
reported in Friday's WaPo, but apparently the fact they
spiked in the last few months only came out in the meeting.
Who knows if that point would've ever seen the light of day
if a reporter hadn't been there. A source close to the board
told me that media rarely show up to cover the DHB, which is
a pity, because its members, which include both civilian and
retired military doctors and scientists, probably know more
about the ``big picture'' regarding the health and welfare of
our troops in the battlefield than anyone else and tend to
talk candidly among themselves about conditions there.
The data was presented Tuesday by John B. Holcomb, a trauma
surgeon and retired Army colonel. As a former head of the
U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research, he said he had
heard of ``unwritten pacts among young Marines that if they
get their legs and genitals blown off they won't put
tourniquets on but will let each other die on the
battlefield.''
New DHB member Richard Carmona, a former U.S. Surgeon
General under Bush, apparently didn't get the memo about
keeping his emotional responses in check. The Vietnam veteran
called the new statistics ``very disturbing,'' and then
asked, ``What is the endgame here? Is the sacrifice we are
asking of our young men and women worth the potential return?
I have questions about that now.''
He should definitely have questions, considering that Gen.
David Petraeus, Lt. Gen. William ``svengali'' Caldwell and
others have been all over the press in recent weeks talking
about how promising it looks in Afghanistan the Taliban's
``halted momentum,'' and all that.
Meanwhile, the other big news today is that civilian deaths
in Afghanistan are up, too.
According to a new U.N. report, civilian deaths as a result
of war violence rose 15 percent from the year before in
Afghanistan (some of the highest levels since the war began
in 2001). More than two-thirds of those deaths--2,777--were
caused by insurgents (up 28 percent) and 440 were caused by
Afghan Army/NATO forces (down 25 percent*). While the Taliban
is responsible for most civilian deaths, the U.S. has made
``protecting the population'' a major strategic goal for
winning over the Afghan people, legitimizing the Karzai
government and draining the Taliban of its authority.
Instead, it's been publicly blamed and repudiated by Afghans
for a number of civilian bombing deaths, the most recent
being nine Afghan boys killed ``by accident'' in a U.S. air
strike in Kunar province.
This week, President Karzai, rejected an apology from
Petraeus for the killings, and later accepted another attempt
at apology from Sec. Def. Bob Gates. It didn't help that
Petraeus' apology came a week after he suggested that the
young victims of another NATO attack in Kunar had gotten
their burn marks not from the strike, but from their parents,
who might have hurt the kids themselves in disciplinary
actions. It didn't go over so well, especially since Afghan
authorities say 65 people were killed, many of them women and
children. NATO has now admitted that some civilians may have
been hurt, but insists the operation had targeted insurgents.
Again, my mind goes back to the COINdinistas, many of whom
remain delusional about the direction of the war, and others
who might be furiously back-peddling or remolding themselves
as we speak. In June 2009, Triage: The Next Twelve Months in
Afghanistan and Pakistan, was published by the pro-COIN
Center for a New American Security (CNAS). In it, fellow
Andrew Exum, CNAS CEO Nathaniel Fick, David Kilcullen and
Ahmed Humayun wrote this (emphasis mine):
``To be sure, violence will rise in Afghanistan over the
next year--no matter what the United States and its allies
do. What matters, though, is who is dying. And here a
particular lesson may be directly imported from the U.S.
experience in Iraq. In 2007, during the Baghdad security
operations commonly referred to as ``the surge,'' U.S.
casualties actually increased sharply. What U.S. planners
were looking for, however, was not a drop in U.S.
casualties--or even a drop in Iraqi security force casualties
but a drop in Iraqi civilian casualties. In the same way,
U.S. and allied operations in Afghanistan must be focused on
protecting the population even at the expense of allied
casualties.''.
Afghan civilian casualties, whether at the hands of the
coalition, the Taliban, or the Afghan government, will be the
most telling measure of progress.
Well, violence is up, and deaths among NATO and its allies
are up. And so are civilian casualties.
Meanwhile, while the CNAS team said in June 2009 that NATO/
Afghan soldier deaths were expected to rise, they also
claimed that another metric of success would be an eventual
flattening of IED (Improvised Explosive Devices) incidents.
Another indicator of cooperation (with local Afghans) is
the number of roadside bombs (improvised explosive devices,
or IEDs) that are found and cleared versus exploded. IED
numbers have risen sharply in Afghanistan since 2006 (though
numbers are still low, and IEDs still unsophisticated,
compared to Iraq). The coalition should expect an increase in
numbers again this year. However, a rise in the proportion of
IEDs being found and defused (especially when discovered
thanks to tips from the local population) indicates that
locals have a good working relationship with local military
units a sign of progress.
Despite all his spin to the contrary, Petraeus cannot hide
the fact that late last year, IED deaths among our own
soldiers were up, not down. A chart issued within its own
November progress report to Congress last November shows
that, and it shows that the found and cleared IEDs had not
risen above the attacks in most areas of the country.
Plus, metric or no metric, the recent data indicating
serious injuries of U.S. soldiers this late in the game--
while every other assessment outside the military bubble says
the Taliban are making more gains not less--should leave any
thinking person at this point to question, ``is it really
worth it?''
Not sure what it will take before the COINdinistas admit
events on the ground are falling short of their own metrics.
Sounds like a good follow-up to ``Triage,'' but will anyone
there have the guts to write it?

I yield 1 minute to the gentlewoman from Texas, Representative
Jackson Lee.
Ms. JACKSON LEE of Texas. I respect my President, our President.
I thank the previous speaker for his service. I thank all of the
United States military, at home and abroad, for their brave and
courageous service.
I beg to differ. The Constitution indicates that the Congress can
declare war, which has not been so declared. I would make the argument
that we have shed our blood in Afghanistan, and my hat is off to those
families who have lost their loved ones, and certainly those who fight
on the front lines today.
I believe it is important for Congress to be engaged in this effort
because this is the people's House. A few months ago, a year ago, I may
not have supported this move. But here we are again, facing the same
obstacles.
This amendment or resolution says within 30 days, but up to December
31, if necessary.
It is time now to push the Kabul government to be able to negotiate
and engage. It is time to use smart power. It is time to let girls go
to school, let leaders lead, and for our combat troops and others to
come home.
It is time to recognize that our resources are needed around the
world. Libya is in need.
But it is time for us to end with Afghanistan and to push them to be
a sovereign nation, and to work with them on diplomacy and to be able
to save lives.
I support this resolution. I wish that it would pass now.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Georgia (Mr.
Lewis).
Mr. LEWIS of Georgia. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong opposition
to the longest running war in our Nation's history. I want to thank my
friend and colleague from Ohio for introducing this resolution.
War is not the answer. It is not the way to peace. We must root out
the causes of hate and violence.
Gandhi once said: ``Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the
fear of punishment, and the other by acts of love. Power based on love
is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived
from the fear of punishment.''
Our path to peace in Afghanistan is not through war; it is not
through violence. Enough is enough. The time is long overdue.
We are spending billions of dollars a week. Not another nickel, not
another dime, not another dollar, not another hour, not another day,
not another week. We must end this war and end it now.
I urge all of my colleagues to support the resolution.
Mr. KUCINICH. I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr.
Polis).

[[Page H1939]]

Mr. POLIS. I thank the gentleman from Ohio for bringing forth this
important resolution and finally bringing to the floor of the House the
discussion about the war in Afghanistan.
Wrong war, wrong time, wrong place. Intelligence estimates are that
there are under 50 al Qaeda operatives in Afghanistan. With the current
cost of the war effort, we're spending between $1.5 billion and $2
billion per al Qaeda operative.
There is a very real terrorist threat to our country that comes from
the loosely knit al Qaeda terrorist network, but that threat does not
emanate from Afghanistan. It does not emanate from any one particular
nation-state. It is a stateless menace. They go wherever they're able
to thrive on the lack of order.
To effectively combat this menace, we need targeted special
operations, we need aggressive intelligence gathering, and we need to
make sure that we combat this menace wherever they are with the
appropriate resources.
Being bogged down, occupying one particular nation-state is a waste
of resources and not the best way to keep the American people safe.
I strongly support this resolution.

{time} 1240

Mr. KUCINICH. I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. BERMAN. I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from
California (Mr. Rohrabacher).
Mr. ROHRABACHER. I rise in support of the resolution, and again with
great respect and concern for those great people who we are sending
overseas to defend us. If we don't think they can succeed, it is
incumbent upon us to bring them home as soon as possible.
I was not in the United States military in Afghanistan, but I did
participate in a battle in Afghanistan when the Russians were there. I
went in with the Mujahideen unit and fought in the Battle of Jalalabad
in 1988. I got to know these people of Afghanistan. Foreign troops will
never conquer the people of Afghanistan.
And, yes, radicalized Islams did murder Americans on 9/11. By the
way, most of them were Saudis. Most all of them who hijacked the planes
were Saudis. And Saudi Arabia still has the radical Islamic tenets that
we are talking about that supposedly brought us into this battle.
We will not succeed if we are planning to force the Afghan people to
accept the centralized government that our State Department has foisted
upon them. All we are going to do is lose more people. All we are going
to do is have more wounded people and more of our military sent over
there, because that is what they are telling us is the method of
getting out. To get out, we have to have Karzai accepted.
We have foisted on them the most centralized system of government
that would never have even worked here, because we believe that local
people should run the police and should elect their own local
officials. If we don't believe that that system will work, and that is
our plan, we should get our people out of there before more of them are
killed and maimed.
Yes, we do respect Duncan Hunter and all those people who have
served. That is the reason, that is what motivates me.
Here we have Walter Jones, who represents the Marine Corps down at
Camp Lejeune. If they thought that they were defending our country and
were going to save our lives, all of them would give their lives for
us. But they are not on that mission. They are on that mission to get
the Afghan people and coerce them into accepting a corrupt central
government, and that won't work. It didn't work when I was there
fighting the Russians. It won't work now.
Mr. JONES. I continue to reserve my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, with all due respect to the gentleman
from California, I would not compare a staff delegation trip to the
valiant forces of our armed services who are fighting overseas.
I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the gentleman from Colorado (Mr.
Coffman), a member of the Armed Services Committee, a combat veteran of
the first gulf war, who served again in Iraq 5 years ago with the
United States Marine Corps.
Mr. COFFMAN of Colorado. I thank the gentlewoman from Florida, and I
thank the gentleman from Ohio for bringing this resolution forward, and
I reluctantly rise in opposition to it.
I volunteered to serve in Iraq not because I believed that invading,
pacifying, and administering the country was the right course of
action, but I believed that once we had made the commitment that we had
to follow it through and bring it to a reasonable and just conclusion.
In Afghanistan, I think that what this Nation first did was great:
That we were attacked on 9/11. The Taliban controlled much of the
country and gave safe harbor to al Qaeda, and we gave air, logistical,
and advisory support to the anti-Taliban forces in the country and they
pushed the Taliban out.
We made a wrong turn after that, by forcing the victors on the ground
aside instead of using our leverage to have them reach out to the
Pashtun elements of the country, and we superimposed a political
process on them that doesn't fit the political culture of the country,
a government that is mired in corruption and has little capacity to
govern outside of Kabul. I believe it is wrong to use conventional
forces against an irregular force that make our military vulnerable to
asymmetric capability. But we have security interests in Afghanistan
that we must accept.
We need to make sure that the Taliban doesn't take over the country
where it becomes a permissive environment, where they can use that to
destabilize Afghanistan, to assist the Taliban on the other side of the
Durand Line. We need some base of operations in Afghanistan to be able
to strike al Qaeda targets in the federally administered tribal areas
of Afghanistan. I believe that we can do it with a lighter footprint. I
think we ought to be focused on supporting factions within this region
that share our strategic interests.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. COFFMAN of Colorado. I thank the gentlewoman from Florida.
We have strategic interests in Afghanistan. It would be wrong, it
would be irresponsible at this time to expeditiously withdraw all of
our forces from Afghanistan, again, without recognizing our strategic
interests there.
Although I differ on the strategy that we are using right now, I
recognize the security interests of the United States that are vital
for us to maintain not only peace and stability in the region but also
at home.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman
from Texas (Mr. Conaway), a member of the Armed Services, Intelligence,
Agriculture, and Ethics Committees.
Mr. CONAWAY. I thank the gentlewoman.
We have to get this right. I rise in opposition to this motion. I use
that phrase, it comes from David Petraeus' testimony in the last 2 days
in front of the House Armed Services Committee.
He tells a poignant story about a black day in Iraq when he was
commander of the 101st in which two helicopters collided midair and 17
troops were killed. Really, one of his darkest days. And in the
emotions of all of that and the trauma and the fight to move forward, a
young PFC came up to this two-star general, which is pretty odd, and he
said: General, I know of 17 reasons why we have to get this right.
That analogy can be spread across all of the lives lost, all of the
grievous injuries that we have suffered in this war over the last 10
years in Afghanistan. We have to get this right. And this emotion that
they have brought forward is not remotely going to get it right.
Whatever your position is, this is not the right thing to do. We should
not do this.
These conversations have consequences. They are heard around the
world. And while the other side, the folks who will vote for this, the
folks who brought this forward have a right to do this and, in their
mind, perhaps an obligation to do this, to have this conversation,
these conversations affect the men and women in the fight. And for us
to stand here over and over to tell them that they cannot win, that
they cannot make this happen, is irresponsible on our part.
David Petraeus is the man who knows more about what is going on on

[[Page H1940]]

the ground in Afghanistan today than anybody walking the face of the
Earth. And, Mr. Speaker, in all deference to the fellows who served 20
years ago there in whatever capacity, that was 20 years ago. Today,
David Petraeus says the strategy is correct. We have got the inputs
correct. We are moving forward, and we can make the circumstances to
get the end results that we want in which the Afghan people are in
charge of Afghanistan and responsible for Afghanistan security.
This resolution is incorrect. It will not get it right, and I
strongly urge a ``no'' vote on this resolution.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the gentleman
from Texas, Judge Poe, vice chair of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee
on Oversight and Investigation.
Mr. POE of Texas. I thank the gentlewoman for yielding.
War is expensive; and it should not be measured in the cost of money,
which has been, really, the discussion today. I have the greatest
respect for Mr. Jones and Mr. Rohrabacher and you, too, Mr. Kucinich,
but this is an important issue before us.
Today, as we are here in the House of Representatives, Mark Wells is
being buried. He was killed on March 5, representing us in Afghanistan.
He had been to Iraq. And, yes, he is of Irish heritage, so his family
decided, ``We want to have his service on St. Patrick's Day.''
I talked to his father, Burl, earlier this week. And Burl is proud of
his son's service, and he is proud of America's service in Afghanistan.
And Burl told me, he said: ``Congressman Poe, it is my fear that there
are dark days ahead for America because we may not choose to
persevere.''
And what I believe he meant by that was that his son and others who
have died for this country, died for that concept of freedom, people
that live after them, our soldiers that are over there, and we who make
decisions, may not persevere and finish this war.
War is hard. It is expensive. And America never quits, and America
should never quit in this war.
Our enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan have always had the policy and
philosophy: America will get weary. Americans will quit. They don't
have the stomach for it.

{time} 1250

We need to send a message to them and the rest of the world and to
our troops that are on the front lines in Afghanistan today that we
support them and we will not get weary, we will not quit, we will not
give in or give up just because this war has been long and hard.
And that's just the way it is.
Mr. KUCINICH. I would like to put into the Record an article from the
National Interest which states that many U.S. and western troops cannot
leave their bases without encountering IEDs or more coordinated attacks
from insurgents.

[From The National Interest, Mar. 9, 2011]

Pulling a Fast One in Afghanistan

(By Christopher A. Preble)

I have just returned from a discussion of U.S. strategy in
Afghanistan and Pakistan hosted by the Foundation for the
Defense of Democracies. The meeting of 25 or so journalists,
think tankers, and current and former government officials
featured introductory remarks by Gilles Dorronsoro, visiting
scholar at the Carnegie Endowment, and FDD's Bill Roggio. FDD
President, Cliff May, moderated the session. The meeting was
officially on the record, but I'm relying solely on my hand-
written notes, so I won't quote the other attendees directly.
I would characterize the general mood as grim. A few
attendees pointed to the killing of a number of Taliban
figures in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, and reports of
progress in Marja and the rest of Helmand province as
evidence of progress. These gains, one speaker maintained,
were sustainable and would not necessarily slip in the event
that U.S. forces are directed where elsewhere.
Dorronsoro disputed these assertions. He judged that the
situation today is worse than it was a year ago, before the
surge of 30,000 additional troops. The killing of individual
Taliban leaders, or foot-soldiers, was also accompanied by
the inadvertent killing of innocent bystanders, including
most recent nine children. So there is always the danger that
even targeted strikes based on timely, credible intelligence,
will over the long term replace one dead Talib with two or
four or eight of his sons, brothers, cousins, and tribesman.
How many people have said ``We can't kill our way to
victory''?
For Dorronsoro, the crucial metric is security, no number
of bad guys and suspected bad guys killed. And, given that he
can't drive to places that he freely visited two or three
years ago, he judges that security in the country has gotten
worse, not better. Many U.S. and Western troops cannot leave
their bases without encountering IEDs or more coordinated
attacks from insurgents. U.S. and NATO forces don't control
territory, and there is little reason to think that they can.
Effective counterinsurgencies (COIN) are waged by a credible
local partner, a government that commands the respect and
authority of its citizens. That obviously doesn't exist in
Afghanistan. The Afghan militia, supposedly the key to long-
term success, is completely ineffective.
Secretary Gates asserted on Monday that the draw down of
U.S. troops would begin as scheduled this July, although, as
the Washington Post's Greg Jaffe writes, ``he cautioned that
any reductions in U.S. forces would likely be small and that
a significant U.S. force will remain in combat for the rest
of 2011.'' NATO remains committed to 2014 as the date to hand
over security to the Afghan government. Whether the United
States retains a long-term presence in the country is the
subject of much speculation.
For the people from FDD, it shouldn't be. Roggio stressed
that the problem with U.S. strategy is that Americans were
looking for an exit, when we should be making a long-term
commitment to Afghanistan. May concurred. When I asked them
to clarify how long term, both demurred (Roggio said ``a
decade or more'' but didn't elaborate). I also inquired about
the resources that would be required to constitute
``commitment''. Given that we have over 100,000 troops on the
ground, and that we will spend over $100 billion in
Afghanistan in this year alone, how much more of a commitment
would they find acceptable? Again, no definitive answer.
Roggio did claim, however, that a long-term commitment
would increase the prospect of turning the Pakistanis. This
is the crucial other piece in the puzzle. Nearly everyone in
the meeting agreed that the unwillingness of the Pakistanis
to cooperate with the United States had allowed a safe haven
to be created in North Waziristan and elsewhere along the
AfPak border. Most in the meeting admitted that Pakistan's
interests in Afghanistan did not always align with our own.
None had an answer for decisively changing this calculus, but
some agreed with Roggio that evidence of progress in
Afghanistan--combined with a credible commitment on the part
of the U.S. to remain for the long-haul--would convince the
Pakistanis to side with the Americans.
If you're reading carefully, you can see a circular logic
here, brilliantly encapsulated by Dorronsoro. I paraphrase:
We cannot win Afghanistan without turning Pakistan, but we
cannot turn the Pakistanis without warning in Afghanistan. It
is no wonder that one attendee declared herself growing
increasingly depressed as the meeting wore on.

I would like to insert into the Record an article from Cato-at-
Liberty's Web site entitled America's Aimless Absurdity in Afghanistan.

America's `Aimless Absurdity' In Afghanistan

(Posted By Malou Innocent On March 7, 2011)

Rasmussen reports that 52% of Americans want U.S. troops
home from Afghanistan within a year, up from 43% last fall.
Of course, polls are ephemeral snapshots of public opinion
that can fluctuate with the prevailing political winds;
nonetheless, it does appear that more Americans are slowly
coming to realize the ``aimless absurdity'' of our nation-
building project in Central Asia.
Earlier today, former Republican senator Judd Gregg of New
Hampshire said on MSNBC's ``Morning Joe'': ``I don't think we
can afford Afghanistan much longer.'' He continued: ``The
simple fact is that it's costing us. Good people are losing
their lives there, and we're losing huge amounts of resources
there. . . . So I think we should have a timeframe for
getting out of Afghanistan, and it should be shorter rather
than longer.''
Gregg is absolutely right. It is well past time to bring
this long war to a swift end. Yet Gregg's comments also
reflect a growing bipartisan realization that prolonging our
land war in Asia is weakening our country militarily and
economically.
To politicians of any stripe, the costs on paper of staying
in Afghanistan are jarring. Pentagon officials told the House
Defense Appropriations Subcommittee that it costs an average
of $400 per gallon of fuel for the aircraft and combat
vehicles operating in land-locked Afghanistan. The U.S.
Agency for International Development has spent more than $7.8
billion on Afghanistan reconstruction since 2001, including
building and refurbishing 680 schools and training thousands
of civil servants. Walter Pincus, of The Washington Post,
reported that the Army Corps of Engineers spent $4 billion
last year on 720 miles of roads to transport troops in and
around the war-ravaged country. It will spend another $4 to
$6 billion this year, for 250 more miles.
War should no longer be a left-right issue. It's a question
of scarce resources and limiting the power of government.
Opposition to the war in Afghanistan can no longer be swept
under the carpet or dismissed as an issue owned by peaceniks
and pacifists, especially when our men and women in uniform
are being deployed to prop up a regime Washington doesn't
trust, for goals our president can't define.

I would like to put into the Record an article from Truthdig posted
on

[[Page H1941]]

AlterNet entitled Afghanistan: Obscenely Well-Funded but Largely
Unsuccessful War Rages on Out of Sight of the American Public.

[From AlterNet, Nov. 18, 2010]

Afghanistan: Obscenely Well-Funded, But Largely Unsuccessful War Rages
on Out of Sight of the American Public

(By Juan Cole)

Not only is it unclear that the U.S. and NATO are winning
their war in Afghanistan, the lack of support for their
effort by the Afghanistan president himself has driven the
American commander to the brink of resignation. In response
to complaints from his constituents, Afghanistan's mercurial
President Hamid Karzai called Sunday for American troops to
scale back their military operations. The supposed ally of
the U.S., who only last spring petulantly threatened to join
the Taliban, astonished Washington with this new outburst,
which prompted a warning from Gen. David Petraeus that the
president was making Petraeus' position ``untenable,'' which
some speculated might be a threat to resign.
During the past two months, the U.S. military has fought a
major campaign in the environs of the southern Pashtun city
of Kandahar, launching night raids and attempting to push
insurgents out of the orchards and farms to the east of the
metropolis. Many local farmers were displaced, losing their
crops in the midst of the violence, and forced to become day
laborers in the slums of Kandahar. Presumably these Pashtun
clans who found themselves in the crossfire between the
Taliban and the U.S. put pressure on Karzai to call a halt to
the operation.
That there has been heavy fighting in Afghanistan this fall
would come as a surprise to most Americans, who have seen
little news on their televisions about the war. Various
websites noted that 10 NATO troops were killed this past
Saturday and Sunday alone, five of them in a single battle,
but it was hardly front page news, and got little or no
television coverage.
The midterm campaign circus took the focus off of foreign
affairs in favor of witches in Newark and eyes of Newt in
Georgia. Distant Kandahar was reduced to an invisible battle
in an unseen war, largely unreported in America's mass media,
as though it were irrelevant to the big campaign issues--of
deficits and spending, of taxes and public welfare. Since it
was President Obama's offensive, Democrats could not run
against it. Since it is billed as key to U.S. security,
Republicans were not interested in running against it.
Kandahar, city of pomegranates and car bombs, of poppies and
government cartels, lacked a partisan implication, and so no
one spoke of it.
In fact, the war is costing on the order of $7 billion a
month, a sum that is still being borrowed and adding nearly
$100 billion a year to the already-burgeoning national debt.
Yet in all the talk in all the campaigns in the hustings
about the dangers of the federal budget deficit, hardly any
candidates fingered the war as economically unsustainable.
The American public cannot have a debate on the war if it
is not even mentioned in public. The extreme invisibility of
the Afghanistan war is apparent from a Lexis Nexis search I
did for ``Kandahar'' (again, the site of a major military
campaign) for the period from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15. I got only
a few dozen hits, from all American news sources (National
Public Radio was among the few media outlets that devoted
substantial airtime to the campaign).
The campaign in the outskirts of Kandahar had been modeled
on last winter's attack on the farming area of Marjah in
Helmand Province. Marjah was a demonstration project,
intended to show that the U.S., NATO and Afghanistan security
forces could ``take, clear, hold and build.''
Petraeus' counterinsurgency doctrine depends on taking
territory away from the insurgents, clearing it of
guerrillas, holding it for the medium term to keep the
Taliban from returning and to reassure local leaders that
they need not fear reprisals for ``collaborating,'' and then
building up services and security for the long term to ensure
that the insurgents can never again return and dominate the
area. But all these months later, the insurgents still have
not been cleared from Marjah, which is a site of frequent gun
fights between over-stretched Marines and Taliban.
There is no early prospect of Afghan army troops holding
the area, or of building effective institutions in the face
of constant sniping and bombing. Marjah is only 18 square
miles. Afghanistan is more than 251,000 square miles. If
Marjah is the model for the campaign in the outskirts of
Kandahar, then the latter will be a long, hard slog. Kandahar
is even more complicated, since the labyrinthine alleyways of
the city and its hundreds of thousands of inhabitants offer
insurgents new sorts of cover when they are displaced there
from the countryside.
Counterinsurgency requires an Afghan partner, but all along
the spectrum of Afghan institutions, the U.S. and NATO are
seeking in vain for the ``government in a box'' once promised
by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. The people in the key provinces
of Helmand and Kandahar are largely hostile to U.S. and NATO
troops, seeing them as disrespecting their traditions and as
offering no protection from violence. They see cooperating
with the U.S. as collaboration and want Mullah Omar of the
Taliban to join the government.
Although the U.S. and NATO have spent $27 billion on
training Afghan troops, only 12 percent of them can operate
independently. Karzai and his circle are extremely corrupt,
taking millions in cash payments from Iran and looting a
major bank for unsecured loans, allowing the purchase of
opulent villas in fashionable Dubai. It is no wonder that
Petraeus is at the end of his rope. The only question is why
the Obama administration is not, and how long it will hold to
the myth of counterinsurgency.

I would like to put into the Record an article published on AlterNet
titled Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan,
by Nick Turse at TomDispatch.com.

[From AlterNet, Posted on February 10, 2010, Printed on March 17, 2011]

Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan

(By Nick Turse, Tomdispatch.com)

In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British
forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into
the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in
the Shinwar district of Afghanistan's Nangarhar Province,
U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in
preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation.
On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one
of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the
country.
Nearly a decade after the Bush administration launched its
invasion of Afghanistan, TomDispatch offers the first actual
count of American, NATO, and other coalition bases there, as
well as facilities used by the Afghan security forces. Such
bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-
bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to
official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot
the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar,
are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-
building boom that began last year.
Existing in the shadows, rarely reported on and little
talked about, this base-building program is nonetheless
staggering in size and scope, and heavily dependent on
supplies imported from abroad, which means that it is also
extraordinarily expensive. It has added significantly to the
already long secret list of Pentagon property overseas and
raises questions about just how long, after the planned
beginning of a drawdown of American forces in 2011, the U.S.
will still be garrisoning Afghanistan.

400 Foreign Bases in Afghanistan

Colonel Wayne Shanks, a spokesman for the U.S.-led
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), tells
TomDispatch that there are, at present, nearly 400 U.S. and
coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward
operating bases, and combat outposts. In addition, there are
at least 300 Afghan National Army (ANA) and Afghan National
Police (ANP) bases, most of them built, maintained, or
supported by the U.S. A small number of the coalition sites
are mega-bases like Kandahar Airfield, which boasts one of
the busiest runways in the world, and Bagram Air Base, a
former Soviet facility that received a makeover, complete
with Burger King and Popeyes outlets, and now serves more
than 20,000 U.S. troops, in addition to thousands of
coalition forces and civilian contractors.
In fact, Kandahar, which housed 9,000 coalition troops as
recently as 2007, is expected to have a population of as many
as 35,000 troops by the time President Obama's surge is
complete, according to Colonel Kevin Wilson who oversees
building efforts in the southern half of Afghanistan for the
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. On the other hand, the Shinwar
site, according to Sgt. Tracy J. Smith of the U.S. 48th
Infantry Brigade Combat Team, will be a small forward
operating base (FOB) that will host both Afghan troops and
foreign forces.
Last fall, it was reported that more than $200 million in
construction projects--from barracks to cargo storage
facilities--were planned for or in-progress at Bagram.
Substantial construction funds have also been set aside by
the U.S. Air Force to upgrade its air power capacity at
Kandahar. For example, $65 million has been allocated to
build additional apron space (where aircraft can be parked,
serviced, and loaded or unloaded) to accommodate more close-
air support for soldiers in the field and a greater
intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capability.
Another $61 million has also been earmarked for the
construction of a cargo helicopter apron and a tactical
airlift apron there.
Kandahar is just one of many sites currently being
upgraded. Exact figures on the number of facilities being
enlarged, improved, or hardened are unavailable but,
according a spokesman for ISAF, the military plans to expand
several more bases to accommodate the increase of troops as
part of Afghan War commander Stanley McChrystal's surge
strategy. In addition, at least 12 more bases are slated to
be built to help handle

[[Page H1942]]

the 30,000 extra American troops and thousands of NATO forces
beginning to arrive in the country.
``Currently we have over $3 billion worth of work going on
in Afghanistan,'' says Colonel Wilson, ``and probably by the
summer, when the dust settles from all the uplift, we'll have
about $1.3 billion to $1.4 billion worth of that [in the
South].'' By comparison, between 2002 and 2008, the Army
Corps of Engineers spent more than $4.5 billion on
construction projects, most of it base-building, in
Afghanistan.
At the site of the future FOB in Shinwar, more than 135
private construction contractors attended what was termed an
``Afghan-Coalition contractors rodeo.'' According to
Lieutenant Fernando Roach, a contracting officer with the
U.S. Army's Task Force Mountain Warrior, the event was
designed ``to give potential contractors a walkthrough of the
area so they'll have a solid overview of the scope of work.''
The construction firms then bid on three separate projects:
the renovation of the more than 30-year old Soviet
facilities, the building of new living quarters for Afghan
and coalition forces, and the construction of a two-kilometer
wall for the base.
In the weeks since the ``rodeo,'' the U.S. Army has
announced additional plans to upgrade facilities at other
forward operating bases. At FOB Airborne, located near Kane-
Ezzat in Wardak Province, for instance, the Army intends to
put in reinforced concrete bunkers and blast protection
barriers as well as lay concrete foundations for Re-Locatable
Buildings (prefabricated, trailer-like structures used for
living and working quarters). Similar work is also scheduled
for FOB Altimur, an Army camp in Logar Province.

The Afghan Base Boom

Recently, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Afghanistan
District-Kabul, announced that it would be seeking bids on
``site assessments'' for Afghan National Security Forces
District Headquarters Facilities nationwide. The precise
number of Afghan bases scattered throughout the country is
unclear.
When asked by TomDispatch, Colonel Radmanish of the Afghan
Ministry of Defense would state only that major bases were
located in Kabul, Pakteya, Kandahar, Herat, and Mazar-e-
Sharif, and that ANA units operate all across Afghanistan.
Recent U.S. Army contracts for maintenance services provided
to Afghan army and police bases, however, suggest that there
are no fewer than 300 such facilities that are, according to
an ISAF spokesman, not counted among the coalition base
inventory.
As opposed to America's fast-food-franchise-filled bases,
Afghan ones are often decidedly more rustic affairs. The
police headquarters in Khost Farang District, Baghlan
Province, is a good example. According to a detailed site
assessment conducted by a local contractor for the Army Corps
of Engineers and the Afghan government, the district
headquarters consists of mud and stone buildings surrounded
by a mud wall. The site even lacks a deep well for water. A
trench fed by a nearby spring is the only convenient water
source.
The U.S. bases that most resemble austere Afghan facilities
are combat outposts, also known as COPs. Environmental
Specialist Michael Bell of the Army Corps of Engineers,
Afghanistan Engineer District-South's Real Estate Division,
recently described the facilities and life on such a base as
he and his co-worker, Realty Specialist Damian Salazar, saw
it in late 2009:
``COP Sangar . . . is a compound surrounded by mud and
straw walls. Tents with cots supplied the sleeping quarters .
. . A medical, pharmacy and command post tent occupied the
center of the COP, complete with a few computers with
internet access and three primitive operating tables. Showers
had just been installed with hot [water] . . . only available
from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. . . .
``An MWR [Morale, Welfare and Recreation] tent was erected
on Thanksgiving Day with an operating television; however,
the tent was rarely used due to the cold. Most of the troops
used a tent with gym equipment for recreation . . . A cook
trailer provided a hot simple breakfast and supper. Lunch was
MREs [meals ready to eat]. Nights were pitch black with no
outside lighting from the base or the city.''

What Makes a Base?

According to an official site assessment, future
construction at the Khost Farang District police headquarters
will make use of sand, gravel, and stone, all available on
the spot. Additionally, cement, steel, bricks, lime, and
gypsum have been located for purchase in Pol-e Khomri City,
about 85 miles away.
Constructing a base for American troops, however, is
another matter. For the far less modest American needs of
American troops, builders rely heavily on goods imported over
extremely long, difficult to traverse, and sometimes
embattled supply lines, all of which adds up to an
extraordinarily costly affair. ``Our business runs on
materials,'' Lieutenant General Robert Van Antwerp, commander
of the Army Corps of Engineers, told an audience at a town
hall meeting in Afghanistan in December 2009. ``You have to
bring in the lumber, you have to bring in the steel, you have
to bring in the containers and all that. Transport isn't easy
in this country--number one, the roads themselves, number
two, coming through other countries to get here--there are
just huge challenges in getting the materials here.''
To facilitate U.S. base construction projects, a new
``virtual storefront''--an online shopping portal--has been
launched by the Pentagon's Defense Logistics Agency (DLA).
The Maintenance, Repair and Operations Uzbekistan Virtual
Storefront website and a defense contractor-owned and
operated brick-and-mortar warehouse facility that supports it
aim to provide regionally-produced construction materials to
speed surge-accelerated building efforts.
From a facility located in Termez, Uzbekistan, cement,
concrete, fencing, roofing, rope, sand, steel, gutters, pipe,
and other construction material manufactured in countries
like Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan can be rushed to nearby
Afghanistan to accelerate base-building efforts. ``Having the
products closer to the fight will make it easier for
warfighters by reducing logistics response and delivery
time,'' says Chet Evanitsky, the DLA's construction and
equipment supply chain division chief.

America's Shadowy Base World

The Pentagon's most recent inventory of bases lists a total
of 716 overseas sites. These include facilities owned and
leased all across the Middle East as well as a significant
presence in Europe and Asia, especially Japan and South
Korea. Perhaps even more notable than the Pentagon's
impressive public foreign property portfolio are the many
sites left off the official inventory. While bases in the
Persian Gulf countries of Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the
United Arab Emirates are all listed, one conspicuously absent
site is Al-Udeid Air Base, a billion-dollar facility in
nearby Qatar, where the U.S. Air Force secretly oversees its
on-going unmanned drone wars.
The count also does not include any sites in Iraq where, as
of August 2009, there were still nearly 300 American bases
and outposts. Similarly, U.S. bases in Afghanistan--a
significant percentage of the 400 foreign sites scattered
across the country--are noticeably absent from the Pentagon
inventory.
Counting the remaining bases in Iraq--as many as 50 are
slated to be operating after President Barack Obama's August
31, 2010, deadline to remove all U.S. ``combat troops'' from
the country--and those in Afghanistan, as well as black sites
like Al-Udeid, the total number of U.S. bases overseas now
must significantly exceed 1,000. Just exactly how many U.S.
military bases (and allied facilities used by U.S. forces)
are scattered across the globe may never be publicly known.
What we do know--from the experience of bases in Germany,
Italy, Japan, and South Korea--is that, once built, they have
a tendency toward permanency that a cessation of hostilities,
or even outright peace, has a way of not altering.
After nearly a decade of war, close to 700 U.S., allied,
and Afghan military bases dot Afghanistan. Until now,
however, they have existed as black sites known to few
Americans outside the Pentagon. It remains to be seen, a
decade into the future, how many of these sites will still be
occupied by U.S. and allied troops and whose flag will be
planted on the ever-shifting British-Soviet-U.S./Afghan site
at Shinwar.

General Petraeus and others in the administration continue their PR
campaign. Overwhelming evidence is proving their upbeat assessments of
our strategy is false. A recent article by the Los Angeles Times cited
a report released by the Foreign Affairs Committee and the British
Parliament that concluded that ``despite the optimistic appraisals we
heard from some military and official sources, the security situation
across Afghanistan as a whole is deteriorating. Counterinsurgency
efforts in the south and east have allowed the Taliban to expand its
presence and control in other previously relatively stable areas in
Afghanistan.''
Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the gentleman from New York, Mr.
Charles Rangel.
(Mr. RANGEL asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. RANGEL. This afternoon sometime, I will reintroduce my bill
calling for a mandatory draft, making certain that every young person
has an opportunity one way or the other to serve this great nation of
ours, whether we're talking about in our schools, our hospitals, or
just to provide some public service.
But the main part of this bill is that the President, when he asked
us to declare war, or however we get involved in these things with loss
of lives, we're going to have these people that come to the well and
explain how we have to get involved, we have to fight, we can't give
up, to see whether or not if their kids and grandchildren were mandated
that they would have to go into these areas and put themselves in
harm's way, how soon it will be before we take another look at this.
Let me congratulate the gentleman from Ohio for allowing our priests,
our rabbis, our ministers to recognize that

[[Page H1943]]

we're talking about human lives being lost because of our concern about
oil in this part of the world. It hasn't got a darn thing to do with
our national security. I just hope and pray that one day we would be
able to say we know we made a mistake and withdraw from this type of
thing now and for the future of this great country.
Thank you for this opportunity.
Mr. BERMAN. I reserve the balance of my time.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Bartlett), the chairman of the Armed
Services Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces.
(Mr. BARTLETT asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. BARTLETT. Thank you very much for yielding.
If our only reason for being in Afghanistan was to deny sanctuary to
al Qaeda, I probably would have asked time from the gentleman from Ohio
and be speaking from the other side, because when we are successful in
Afghanistan, that will not have denied sanctuary to al Qaeda because
they will simply go over into Pakistan. If not there, they'll go to
Yemen and Somalia. If we leave Afghanistan now or if we leave
Afghanistan before victory in Afghanistan, we will have sent a message
to the world that their suspicions are really true, that all you have
to do to the United States is make it tough for them and they will pull
out. We did it in Beirut. We did it in Somalia. It is absolutely
essential that we win here, or our credibility is gone forever as a
major player in geopolitical things in the world.
A second good reason for staying in Afghanistan is that if we can
have a fledgling democracy there, that will send a very powerful
message to the Middle East from which most of the world's oil comes.
There is a lot of upheaval there, and a stable democracy in Afghanistan
would be enormously important.
Beyond denying sanctuary to al Qaeda, there are very good reasons for
staying in Afghanistan until we have victory. Our young people there
are doing an incredible job. I just came from there a bit over a week
ago. We can succeed there, and I think we must succeed for the two
reasons I mentioned.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am honored to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from New York (Mr. Gibson), a member of the Armed Services
Committee and a decorated combat veteran who ended his 24-year military
career as a colonel in the United States Army.
Mr. GIBSON. I thank the lady.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in opposition to the resolution. I served
in Iraq when it was hard and unpopular, and I thank God that I live in
a country that had the intestinal fortitude to see it through.
This year, we're going to complete our objectives in Iraq, and the
remaining 48,000 troops that are there are going to come home. There's
going to be a small contingent, about 150 or so, that are going to move
underneath the Embassy, but we will have completed our objectives and
Iraq will be stable and friendly.
Now, Afghanistan is different from Iraq, but our approach should be
similar. The surge has accomplished its primary aim, to seize the
initiative from the Taliban. But now we need to finish the job of
building out the institution, the security and the civil institutions.
I'm recently back from Afghanistan, and I had an opportunity to meet
the leadership there. I feel confident we've got the right plan going
forward. And I support the President's plan, the President's plan to
begin withdrawal this year and to complete combat operations by 2014,
because I believe this plan will stabilize Afghanistan and help protect
our cherished way of life, preventing al Qaeda from regaining
sanctuary.
Now going forward, I think we need to learn from these experiences.
Some comments were made here earlier about us, whether or not we're a
Republic or an empire. I share those concerns and those sentiments.
We're a Republic, and we need to learn from these experiences. But we
need to see this through. We need to stand with our Commander in Chief.
We need to stand with our troops. Complete this task.
And then finally let me say that I join all today on both sides of
the aisle who honor our service men and women who have fell in the line
of battle. We pray for their souls. We pray for their families. We
remember those wounded in battle, those who bear physical scars. Those
who bear no physical scars who are emotionally scarred, we pray for
them. We honor them.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The time of the gentleman has expired.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I yield the gentleman an additional 30 seconds.
Mr. GIBSON. And let me say this: That going forward, that this body,
whether it be this issue or any issue, that this body and that this
country shall be worthy of the sacrifices of our service men and women.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to yield 2 minutes to the
gentleman from Mississippi (Mr. Palazzo), a member of the Armed
Services Committee and a Marine veteran of the first gulf war who
continues to serve with the Army National Guard.
Mr. PALAZZO. Mr. Speaker, the resolution proposed by my colleague
from Ohio does a disservice to the men and women who have courageously
defended our country from our enemies in Afghanistan. This past weekend
I had the distinct pleasure and honor of welcoming home the 287th
Engineering Company, commonly referred to as Sappers, based in
Lucedale, Mississippi. They have the most dangerous mission in
Afghanistan. They were the ones that cleared routes so that our men and
women in uniform could have safe passage. They're the ones that rooted
out the IEDs and the roadside bombs. And I'm happy to say they came
back 100 percent, with one wounded warrior, but they did their mission.
While they were obviously overjoyed to see their loved ones again,
the soldiers I spoke with were good to go with that mission and what
they had accomplished. They fully understand that there are those who
want to indiscriminately kill and maim Americans and we would rather
take the fight to them overseas and abroad instead of having them come
to our backyard, to our schools and our playgrounds.

{time} 1300

Just yesterday, I had the chance to speak personally with General
Petraeus after his testimony before the House Armed Services Committee.
Again, as a Marine veteran of the Persian Gulf war and currently
serving in the Mississippi National Guard, I know firsthand what good
military commands look like, and General Petraeus is a great leader, a
professional soldier, and someone whose opinion I respect very much.
Based on this resolution, his quote was, ``The Taliban and al Qaeda
obviously would trumpet this as a victory, as a success. Needless to
say, it would completely undermine everything that our troopers have
fought and sacrificed so much for.''
Mr. Speaker, Congress' constitutional responsibility is to ensure
that the courageous men and women in our armed services have the tools
and equipment and training to do their job and come home safely to
their family. Our warfighters don't need armchair generals in this
Congress arbitrarily dictating terms that will cause irreparable harm
to them and to the national security of this country.
I urge my colleagues to oppose this resolution.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, may I inquire how much time is remaining
for each individual.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) has
5\3/4\ minutes remaining; the gentlewoman from Florida (Ms. Ros-
Lehtinen) has 3\1/2\ minutes remaining; the gentleman from California
(Mr. Berman) has 9\1/2\ minutes remaining; and the gentleman from North
Carolina (Mr. Jones) has 5 minutes remaining.
Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself 30 seconds.
Mr. Speaker, spending on the Afghanistan war is rising at an
accelerating rate. Over just 3 years, in a period of 3 years--2010,
2011, and 2012--we will spend 45 percent more on the war in Afghanistan
than we did in the preceding

[[Page H1944]]

8 years, $336.9 billion versus $231.2 billion. This is an example of
out-of-control Federal spending.
If Congress is serious about being fiscally responsible and about
cutting the Federal budget by three figures, then cutting spending on
the out-of-control $100 billion-a-year war in Afghanistan must be a
serious consideration. This legislation, House Concurrent Resolution
28, gives those who are concerned about the costs of this war an
opportunity finally to have a choice.
I reserve the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Who seeks recognition?
The Chair will recognize Members for closing speeches in the reverse
order of opening. That is, the gentleman from North Carolina, the
gentleman from California, the gentleman from Ohio, and finally the
gentlewoman from Florida.

Parliamentary Inquiries

Mr. KUCINICH. Mr. Speaker, I have a parliamentary inquiry.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman will state it.
Mr. KUCINICH. Is it the province of the Chair to determine that
closing statements are in order?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Recognition is in the discretion of the
Chair.
Mr. KUCINICH. Further parliamentary inquiry. Does the Chair have the
right to determine that closing statements are the order of business
here?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. It is the custom of the House for the Chair
to recognize Members in the reverse order of their opening statements
to make their closing statements.
Mr. KUCINICH. Further parliamentary inquiry. Does the Chair have the
ability to direct individual Members that they are to give their
closing statements?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. A Member may yield his last amount of time
to another Member at his discretion.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from North Carolina.
Mr. JONES. I yield myself 3 minutes.
Mr. Speaker, first I would like to say to every Member that has been
on the floor that served in our military, thank you and God bless you,
as I say all the time to those who are overseas for this country.
Because I did not serve, I sought out a Marine general that every
Marine that spoke on the floor today, if I said his name--but I don't
have permission--they would salute him. They know him.
Let me share with you what this Marine general said to me back in
November when I told him I read an article in The New York Times that
an Army colonel was saying, Oh, the training of Afghans is going so
well. So I emailed him. This is a six-point response, and I am going to
read three very quickly:
``Continued belief that we can train the Afghan army to be effective
in the time we have is nonsense. The vast majority cannot even read.
They are people from the villages hooked on drugs, illiterate, and
undisciplined. The South Vietnamese soldiers were much better trained,
and they could not stem the tide.''
He further states, ``What is the end state we are looking to achieve?
What are the measures of effectiveness? What is our exit strategy? Same
old questions, no answers.''
He closed by saying this: ``What do we say to the mother and father,
the wife, of the last Marine killed to support a corrupt government and
a corrupt leader in a war that cannot be won?''
I reserve the balance of my time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, if I could ask my good friend the
gentleman from California if he would yield 2 minutes of his time to
me.
Mr. BERMAN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to ask unanimous consent to
yield 2 minutes of my remaining time to my chairman, the gentlewoman
from Florida (Ms. Ros-Lehtinen).
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from California?
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from Florida may control
that time.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, how much would I have, then, to close?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from Florida has 5\1/2\
minutes remaining.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. I reserve the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Who seeks recognition?
Seeing none, we will proceed with the closing statements in the
reverse order of the opening statements.
First, the gentleman from North Carolina.
Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, how much time do I have remaining?
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from North Carolina has 3\1/2\
minutes remaining.
Mr. JONES. I yield the balance of my time to the gentleman from Ohio
(Mr. Kucinich).
Mr. KUCINICH. The 2001 authorization of military force and the
justification for our continued military presence in Afghanistan is
that the Taliban in the past provided a safe haven for al Qaeda or
could do so again in the future. General Petraeus has already admitted
that al Qaeda has little or no presence in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda is an
international organization, and, yes, they are a threat to America. The
Taliban is only a threat to us as long as we continue our military
occupation in Afghanistan.
After more than 9 years of military occupation of Afghanistan, can we
really continue to claim to be acting in self-defense? The premise that
the presence of our troops on the ground keeps us safer at home has
been repudiated by recent terrorist attacks on the United States, all
done by people other than Afghans outraged at continuing U.S. military
occupation of predominantly Muslim countries. That is not to justify
what they do, but it is to clarify the condition that we have in
Afghanistan.
For how long are we going to continue to dedicate hundreds of
billions of dollars and thousands of lives before we realize we can't
win Afghanistan militarily?
At the end of the year, the administration and U.S. military leaders
were touting peace talks to end the war with high-level Taliban
leaders. These Taliban leaders turned out to be fake.
A November 2010 article in The New York Times detailed joint U.S. and
Afghan negotiations with Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour, a man the U.S.
claimed was one of the most senior commanders in the Taliban. According
to the New York Times, ``the episode underscores the uncertain and even
bizarre nature of the atmosphere in which Afghan and American leaders
search for ways to bring the American-led war to an end. The leaders of
the Taliban are believed to be hiding in Pakistan, possibly with
assistance of the Pakistani government, which receives billions of
dollars in U.S. aid.''
How can we claim that a cornerstone of our counterinsurgency strategy
is to take out Taliban strongholds across the country while at the same
time conducting negotiations with the Taliban in an effort to end the
war?
This episode further underlies the significant weakness in our
strategy. We think we can separate the Taliban from the rest the Afghan
population. Our counterinsurgency strategy fails to recognize a basic
principle: Occupations fuel insurgencies. Occupations fuel
insurgencies. Occupations fuel insurgencies.
The Taliban is a local resistance movement that is part and parcel of
the indigenous population.

{time} 1310

We lost the Vietnam war because we failed to win the hearts and minds
of the local population. Without providing them with a competent
government that provided them with basic security and a decent living,
we're committing the same mistake in Afghanistan.
News reports indicate the Taliban is regaining momentum. The increase
in civilian casualties due to higher levels of violence by insurgents
further undermines the assurances of progress. As we send more troops
into the country and kill innocent civilians with errant air strikes,
the Taliban gains more support as resistors of foreign occupation. If
we accept the premise that we can never leave Afghanistan until the
Taliban is eradicated, we'll be there forever.
I would like to insert into the Record an article from The Nation,
``America's Failed War in Afghanistan--No Policy Change Is Going to
Affect the Outcome.'' That's by Jeremy Scahill.

[[Page H1945]]

[From The Nation, Mar. 17, 2011]

America's Failed War in Afghanistan--No Policy Change Is Going To
Affect the Outcome

(By Jeremy Scahill)

At the end of the NATO summit in Lisbon, Portugal this
weekend, the leadership of the Afghan Taliban issued a
statement characterizing the alliance's adoption of a loose
timeline for a 2014 end to combat operations as ``good news''
for Afghans and ``a sign of failure for the American
government.'' At the summit, President Barack Obama said that
2011 will begin ``a transition to full Afghan lead'' in
security operations, while the Taliban declared: ``In the
past nine years, the invaders could not establish any system
of governance in Kabul and they will never be able to do so
in future.''
While Obama claimed that the U.S. and its allies are
``breaking the Taliban's momentum,'' the reality on the
ground tells a different story. Despite increased Special
Operations Forces raids and, under Gen. David Petraeus, a
return to regular U.S.-led airstrikes, the insurgency in
Afghanistan is spreading and growing stronger. ``By killing
Taliban leaders the war will not come to an end,'' said the
Taliban's former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, in
an interview at his home in Kabul. ``On the contrary, things
get worse which will give birth to more leaders.''
Former and current Taliban leaders say that they have seen
a swelling in the Taliban ranks since 9-11. In part, they
say, this can be attributed to a widely held perception that
the Karzai government is corrupt and illegitimate and that
Afghans--primarily ethnic Pashtuns--want foreign occupation
forces out. ``We are only fighting to make foreigners leave
Afghanistan,'' a new Taliban commander in Kunduz told me
during my recent trip to the country. ``We don't want to
fight after the withdrawal of foreigners, but as long as
there are foreigners, we won't talk to Karzai.''
``The Americans have very sophisticated technology, but the
problem here in Afghanistan is they are confronting ideology.
I think ideology is stronger than technology,'' says Abdul
Salam Zaeef, a former senior member of Mullah Mohammed Omar's
government. ``If I am a Taliban and I'm killed, I'm martyred,
then I'm successful. There are no regrets for the Taliban.
It's very difficult to defeat this kind of idea.''
But it is not simply a matter of ideology versus
technology. The Taliban is not one unified body. The Afghan
insurgency is fueled by fighters with a wide variety of
motivations. Some are the dedicated jihadists of which Zaeef
speaks, but others are fighting to defend their land or are
seeking revenge for the killing of family members by NATO or
Afghan forces. While al Qaeda has been almost entirely
expelled from Afghanistan, the insurgency still counts a
small number of non-Afghans among its ranks. Bolstering the
Taliban's recruitment efforts is the perception in
Afghanistan that the Taliban pays better than NATO or the
Afghan army or police.
The hard reality U.S. officials don't want to discuss is
this: the cultural and religious values of much of the
Pashtun population--which comprises 25-40 percent of the
country--more closely align with those of the Taliban than
they do with Afghan government or U.S./NATO forces. The
Taliban operate a shadow government in large swaths of the
Pashtun areas of the country, complete with governors and a
court system. In rural areas, land and property disputes are
resolved through the Taliban system rather than the Afghan
government, which is widely distrusted. ``The objectives and
goal of the American troops in Afghanistan are not clear to
the people and therefore Afghans call the Americans
`invaders,' '' says Muttawakil. ``Democracy is a very new
phenomenon in Afghanistan and most people don't know the
meaning of democracy. And now corruption, thieves and fakes
have defamed democracy. Democracy can't be imposed because
people will never adopt any value by force.''
The U.S. strategy of attempting to force the Taliban to
surrender or engage in negotiations rests almost exclusively
on attempts to decapitate the Taliban leadership. While
Taliban leaders acknowledge that commanders are regularly
killed, they say the targeted killings are producing more
radical leaders who are far less likely to negotiate than the
older school Taliban leaders who served in the government of
Mullah Mohammed Omar. ``If today Mullah Omar was captured or
killed, the fighting will go on,'' says Zaeef, adding: ``It
will be worse for everyone if the [current] Taliban
leadership disappears.''
In October, there were a flurry of media reports that
senior Taliban leaders were negotiating with the Karzai
government and that U.S. forces were helping to insure safe
passage for the Taliban leaders to come to Kabul. The Taliban
passionately refuted those reports, saying they were
propaganda aimed at dividing the insurgency. Last week the
Taliban appeared vindicated on this point as Karzai spoke in
markedly modest terms on the issue. He told The Washington
Post that three months ago he had met with one or two ``very
high'' level Taliban leaders. He characterized the meeting as
``the exchange of desires for peace,'' saying the Taliban
``feel the same as we do here--that too many people are
suffering for no reason.''
Update: [On Tuesday, The New York Times reported that NATO
and the Afghan government have held a series of ``secret''
peace negotiations with a man who posed as a senior Taliban
leader, Mullah Akhtar Muhammad Mansour. A Western diplomat
involved in the discussions told the Times, ``[W]e gave him a
lot of money.'' It is unclear who, if anyone, the impostor
was working for, though the Times speculated that he could
have been deployed by Pakistan's ISI spy agency or by the
Taliban itself. ``The Taliban are cleverer than the Americans
and our own intelligence service,'' said a senior Afghan
official who is familiar with the case. ``They are playing
games.'' Last month, the White House asked the Times to
withhold Mansour's name ``from an article about the peace
talks, expressing concern that the talks would be
jeopardized--and Mr. Mansour's life put at risk--if his
involvement were publicized. The Times agreed to withhold Mr.
Mansour's name,'' according to the paper.
This incident is significant on a number of levels. If
true, it underscores the ineffective and inaccurate nature of
U.S., NATO and Afghan government intelligence. It also
confirms what Taliban leaders have stated publicly and to
The Nation, namely that it has not negotiated with the
Afghan government or NATO and that it will not negotiate
unless foreign troops leave Afghanistan. The fake Mullah
Mansour, according to the Times, ``did not demand, as the
Taliban have in the past, a withdrawal of foreign forces
or a Taliban share of the government.''
In October, a U.S. official said that reports in U.S. media
outlets of senior Taliban negotiating are propaganda aimed at
sowing dissent among the Taliban leadership. ``This is a
psychological operation, plain and simple,'' the official
with firsthand knowledge of the Afghan government's
strategies told the McClatchy news service. ``Exaggerating
the significance of it is an effort to sow distrust within
the insurgency.''
Today on MSNBC, Pentagon spokesperson Geoff Morrell
continued to insist that U.S. and NATO forces have
facilitated safe passage for Taliban leaders for
reconciliation meetings in Kabul. The Taliban maintain there
have been no meetings.
The Taliban impostor incident also calls into question
scores of deadly night raids that have resulted in the deaths
of innocent Afghans. Several survivors of night raids
recently told The Nation that they believed they were victims
of bad intelligence provided by other Afghans for money or to
settle personal grudges.
Contrary to the rhetoric emanating from NATO and
Washington, the Taliban are not on the ropes and, from their
perspective, would gain nothing from negotiating with the
U.S. or NATO. As far as they are concerned, time is on their
side. ``The bottom line for [NATO and the U.S.] is to
immediately implement what they would ultimately have to
implement . . . after colossal casualties,'' stated the
Taliban declaration after the recent NATO summit. ``They
should not postpone withdrawal of their forces.''
Depending on who you ask, the fact that Gen. Petraeus has
brought back the use of heavy U.S. airstrikes and is
increasing night raids and other direct actions by Special
Operations Forces could be seen as a sign of either fierce
determination to wipe out ``the enemy'' or of desperation to
prove the U.S. and its allies are ``winning.'' Over the past
three months, NATO claims that Special Operations Forces'
night raids have resulted in more than 360 ``insurgent
leaders'' being killed or captured along with 960 ``lower-
level'' leaders and the capture of more than 2400 ``lower-
level'' fighters. In July, Special Operations Forces averaged
5 raids a night. Now, according to NATO, they are conducting
an average of 17. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called
the raids ``intelligence-driven precision operations against
high value insurgents and their networks,'' adding, ``There
is no question that they are having a significant impact on
the insurgent leadership.''
The raids undoubtedly have produced scores of successful
kill or capture operations, but serious questions abound over
the NATO definitions of Taliban commanders, sub-commanders
and foot soldiers. Most significantly, the raids consistently
result in the killing of innocent civilians, a fact that is
problematic for NATO and the Karzai government. ``A lot of
times, yeah, the right guys would get targeted and the
right guys would get killed,'' says Matthew Hoh a former
senior State Department official in Afghanistan who
resigned in 2009 in protest of U.S. war strategy. ``Plenty
of other times, the wrong people would get killed.
Sometimes it would be innocent families.'' Hoh, who was the
senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban stronghold,
describes night raids as ``a really risky, really violent
operation,'' saying that when Special Operations Forces
conduct them, ``We might get that one guy we're looking for
or we might kill a bunch of innocent people and now make ten
more Taliban out of them.''
Hoh describes the current use of U.S. Special Operations
Forces in Afghanistan as a ``tremendous waste of resources,''
saying, ``They are the best strike forces the world's ever
known. They're very well trained, very well equipped, have a
tremendous amount of support, and we've got them in
Afghanistan chasing after mid-level Taliban leaders who are
not threatening the United States, who are only fighting us
really because we're in their valley.''
In an interview with The Washington Post in mid-November,
President Karzai called for an end to the night raids. ``I
don't like it in

[[Page H1946]]

any manner and the Afghan people don't like these raids in
any manner,'' Karzai said. ``We don't like raids in our
homes. This is a problem between us and I hope this ends as
soon as possible. . . . Terrorism is not invading Afghan
homes and fighting terrorism is not being intrusive in the
daily Afghan life.''
Karzai's comments angered the Obama administration. At the
NATO summit, President Obama acknowledged that civilian
deaths have sparked ``real tensions'' with the Karzai
government, but reserved the right to continue US raids.
``[Karzai's] got to understand that I've got a bunch of young
men and women . . . who are in a foreign country being shot
at and having to traverse terrain filled with IEDs, and they
need to protect themselves,'' Obama said. ``So if we're
setting things up where they're just sitting ducks for the
Taliban, that's not an acceptable answer either.'' Republican
Senator Lindsey Graham blasted Karzai's statement calling for
an end to night raids, saying, ``it would be a disaster for
the Petraeus strategy.''
Along with Afghan government corruption, including a cabal
of war lords, drug dealers and war criminals in key
positions, the so-called Petraeus strategy of ratcheting up
air strikes and expanding night raids is itself delivering
substantial blows to the stated U.S. counterinsurgency
strategy and the much-discussed battle for hearts and minds.
The raids and airstrikes are premiere recruiting points for
the Taliban and, unlike Sen. Graham and the Obama
administration, Karzai seems to get that. In the bigger
picture, the U.S. appears to be trying to kill its way to a
passable definition of a success or even victory. This
strategy puts a premium on the number of kills and captures
of anyone who can loosely be defined as an insurgent and
completely sidelines the blowback these operations cause.
``We found ourselves in this Special Operations form of
attrition warfare,'' says Hoh, ``which is kind of like an
oxymoron, because Special Operations are not supposed to be
in attrition warfare. But we've found ourselves in that in
Afghanistan''

I would like to put into the Record an article from Aljazeera.net,
which points out that for all practical purposes, Washington has given
up on its counterinsurgency strategy.

[From Aljazeera.net, Mar. 7, 2011]

Failing in Afghanistan Successfully--Despite Hundreds of Billions of
Dollars and Thousands of Troops, the U.S. Is Unable To Conclude Its
Longest War

(By Marwan Bishara)

While we have been fixated on successive Arab breakthroughs
and victories against tyranny and extremism, Washington is
failing miserably but discreetly in Afghanistan.
The American media's one-obsession-at-a-time coverage of
global affairs might have put the spotlight on President
Obama's slow and poor reaction to the breathtaking
developments starting in Tunisia and Egypt. But they spared
him embarrassing questions about continued escalation and
deaths in Afghanistan.
In spite of its international coalition, multiple
strategies, hundreds of billions of dollars, and a surge of
tens of thousands of troops, the U.S. is unable to conclude
its longest war yet or at least reverse its trend.
Recent ``reports'' from the war front have been of two
kinds. Some official or analytical in nature and heavily
circulated in Washington portray a war going terribly well.
On the other hand, hard news from the ground tell a story of
U.S. fatigue, backtracking and tactical withdrawals or
redeployments which do not bode well for defeating the
Taliban or forcing them to the negotiations' table.
For example, while the U.S. military's decision to withdraw
from the Pech valley was justified on tactical need to
redeploy troops for the task of ``protecting the
population'', keen observers saw it as a humiliating retreat
from what the Pentagon previously called a very strategic
position and sacrificed some hundred soldiers defending it.
Likewise, strategic analysts close to the administration
speak triumphantly of U.S. surge and hi-tech firepower
inflicting terrible cost on the Taliban, killing many
insurgents and driving many more from their sanctuaries.
But news from the war front show the Taliban unrelenting,
mounting counterattacks and escalating the war especially in
areas where the U.S. has ``surged'' its troops. And while the
majority of the 400 Afghan districts are ``calmer'', they
remain mostly out of Kabul's control.
What success?
Those with relatively long memories recall the then defence
secretary Donald Rumsfeld's claims that most of Afghanistan
was secure in early 2003 and that American forces had changed
their strategy from major combat operations to stabilisation
and reconstruction project.
But the Taliban continued to carry daily attacks on
government buildings, U.S. positions and international
organisations. Two years later, the U.S. was to suffer the
worst and deadliest year since the war began.
Today's war pundits are in the same state of denial. For
all practical purpose, Washington has given up on its
counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy devised under McChrystal
and Petreaus.
Instead, it is pursuing a heavy handed and terribly
destructive crackdown that includes special operations,
assassinations, mass demolitions, air and night raids etc.
that have led to anything but winning the country, let alone
its hearts and minds.
The killing of nine Afghan children last week--all under
the age of 12--by U.S. attack helicopters has once again put
the spotlight on the U.S. military's new aggressive methods.
The results are so devastating for the conduct of the war
and to Washington's clients, that President Karzai not only
distanced himself from the U.S. methods, but also publicly
rejected Washington's apology for the killings.
Nor is the recruitment and training of the Afghan forces
going well. Indeed, many seem to give up on the idea that
Afghan security forces could take matters into their hands if
the U.S. withdraws in the foreseeable future.
Worse, U.S. strategic co-operation with Pakistan--the
central pillar of Obama's PakAf strategy--has cooled after
the arrest of a CIA contractor for the killing of two
Pakistanis even though he presumably enjoys diplomatic
immunity.
Reportedly, it has also led to a ``breakdown'' in co-
ordination between the two countries intelligence agencies,
the CIA and the ISI.
But the incident is merely a symptom of a bigger problem
between the two countries. A reluctant partner, the Pakistani
establishment and its military are unhappy with U.S. strategy
which they reckon could destabilise their country and
strengthen Afghanistan and India at their expense.
That has not deterred Washington from offering ideas and
money to repair the damage. However, it has become clear that
unlike in recent years, future improvement in their bilateral
relations will most probably come as a result of the U.S.
edging closer to Pakistan's position, not the opposite.
All of which makes one wonder why certain Washington
circles are rushing to advance the ``success story''.
Running out of options
The Afghan government's incapability to take on the tasks
of governing or securing the country beyond the capital, and
the incapacity of the Obama administration to break the
Taliban's momentum does not bode well for an early conclusion
of the war.
To their credit some of Obama's war and surge supporters
realise that there is no military solution for Afghanistan.
Clearly, their claims of battlefield successes help justify
the rush to talk to the Taliban.
But it is not yet clear whether the presumably ongoing
exploratory secret negotiations with the Taliban are serious
at all, or will lead to comprehensive negotiations and
eventually a lasting deal. The last ``Taliban commander''
Washington dialogued with in the fall turned out to be an
impostor--a shopkeeper from Quetta!
If the Taliban does eventually accept to sit down with
Obama or Karzai envoys, the U.S. needs to explain why it
fought for 10 years only to help the group back to power.
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton has begun the
humiliating backtracking last month: ``Now, I know that
reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the
Taliban sounds distasteful, even unimaginable. And diplomacy
would be easy if we only had to talk to our friends. But that
is not how one makes peace.''
Facing up to the reality
The mere fact that the world's mightiest superpower cannot
win over the poorly armed Taliban after a long decade of
fighting, means it has already failed strategically,
regardless of the final outcome.
The escalation of violence and wasting billions more cannot
change that. It is history. The quicker the Obama
administration recognises its misfortunes, minimises its
losses and convenes a regional conference over the future of
Afghanistan under UN auspices, the easier it will be to
evacuate without humiliation.
Whether the U.S. eventually loses the war and declares
victory; negotiates a settlement and withdraw its troops,
remains to be seen. What is incontestable is that when you
fight the week for too long, you also become weak.
All of which explains the rather blunt comments made in a
speech at the end of February, by U.S. Defence Secretary
Robert Gates when he said ``. . . any future defense
secretary who advises the president to again send a big
American land army into Asia or into the Middle East or
Africa should `have his head examined,' as General MacArthur
so delicately put it.''
Amen.

I would like to insert into the Record, from AlterNet, an article by
Derrick Crowe and Robert Greenwald posted on February 6, 2011, titled
Damning New Report Shows U.S. Strategy is Blocking Chance for Peace in
Afghanistan.

[From AlterNet, Feb. 6, 2011]

Damning New Report Shows U.S. Strategy Is Blocking Chance for Peace in
Afghanistan

(By Derrick Crowe and Robert Greenwald)

See: http://www.alternet.org/story/149815/
The new report from NYU's Center for International
Cooperation is a damning description of the U.S. policies in
Afghanistan since 2001, and a warning that the escalated
military strategy blocks the road to peace while making the
Taliban more dangerous.
Separating the Taliban from al-Qaeda: The Core of Success
in Afghanistan is the latest

[[Page H1947]]

in a continuous string of statements from Afghanistan experts
that the U.S. war policies that were launched a year ago
aren't making us safer and aren't worth the substantial
costs: $1 million per U.S. troop in Afghanistan per year, for
a total of more than $375.5 billion wasted so far. The report
is written by Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn,
Kandahar-based researchers who've spent more than four years
researching the Taliban and the recent history of southern
Afghanistan.

I would like to place into the Record an article from ABC News titled
Afghan Security the Worst in a Decade, according to the U.N.

ABC News--Afghan Security the Worst in a Decade: UN

The security situation in Afghanistan has worsened to its
lowest point since the toppling of the Taliban a decade ago
and attacks on aid workers are at unprecedented levels, a
United Nations envoy said.
Robert Watkins, the outgoing UN deputy special
representative of the Secretary General for Afghanistan, says
from a humanitarian perspective, security ``is on everyone's
minds''.
``It is fair to say that security in the country is at its
lowest point since the departure of the Talibans,'' he said.
Mr Watkins says before last year's surge in NATO military
forces, the insurgency was centred in the south and south-
east of the country.
``Since the surge of NATO forces last year, we have seen
the insurgency move to parts of the country where we've never
seen before,'' he said.
``We've now confronted with security problems that we'd
never dream that we'd have.
``While NATO is claiming that it has turned the corner . .
. we still see these very difficult security problems.''
UN relief agencies now have regular access to just 30 per
cent of the country. Access is mixed for another 30 per cent
while there is hardly any access to the remaining 40 per
cent.
Mr Watkins says a key issue is the ``conflation of
political, military, developmental and humanitarian aid''.
``Because of the way aid is dispersed in Afghanistan . . .
it has contributed to perception in parts of the Afghan
population that somehow humanitarian work is lumped into this
political and military effort,'' he said.
``We have to emphasise that we recognise that there has to
be separation and we have to be very careful to try to
address this perception.''
But he pointed out that a positive development was that the
international and Afghan military have publicly acknowledged
that some kind of negotiated settlement was necessary to end
the instability.
``[This year] can be a crucial year if there is a
breakthrough in finding some kind of reconciliation
efforts,'' he said.
The Taliban, a hardline Islamist movement, was forced from
power in late 2001 after a US invasion launched in the wake
of the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington.

I would like to place into the Record an article from The New York
Times discussing the counterintelligence strategy titled U.S. Pulling
Back in Afghan Valley it Called Vital to War.

[From The New York Times, Feb. 24, 2011]

U.S. Pulling Back in Afghan Valley It Called Vital to War

(By C. J. Chivers, Alissa J. Rubin and Wesley Morgan)

Kabul, Afghanistan.--After years of fighting for control of
a prominent valley in the rugged mountains of eastern
Afghanistan, the United States military has begun to pull
back most of its forces from ground it once insisted was
central to the campaign against the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
The withdrawal from the Pech Valley, a remote region in
Kunar Province, formally began on Feb. 15. The military
projects that it will last about two months, part of a shift
of Western forces to the province's more populated areas.
Afghan units will remain in the valley, a test of their
military readiness.
While American officials say the withdrawal matches the
latest counterinsurgency doctrine's emphasis on protecting
Afghan civilians, Afghan officials worry that the shift of
troops amounts to an abandonment of territory where multiple
insurgent groups are well established, an area that Afghans
fear they may not be ready to defend on their own.
And it is an emotional issue for American troops, who fear
that their service and sacrifices could be squandered. At
least 103 American soldiers have died in or near the valley's
maze of steep gullies and soaring peaks, according to a count
by The New York Times, and many times more have been wounded,
often severely.
Military officials say they are sensitive to those
perceptions. ``People say, `You are coming out of the Pech';
I prefer to look at it as realigning to provide better
security for the Afghan people,'' said Maj. Gen. John F.
Campbell, the commander for eastern Afghanistan. ``I don't
want the impression we're abandoning the Pech.''
The reorganization, which follows the complete Afghan and
American withdrawals from isolated outposts in nearby
Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley, runs the risk of
providing the Taliban with an opportunity to claim success
and raises questions about the latest strategy guiding the
war.
American officials say their logic is simple and
compelling: the valley consumed resources disproportionate
with its importance; those forces could be deployed in other
areas; and there are not enough troops to win decisively in
the Pech Valley in any case.
``If you continue to stay with the status quo, where will
you be a year from now?'' General Campbell said. ``I would
tell you that there are places where we'll continue to build
up security and it leads to development and better
governance, but there are some areas that are not ready for
that, and I've got to use the forces where they can do the
most good.''
President Obama's Afghan troop buildup is now fully in
place, and the United States military has its largest-ever
contingent in Afghanistan. Mr. Obama's reinforced campaign
has switched focus to operations in Afghanistan's south, and
to building up Afghan security forces.
The previous strategy emphasized denying sanctuaries to
insurgents, blocking infiltration routes from Pakistan and
trying to fight away from populated areas, where NATO's
superior firepower could be massed, in theory, with less risk
to civilians. The Pech Valley effort was once a cornerstone
of this thinking.
The new plan stands as a clear, if unstated, repudiation of
earlier decisions. When Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the
former NATO commander, overhauled the Afghan strategy two
years ago, his staff designated 80 ``key terrain districts''
to concentrate on. The Pech Valley was not one of them.
Ultimately, the decision to withdraw reflected a stark--and
controversial--internal assessment by the military that it
would have been better served by not having entered the high
valley in the first place.
``What we figured out is that people in the Pech really
aren't anti-U.S. or anti-anything; they just want to be left
alone,'' said one American military official familiar with
the decision. ``Our presence is what's destabilizing this
area.''
Gen. Mohammed Zaman Mamozai, a former commander of the
region's Afghan Border Police, agreed with some of this
assessment. He said that residents of the Pech Valley
bristled at the American presence but might tolerate Afghan
units. ``Many times they promised us that if we could tell
the Americans to pull out of the area, they wouldn't fight
the Afghan forces,'' he said.
It is impossible to know whether such pledges will hold.
Some veterans worry that the withdrawal will create an ideal
sanctuary for insurgent activity--an area under titular
government influence where fighters or terrorists will
shelter or prepare attacks elsewhere.
While it is possible that the insurgents will concentrate
in the mountain valleys, General Campbell said his goal was
to arrange forces to keep insurgents from Kabul, the
country's capital.
``There are thousands of isolated mountainous valleys
throughout Afghanistan, and we cannot be in all of them,'' he
said.
The American military plans to withdraw from most of the
four principal American positions in the valley. For security
reasons, General Campbell declined to discuss which might
retain an American presence, and exactly how the Americans
would operate with Afghans in the area in the future.
As the pullback begins, the switch in thinking has fueled
worries among those who say the United States is ceding some
of Afghanistan's most difficult terrain to the insurgency and
putting residents who have supported the government at risk
of retaliation.
``There is no house in the area that does not have a
government employee in it,'' said Col. Gul Rahman, the Afghan
police chief in the Manogai District, where the Americans'
largest base in the valley, Forward Operating Base Blessing,
is located. ``Some work with the Afghan National Army, some
work with the Afghan National Police, or they are a teacher
or governmental employee. I think it is not wise to ignore
and leave behind all these people, with the danger posed to
their lives.''
Some Afghan military officials have also expressed pointed
misgivings about the prospects for Afghan units left behind.
``According to my experience in the military and knowledge
of the area, it's absolutely impractical for the Afghan
National Army to protect the area without the Americans,''
said Major Turab, the former second-in-command of an Afghan
battalion in the valley, who like many Afghans uses only one
name. ``It will be a suicidal mission.''
The pullback has international implications as well. Senior
Pakistani commanders have complained since last summer that
as American troops withdraw from Kunar Province, fighters and
some commanders from the Haqqani network and other militant
groups have crossed into Afghanistan from Pakistan to create
a ``reverse safe haven'' from which to carry out attacks
against Pakistani troops in the tribal areas.
The Taliban and other Afghan insurgent groups are all but
certain to label the withdrawal a victory in the Pech
Valley, where they could point to the Soviet Army's
withdrawal from the same area in 1988. Many Afghans
remember that withdrawal as a symbolic moment when the
Kremlin's military campaign began to visibly fall apart.
Within six months, the Soviet-backed Afghan Army of the
time ceded the territory to mujahedeen groups, according to
Afghan military officials.
The unease, both with the historical precedent and with the
price paid in American

[[Page H1948]]

blood in the valley, has ignited a sometimes painful debate
among Americans veterans and active-duty troops. The Pech
Valley had long been a hub of American military operations in
Kunar and Nuristan Provinces.
American forces first came to the valley in force in 2003,
following the trail of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the leader of the
Hezb-i-Islami group, who, like other prominent insurgent
leaders, has been said at different times to hide in Kunar.
They did not find him, though Hezb-i-Islami is active in the
valley.
Since then, one American infantry battalion after another
has fought there, trying to establish security in villages
while weathering roadside bombs and often vicious fights.
Along with other slotlike canyons that the United States
has already largely abandoned--including the Korangal Valley,
the Waygal Valley (where the battle of Wanat was fought in
2008), the Shuryak Valley and the Nuristan River corridor
(where Combat Outpost Keating was nearly overrun in 2009)--
the Pech Valley was a region rivaled only by Helmand Province
as the deadliest Afghan acreage for American troops.
On one operation alone in 2005, 19 service members,
including 11 members of the Navy Seals, died.
As the years passed and the toll rose, the area assumed for
many soldiers a status as hallowed ground. ``I can think of
very few places over the past 10 years with as high and as
sustained a level of violence,'' said Col. James W. Bierman,
who commanded a Marine battalion in the area in 2006 and
helped establish the American presence in the Korangal
Valley.
In the months after American units left the Korangal last
year, insurgent attacks from that valley into the Pech Valley
increased sharply, prompting the current American battalion
in the area, First Battalion, 327th Infantry, and Special
Operations units to carry out raids into places that American
troops once patrolled regularly.
Last August, an infantry company raided the village of
Omar, which the American military said had become a base for
attacks into the Pech Valley, but which earlier units had
viewed as mostly calm. Another American operation last
November, in the nearby Watapor Valley, led to fighting that
left seven American soldiers dead.
This article has been revised to reflect the following
correction:
Correction: February 24, 2011
An earlier version of this article referred incorrectly to
a pullback of American forces in eastern Afghanistan. It is a
pullback from remote territory within Kunar Province, not
from the province as a whole.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from California (Mr. Berman)
has 7\1/2\ minutes remaining.
Mr. BERMAN. I simply would very quickly make the case that the
resolution should be voted against for several reasons. Initially,
because it improperly invokes a provision of the War Powers Act that's
inapplicable. This war was authorized by the U.S. Congress. Secondly,
the manner in which it would force withdrawal is irresponsible and I
don't think is the right way to do it. And, thirdly, that I am not
prepared, from this point of view, to say that failure is in any way
inevitable, and that we should not at this time make the judgment to
pull the plug out from what we are doing in Afghanistan.
I would urge a ``no'' vote on the resolution.
I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Kucinich) has
5\1/4\ minutes remaining.
Mr. KUCINICH. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
We've stated over and over in this debate the cost of this war in
this budget alone will be over $113 billion--$113 billion. There are
Members who have come to this floor trying to whack a billion dollars
in spending here and there. This is $113 billion. You want to cut out
waste, let's get out of Afghanistan.
Keep in mind that when you go to the Pentagon, and some of our
Members have, and have gone to Afghanistan, there's an open-ended war
going on here. There's no end in sight. I've submitted for the Record
articles with respect to that. Hear this: We're going to be there
through at least 2020. And that's going to cost us an extra, at least
an extra trillion dollars.
Where are we going to get that money? Are we going to cut Social
Security for that? Are we going to cut health care and cut funds for
education? Are we going to cut more funds for home heating aid?
Where are we going to get this money? Are we ready to give up our
entire domestic agenda so that we can continue on the path of a war to
prop up a corrupt regime whose friends are building villas in Dubai,
presumably with money that comes through the United States that's
shipped out in planes out of the Kabul airport?
We have to start standing up for America here.
I appreciate and respect every Member of this Congress who served in
the military. We honor them, just as I honor the members of my own
family; my father, Frank, who was a World War II veteran; my brother
Frank, who was a Vietnam veteran; my brother Gary, a Vietnam-era
veteran; my sister Beth Ann, an Army veteran. I come from a family that
appreciates service to our country.
But how are we serving our troops by letting them in a situation that
is absolutely impossible, whether it's greater numbers of them
returning home with injuries from IEDs. How are we serving our troops
by telling them we're going to keep extending the period of the war?
Who's speaking up truly for our troops here? Is it General Petraeus,
who says, Well, we'll just keep the war going and maybe--maybe--we'll
send 2,000 troops out of Afghanistan or redirect them by 2014. He
doesn't get to make the choice. That choice must be made by the
Congress of the United States.
It's time that we started to stand up for the Constitution of the
United States, which, last I checked, in Article I, section 8 provides
that Congress has to make the decision whether or not to send our
troops into war. We have not the right to give that over to a
President, over to a general, or anybody else. It's our prerogative
inside this Congress.
In 2001, Mr. Speaker, I joined with Members of this House in voting
for the authorization of military force following the terrorist attacks
on 9/11. I don't take a backseat to anyone in standing up to defend
this country. But as the United States continues in what is now the
longest war in our history, it has become clear that the authorization
for military force is being used as a carte blanche for circumventing
Congress' role as a coequal branch of government.
I want you to hear this. We're a coequal branch of government. We're
not lap dogs for the President. We're not servants of generals. We are
a coequal branch of government expressing the sovereign will of the
American people.
It has become clear this administration, just as the last
administration, is willing to commit us to an endless war and an
endless stream of money, just a year after a commitment of an
additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan and continued assurances of
``progress.'' They have been walking that dog down the road for the
last 7 years. Progress.
My legislation invokes the War Powers Resolution of 1973, and if
enacted, would require this President to withdraw U.S. Armed Forces out
of Afghanistan by December 31, 2011.
Regardless of your support or opposition to the war in Afghanistan,
this debate has been a critical opportunity to evaluate the human and
the economic cost as this Congress works to address our country's dire
financial straits. Those of us that supported the withdrawal may not
agree on a timeline, but an increasing number of us agree it's time to
think and rethink our current national security strategy. And we have
to know the costs are great. We can't get away from the costs of this
war.
Nobel Prize-winning economist Joe Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, his
associate, wrote a book about the Iraq war. They projected then a
minimum of $3 trillion in costs.
I would like to include in the Record, Mr. Speaker, a statement that
I made over 8 years ago at the beginning of the Iraq war, where I
pointed out there was nothing--no reason why we should be going to war
in Iraq because there was no proof that Iraq had weapons of mass
destruction.
I mention that in terms of this debate because we're at the
confluence of the events--the anniversary of the Iraq war; the
confluence of the funding of the war in Afghanistan. We've got to get
out of Afghanistan. We've got to get out of Iraq. We've got to start
taking care of things here at home.

Analysis of Joint Resolution on Iraq by Dennis J. Kucinich

Washington, Oct 2, 2002.--Whereas in 1990 in response to
Iraq's war of aggression against and illegal occupation of
Kuwait, the United States forged a coalition of nations to
liberate Kuwait and its people in order to defend the
national security of the United States and enforce United
Nations Security Council resolutions relating to Iraq;

[[Page H1949]]

KEY ISSUE: In the Persian Gulf war there was an
international coalition. World support was for protecting
Kuwait. There is no world support for invading Iraq.
Whereas after the liberation of Kuwait in 1991, Iraq
entered into a United Nations sponsored cease-fire agreement
pursuant to which Iraq unequivocally agreed, among other
things, to eliminate its nuclear, biological, and chemical
weapons programs and the means to deliver and develop them,
and to end its support for international terrorism;
Whereas the efforts of international weapons inspectors,
United States intelligence agencies, and Iraqi defectors led
to the discovery that Iraq had large stockpiles of chemical
weapons and a large scale biological weapons program, and
that Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program
that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than
intelligence reporting had previously indicated;
KEY ISSUE: UN inspection teams identified and destroyed
nearly all such weapons. A lead inspector, Scott Ritter, said
that he believes that nearly all other weapons not found were
destroyed in the Gulf War. Furthermore, according to a
published report in the Washington Post, the Central
Intelligence Agency has no up to date accurate report on
Iraq's WMD capabilities.
Whereas Iraq, in direct and flagrant violation of the
cease-fire, attempted to thwart the efforts of weapons
inspectors to identify and destroy Iraq's weapons of mass
destruction stockpiles and development capabilities, which
finally resulted in the withdrawal of inspectors from Iraq on
October 31, 1998;
KEY ISSUES: Iraqi deceptions always failed. The inspectors
always figured out what Iraq was doing. It was the United
States that withdrew from the inspections in 1998. And the
United States then launched a cruise missile attack against
Iraq 48 hours after the inspectors left. In advanced of a
military strike, the US continues to thward (the
Administration's word) weapons inspections.
Whereas in 1998 Congress concluded that Iraq's continuing
weapons of mass destruction programs threatened vital United
States interests and international peace and security,
declared Iraq to be in ``material and unacceptable breach of
its international obligations'' and urged the President ``to
take appropriate action, in accordance with the Constitution
and relevant laws of the United States, to bring Iraq into
compliance with its international obligations'' (Public Law
105-235);
Whereas Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national
security of the United States and international peace and
security in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material
and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by,
among other things, continuing to possess and develop a
significant chemical and biological weapons capability,
actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting
and harboring terrorist organizations;
KEY ISSUES: There is no proof that Iraq represents an
imminent or immediate threat to the United States. A
``continuing'' threat does not constitute a sufficient cause
for war. The Administration has refused to provide the
Congress with credible intelligence that proves that Iraq is
a serious threat to the United States and is continuing to
possess and develop chemical and biological and nuclear
weapons. Furthermore there is no credible intelligence
connecting Iraq to Al Qaida and 9/11.
Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the
United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in
brutal repression of its civilian population thereby
threatening international peace and security in the region,
by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi
citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American
serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully
seized by Iraq from Kuwait;
KEY ISSUE: This language is so broad that it would allow
the President to order an attack against Iraq even when there
is no material threat to the United States. Since this
resolution authorizes the use of force for all Iraq related
violations of the UN Security Council directives, and since
the resolution cites Iraq's imprisonment of non-Iraqi
prisoners, this resolution would authorize the President to
attack Iraq in order to liberate Kuwaiti citizens who may or
may not be in Iraqi prisons, even if Iraq met compliance with
all requests to destroy any weapons of mass destruction.
Though in 2002 at the Arab Summit, Iraq and Kuwait agreed to
bilateral negotiations to work out all claims relating to
stolen property and prisoners of war. This use-of-force
resolution enables the President to commit U.S.046 troops to
recover Kuwaiti property.
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its
capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction
against other nations and its own people;
Whereas the current Iraqi regime has demonstrated its
continuing hostility toward, and willingness to attack, the
United States, including by attempting in 1993 to assassinate
former President Bush and by firing on many thousands of
occasions on United States and Coalition Armed Forces engaged
in enforcing the resolutions of the United Nations Security
Council;
KEY ISSUE: The Iraqi regime has never attacked nor does it
have the capability to attack the United States. The ``no
fly'' zone was not the result of a UN Security Council
directive. It was illegally imposed by the United States,
Great Britain and France and is not specifically sanctioned
by any Security Council resolution.
Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing
responsibility for attacks on the United States, its
citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred
on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
KEY ISSUE: There is no credible intelligence that connects
Iraq to the events of 9/11 or to participation in those
events by assisting Al Qaida.
Whereas Iraq continues to aid and harbor other
international terrorist organizations, including
organizations that threaten the lives and safety of American
citizens;
KEY ISSUE: Any connection between Iraq support of terrorist
groups in Middle East, is an argument for focusing great
resources on resolving the conflict between Israel and the
Palestinians. It is not sufficient reason for the U.S. to
launch a unilateral preemptive strike against Iraq.
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11,
2001 underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the
acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international
terrorist organizations;
KEY ISSUE: There is no connection between Iraq and the
events of 9/11.
Whereas Iraq's demonstrated capability and willingness to
use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current
Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a
surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces
or provide them to international terrorists who would do so,
and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the
United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine
to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
KEY ISSUE: There is no credible evidence that Iraq
possesses weapons of mass destruction. If Iraq has
successfully concealed the production of such weapons since
1998, there is no credible evidence that Iraq has the
capability to reach the United States with such weapons. In
the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had a demonstrated capability of
biological and chemical weapons, but did not have the
willingness to use them against the United States Armed
Forces. Congress has not been provided with any credible
information, which proves that Iraq has provided
international terrorists with weapons of mass destruction.
Whereas United Nations Security Council Resolution 678
authorizes the use of all necessary means to enforce United
Nations Security Council Resolution 660 and subsequent
relevant resolutions and to compel Iraq to cease certain
activities that threaten international peace and security,
including the development of weapons of mass destruction and
refusal or obstruction of United Nations weapons inspections
in violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution
687, repression of its civilian population in violation of
United Nations Security Council Resolution 688, and
threatening its neighbors or United Nations operations in
Iraq in violation of United Nations Security Council
Resolution 949;
KEY ISSUE: The UN Charter forbids all member nations,
including the United States, from unilaterally enforcing UN
resolutions.
Whereas Congress in the Authorization for Use of Military
Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1) has
authorized the President ``to use United States Armed Forces
pursuant to United Nations Security Council Resolution 678
(1990) in order to achieve implementation of Security Council
Resolutions 660, 661, 662, 664, 665, 666, 667, 669, 670, 674,
and 677'';
KEY ISSUE: The UN Charter forbids all member nations,
including the United States, from unilaterally enforcing UN
resolutions with military force.
Whereas in December 1991, Congress expressed its sense that
it ``supports the use of all necessary means to achieve the
goals of United Nations Security Council Resolution 687 as
being consistent with the Authorization of Use of Military
Force Against Iraq Resolution (Public Law 102-1),'' that
Iraq's repression of its civilian population violates United
Nations Security Council Resolution 688 and ``constitutes a
continuing threat to the peace, security, and stability of
the Persian Gulf region,'' and that Congress, ``supports the
use of all necessary means to achieve the goals of United
Nations Security Council Resolution 688'';
KEY ISSUE: This clause demonstrates the proper chronology
of the international process, and contrasts the current march
to war. In 1991, the UN Security Council passed a resolution
asking for enforcement of its resolution. Member countries
authorized their troops to participate in a UN-led coalition
to enforce the UN resolutions. Now the President is asking
Congress to authorize a unilateral first strike before the UN
Security Council had asked its member states to enforce UN
resolutions.
Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338)
expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy
of the United States to support efforts to remove from power
the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a
democratic government to replace that regime;
KEY ISSUE: This ``Sense of Congress'' resolution was not
binding. Furthermore, while Congress supported democratic
means of removing Saddam Hussein it clearly did not endorse
the use of force contemplated in this resolution, nor did it
endorse assassination as a policy.

[[Page H1950]]

Whereas on September 12, 2002, President Bush committed the
United States to ``work with the United Nations Security
Council to meet our common challenge'' posed by Iraq and to
``work for the necessary resolutions,'' while also making
clear that ``the Security Council resolutions will be
enforced, and the just demands of peace and security will be
met, or action will be unavoidable'';
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the
war on terrorism and Iraq's ongoing support for international
terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of
mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under
the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council
resolutions make clear that it is in the national security
interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war
on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security
Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of
force if necessary;
KEY ISSUE: Unilateral action against Iraq will cost the
United States the support of the world community, adversely
affecting the war on terrorism. No credible intelligence
exists which connects Iraq to the events of 9/11 or to those
terrorists who perpetrated 9/11. Under international law, the
United States does not have the authority to unilaterally
order military action to enforce UN Security Council
resolutions.
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the
war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and
funding requested by the President to take the necessary
actions against international terrorists and terrorist
organizations, including those nations, organizations or
persons who planned, authorized, committed or aided the
terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001 or
harbored such persons or organizations;
KEY ISSUE: The Administration has not provided Congress
with any proof that Iraq is in any way connected to the
events of 9/11.
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to
continue to take all appropriate actions against
international terrorists and terrorist organizations,
including those nations, organizations or persons who
planned, authorized, committed or aided the terrorist attacks
that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons
or organizations;
KEY ISSUE: The Administration has not provided Congress
with any proof that Iraq is in any way connected to the
events of 9/11. Furthermore, there is no credible evidence
that Iraq has harbored those who were responsible for
planning, authorizing or committing the attacks of 9/11.
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution
to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of
international terrorism against the United States, as
Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization
for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
KEY ISSUE: This resolution was specific to 9/11. It was
limited to a response to 9/11.
Whereas it is in the national security of the United States
to restore international peace and security to the Persian
Gulf region;
KEY ISSUE: If by the ``national security interests'' of the
United States, the Administration means oil, it ought to
communicate such to the Congress. A unilateral attack on Iraq
by the United States will cause instability and chaos in the
region and sow the seeds of future conflicts all over the
world.

The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentlewoman from Florida has 5\1/2\
minutes remaining.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker.
I am pleased and honored to yield the balance of my time to the
gentleman from Michigan (Mr. McCotter), a member of the Financial
Services Committee, a former member of our Foreign Affairs Committee. I
would like to remind my good friend that we still have a GOP vacancy in
our committee and we need freedom and democracy believers like the
gentleman from Michigan; seniority retained.
Mr. McCOTTER. I thank the gentlelady. I thank her for her kind words
and her attempt to draft me.
In this age of hope and peril, today we all assemble with earnestness
and sincerity to discuss matters of liberty and tyranny, matters of
life and death.

{time} 1320

What we see in Afghanistan is a counterinsurgency operation being led
by the United States. It is the most difficult and painful type of
military operation to witness because it does involve working with the
population, winning hearts and minds, and helping to build the
institutions of democracy and liberty at the community and national
levels, which have been nonexistent for decades.
Yet because the cause is difficult, it does not mean we can turn away
from it, because the Afghan people cannot turn away from it.
In 2006, I was fortunate to be on a CODEL with many of my colleagues,
and we had the opportunity to meet women who were serving in the Afghan
National Assembly. Despite the difficulties in translation, it was very
clear that they wanted to accomplish two things: they wanted to serve
the Afghan people, who had entrusted them with their positions; and
they wanted to honor the men and women of the United States military,
who had risked and given so much for them to have that opportunity.
As I said, I deeply appreciate the sincerity and earnestness of this
debate today because, in this instance, clearly, it is not one based
upon partisan division, but one based upon the dictates of conscience.
I think it is very important that we look into this situation and see
that it is not simply the United States that is involved here and that
it is not simply a question of leaving without consequence. If we leave
now, if we back this resolution, there will be consequences to the
female Afghan National Assembly parliamentarians, who are trying to
build freedom within that country.
In my discussion with those brave women, they brought up how
difficult it was for them: how hard it would be to build a sustainable
democracy; to build an economy; to build, in many ways, what we here
take for granted.
I said to them that it was very important to remember that the United
States, itself, was not always a great national power and a beacon of
hope and freedom and that in our darkest days after the Revolution
there were many who thought this free Republic would fail, and there
were enemies who sought its destruction. Yet, at the founding time, the
people of the United States and their leaders were able to take this
Nation's democracy and turn it into one that not only secured freedom
for itself but one that expanded it to others.
I said that it was within the Halls of the United States Congress,
within the Halls of our institution, that you could see the pictures of
the Founders, like Jefferson and Madison, hanging from the walls, which
remind us of what we have endured, what we enjoy, and what we must
return.
I told the Afghan National Assembly women that one day their
daughters and granddaughters would look up and see on the walls their
portraits hanging in a free Afghanistan that was allied with the Free
World against terrorism and that was a beacon, itself, to those who
were oppressed--because they will be free, because we will honor our
duty not to seek miserly to hold our own freedom for ourselves, and
because we will follow what Lincoln said:
In seeking to extend freedom to the enslaved, we ensure freedom for
ourselves.
We will continue to stand with the Afghan people. We will continue to
honor the commitment to the solemn word of the United States as she
gave to that country; and one day, we will look back, and we will be
proud of the votes we cast today.
Mr. DeFAZIO. Mr. Speaker, we have now been in Afghanistan for 113
months, ten months longer than the war in Vietnam. The war in
Afghanistan is now the longest conflict in United States history.
Here at home, Americans are out of work, teachers are facing budget
cuts, police departments are overstretched, and yet the President and
much of Congress continue to cling to the notion that if given more
time and more precious taxpayer dollars borrowed from China we will
finally--after a decade of war--gain the edge to ``finish the job'' in
Afghanistan.
Mr. Speaker, I don't buy it. There is no comprehensive political
outcome in sight. There is no decisive military outcome that will allow
us to declare ``victory.'' There is no meaningful government outside of
Kabul, the Afghani security forces are in disarray, and there is
unbelievable corruption throughout the Karzai government, police, and
security forces.
Despite these realities, the U.S. taxpayer is being asked to foot a
$100 billion bill per year--again, all borrowed money that future
generations will have to pay back with interest--to continue a failed
strategy in Afghanistan. I continue to be extremely concerned that the
Afghanistan war has drawn the U.S. into a black hole not completely
unlike Vietnam, where we propped up a corrupt government that had no
relationship to the rest of the country. Recent events in North Africa
and throughout the Middle East have shown us the consequences of
similar policies.
Mr. Speaker, I strongly support our troops. They have fought
heroically and done everything we have asked of them. We should honor
those who have served and sacrificed for their country. But we are not
honoring those who have served and those who continue to serve by
supporting a war without

[[Page H1951]]

clear objectives, a clear exit strategy, and without any substantial
hope for a ``military victory.''
Clearly an orderly withdrawal can not be accomplished in 9 months.
But supporting H. Con. Res. 28 provides an opportunity to send a
message to the President that the current strategy and cost of the war
in Afghanistan are unsustainable. We need a clear exit strategy. We
need a less expensive, less troop intensive policy that could bring
about a much better result in Afghanistan. We need to prioritize the
needs here at home instead of spending treasure and blood on a
seemingly open-ended war in Afghanistan. I urge my colleagues to join
me in supporting H. Con. Res. 28.
Mr. HOLT. Mr. Speaker, today the House has a chance to make a
judgment about the wisdom of continuing our combat role in Afghanistan.
In 2009, I came to the floor of the House and declared that I would
give the President at least a year to show that his approach could
work. For those who choose to actually look at the facts and the
results to date, the conclusion is clear: it is time--past time--for us
to leave Afghanistan.
Time and again, our military forces would take out one of their field
commanders, and every time several more rise to take their place. This
is the nature of insurgency, it is the nature of the problem that
confronts us, and it is not a problem that will be resolved by the
continuous, endless use of military force. The number of insurgent
attacks is at an all-time high. The corruption and dysfunctionality of
the Afghan government has become legendary. And the cost of this
conflict--both in killed and wounded, including the long-term care
costs for the hundreds of thousands of veterans of this war--continue
to rise. I voted for this resolution today in order to show that I am
no longer willing to allow our military and our nation to bear the
endless, deadly burden of a war without end that is moving neither our
country nor theirs closer to safety and security. I hope the President
takes note and works with us to bring our troops home.
Mr. STARK. Mr. Speaker, Secretary Gates recently stated that we could
be in Afghanistan past the 2014 deadline for complete troop withdrawal.
Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of Americans oppose this war, with more
than 70 percent of people believing that we should withdraw a
substantial number of U.S. troops from Afghanistan this summer.
This is the longest war in U.S. history and all we have to show for
it is a higher deficit and more debt.
We already spend the most of any country in the world on defense. The
next closest defense-spending country is China--and we spend seven
times what they do.
Defense spending currently constitutes about 60 percent of our
discretionary spending. And it has increased 86 percent since 1998,
becoming more entrenched than any entitlement program. As we're talking
about cutting important programs that working families depend on, we
should not continue to throw money down an endless hole in Afghanistan.
I recently conducted a survey in my district inquiring about
constituents' priorities and discovered that getting out of Afghanistan
was second only to job creation. They also agree that one of the best
ways to reduce the deficit is through extensive defense spending cuts.
Republicans keep expressing the absolute necessity in cutting $100
billion from the budget over the next five years. Pulling out of
Afghanistan would, all by itself, save us over $100 billion in the
upcoming budget.
It is time for Congress to reassert its Constitutional war powers
authority and set a time line for complete withdrawal of our troops
from Afghanistan.
I am proud to support this resolution by Representatives Kucinich and
Jones that gives Congress, and therefore the American people, the power
to decide whether America enters into or continues a war.
I urge my colleagues to follow the will of the American people and
support this resolution.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Con. Res. 28, a resolution
that directs the President, pursuant to the War Powers Resolution, to
remove our troops from Afghanistan no later than December 31st, 2011.
Secretary Gates recently stated that we could be in Afghanistan past
the 2014 deadline for complete troop withdrawal. Meanwhile, more than
60 percent of Americans oppose the war, with more than 70 percent of
people believing that we should withdraw most troops from Afghanistan
this summer. I recently conducted a survey in my district inquiring
about constituents' priorities and discovered that getting out of
Afghanistan was second only to job creation. They also agree that one
of the best ways to reduce the deficit is through extensive defense
spending cuts.
This is the longest war in U.S. history and all we have to show for
it is a higher deficit and more debt. Yet Republicans, who continue to
tout the merits of a balanced budget, refuse to consider ending this
expensive war, let alone consider modest defense-spending cuts.
Defense spending currently constitutes almost 60 percent of our
discretionary spending. As we are forced to consider cutting important
programs that working families depend on, we should not continue to
throw money down an endless hole in Afghanistan. Republicans continue
to express the absolute necessity in cutting $100 billion from the
budget over the next five years. Pulling out of Afghanistan would, all
by itself, save us over $100 billion in the upcoming budget.
The Majority is not listening to the American people. The American
people want us out of Afghanistan and they want a solid plan to improve
the economy and create jobs, neither of which the Republicans deem
worthy enough to address.
I am proud to be an original cosponsor of this resolution proposed by
Representatives Kucinich and Jones that gives Congress, and therefore
the American people, the Power to decide whether America enters into or
continues a war. I urge my colleagues to follow the will of the people
and support this resolution.
Ms. CLARKE of New York. Mr. Speaker, I am writing to urge my support
to bring our troops our home. The recent debate on removing the United
States Armed Forces from Afghanistan has been the topic of many
discussions and now is the time to take action. This devastating war
has continued on for nearly a decade and it has taken the lives of more
than 1,400 Americans and cost taxpayers over $366 billion.
The war in Afghanistan is not worth fighting. We need to end this
national humiliation and redirect war funding. The scope of our
interest in Afghanistan has been exceeded and it is time to bring this
war to a successful conclusion. While we have achieved hard-earned
milestones, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated and the
threat to our national security remains unaffected.
We can no longer fight this war. We have to leave it up to the Afghan
people to determine their own fate and future. I ask my colleagues to
join me in taking a stand to bring our troops home. Our economy is at
stake, the precious lives of our troops and their families hang in the
balance and the integrity of the United States has been severely
jeopardized.
Mr. FRELINGHUYSEN. Mr. Speaker, my colleagues, we're debating the
wrong resolution here today.
We should be debating a resolution that honors the continuing
sacrifice, service, the courage and the steadfastness of our men and
women in uniform--all volunteers--as they work to carry out their
missions in the global war on terror. And their families back at home.
These warriors serve today in Afghanistan, and yes, in Iraq.
Both are active war zones where there are no ``front lines'' and
every deployed servicemember lays his or her life on the line every
day.
And they have made significant progress. General Petreaus told our
Defense Subcommittee this morning that ``The momentum of the Taliban
has been halted in much of the country and reversed in some important
areas.''
The Afghan Security Forces are growing in number and capability.
And the day when we turn all operations over to the Afghans gets
closer and closer.
None of this has been easy.
Progress has been made through hard fighting and considerable
sacrifice of so many Americans and our allies.
There have been tough losses along the way. And there have been
setbacks as well as successes.
But instead of debating a resolution that honors the sacrifice of our
brave warfighters, we are considering a measure that seeks to ``turn
off the lights and slam the door as we withdraw.''
Well, we've been down this road before.
Two decades ago we celebrated alongside our Afghan allies as the
invading Russian military rolled back into the USSR in defeat.
And when the celebration ended, we walked away--we did not follow-up
with the necessary investments in diplomacy and development assistance,
turning our back on Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Had we not done that in the early 1990s, we would have better secured
our own country's future, as well as peace and stability in the region.
Instead of intensifying our humanitarian efforts to help the Afghans
meet their postwar challenges, we simply walked away--leaving a
destroyed country that lacked roads, schools, and any plan or hope for
rebuilding.
Into this void marched the Taliban and al-Qaeda. My Colleagues, as
they say, ``the rest is history'' for the Afghans and for all
Americans:
Horrors perpetrated on Afghan men, women and children;
A curtain of oppression which denied half the population--women--any
rights and dignity;

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Closed schools. Destroyed cultural institutions and national
treasures;
A modern-day Dark Ages;
Mr. Speaker, the resolution we debate today would have us repeat that
sad and dangerous saga.
I urge defeat of the resolution.
Mr. NADLER. Mr. Speaker, I rise in support of the Kucinich resolution
directing the President to remove United States Armed Forces from
Afghanistan.
It is time to bring U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan to an
end and to bring our troops home. The war effort in Afghanistan is no
longer serving its purpose of enhancing the security of the United
States, which should be our goal.
We were attacked on 9/11 by al Qaeda. Al Qaeda had bases in
Afghanistan. It made sense to go in and destroy those bases. And we
did. We have every right, we have every duty to destroy bases which are
being used to plot against the United States. But the CIA tells us that
there are now fewer than 100 al Qaeda personnel in all of the country
of Afghanistan.
It is past time to admit that our legitimate purpose in Afghanistan--
to destroy al Qaeda bases--has long since been accomplished. But it is
a fool's errand to try to remake a country that nobody since Genghis
Khan has managed to conquer. What makes us think, what arrogance gives
us the right to assume that we can succeed where the Mongols, the
British, the Soviets failed? No government in Afghanistan, no
government in Kabul, has ever been able to make its writ run in the
entire country.
Why have we undertaken to invent a government that is not supported
by the majority of the people, a government that is corrupt, and try to
impose it on this country? Afghanistan is in the middle of what is at
this point a 35-year civil war. We have no business intervening in that
civil war, we have no ability to win it for one side or the other, and
we have no necessity to win it for one side or the other. This whole
idea of counterinsurgency, that we are going to persuade the people who
are left alive after our firepower is applied to love the government
that we like is absurd.
It will take tens of years, hundreds and hundreds of billions of
dollars, tens of thousands of American lives, if it can be done at all,
and we don't need to do it. It's their country. If they want to have a
civil war, we can't stop them. We can't choose the rulers that they
have, we don't have to like the rulers that they have, and we don't
have to like their choices. It's not up to us.
At this point we must recognize that rebuilding Afghanistan is both
beyond our ability and beyond our mandate to prevent terrorists from
attacking the United States. And if it be said that there are
terrorists operating in Afghanistan, that may be, but it is also true
of Yemen, Somalia and many other countries. We do not need to invade
and conquer and occupy all those countries, and Afghanistan provides no
greater necessity or justification for military operations.
We are throwing $100 billion a year--plus countless lives--down a
drainpipe, for no useful purpose at all--and with very little
discussion of our purposes and of whether our policy matches our
purposes.
To continue so bad a policy at so high a cost is simply
unconscionable. It is unjustifiable to sacrifice more money and more
lives this way. I urge my colleagues to join me in voting to bring the
U.S. involvement in the war in Afghanistan to a close.
Now, I want to say a word about supporting the troops. I believe it
is more supportive of the troops to bring them home from a war that
they should not be fighting than it is to give them weapons to fight an
unnecessary war in which some of them, unfortunately, will lose their
lives.
So I say support our troops. Bring them home. Support the country.
Stop fighting where it no longer makes sense.
Vote for this resolution. Let's bring our troops home.
Ms. EDDIE BERNICE JOHNSON of Texas. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support H.
Con. Res. 28, a resolution requiring the removal of all United States
Armed Forces from Afghanistan. I believe it is time to bring the United
States Military's involvement in Afghanistan to a close.
Since the beginning of the Afghanistan War, the United States and
Coalition Forces have lost 2,347 service men and women. Tens of
thousands have suffered from other disabilities or psychological harm.
With thousands of Texas Guardsmen currently serving in Iraq and
Afghanistan, I will never forget their bravery in fighting for the
freedoms, liberties, aid human dignity of the Afghanistan people.
Our nation's economic and national security interests are not served
by a policy of an open-ended war in Afghanistan.
Mr. Speaker, our soldiers have fought for us, now it's time for us to
fight for them. I encourage my colleagues to support this resolution
and help bring our soldiers home.
Ms. HIRONO. Mr. Speaker, while I support the intent of this bill, I
rise in reluctant opposition to H. Con. Res. 28, legislation introduced
by Congressman Kucinich directing the President to remove U.S. Armed
Forces from Afghanistan within 30 days.
I agree with Congressman Kucinich that we must have an exit strategy
and a concrete plan to withdraw troops from Afghanistan. However, I
voted against this resolution when it came up for a vote last year
because I believed that withdrawing all troops 30 days after enactment
of the bill was unrealistic.
Yesterday, along with a large number of my like-minded colleagues in
the House, I sent a letter to President Obama urging him to prepare for
a significant and sizeable drawdown of troops from Afghanistan that
begins this July. I ask for permission to include this letter for the
record.
Last December, the Obama Administration concluded in its review of
the war in Afghanistan that we will be ready to begin a responsible
drawdown in July 2011. This week, General Petraeus testified before
Congress that he would keep our military and counterinsurgency gains in
mind as he begins to provide recommendations to the President on
commencing our military drawdown in July.
We have now entered the tenth year that American troops have been in
Afghanistan, the longest war in U.S. history. An overwhelming majority
of the American people--including an increasing number of Members of
Congress--supports a safe and significant redeployment of U.S troops
from Afghanistan soon.
There is no question that we need to end our mission in Afghanistan.
I will carefully review the Obama Administration's assessment of the
war effort, including plans for a drawdown, in the coming months.
Insufficient progress in withdrawing U.S. troops by July 2011 will
compel me to support a resolution like this in the future.

Congress of the United States,

Washington, DC, March 16, 2011.
Hon. Barack Obama,
President of the United States,
The White House, Washington, DC.
Dear Mr. President, We write to you to: express our utmost
support for your planned drawdown of the U.S. military
presence in Afghanistan beginning no later than July of this
year. We, the undersigned members of Congress, believe the
forthcoming reduction in U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan
must be significant and sizeable, and executed in an orderly
fashion.
Our nation's economic and national security interests are
not served by a policy of open-ended war in Afghanistan. At a
time of severe economic distress, the war in Afghanistan is
costing the United States more than $100 billion per year,
excluding the long-term costs of care for returning military
servicemembers. At the same time, military and intelligence
officials agree that Al Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is
diminished and that there will not be a military solution to
resolve the current situation. It is simply unsustainable for
our nation to maintain a costly, military-first strategy in
Afghanistan.
A significant redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan
beginning in July 2011 will send a clear signal that the
United States does not seek a permanent presence in
Afghanistan. This transition will provide incentive for
internal stakeholders to improve upon the political status
quo, reduce corruption, and take meaningful steps toward the
establishment of an effective, trustworthy, and inclusive
governance structure. A meaningful start to withdrawal will
also empower U.S. diplomatic engagement with regional and
global stakeholders who share a common interest in the long-
term stability of Afghanistan.
The majority of the American people overwhelmingly support
a rapid shift toward withdrawal in Afghanistan. In fact, a
Gallup Poll released on February 2, 2011 indicated that 72%
of Americans favor action this year to ``speed up the
withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.'' Let us be clear. The
redeployment of a minimal number of U.S. troops from
Afghanistan in July will not meet the expectations of
Congress or the American people.
Mr. President, as you work to finally bring an end to the
war in Iraq by the end of this year, we must commit ourselves
to ensuring that our nation's military engagement in
Afghanistan does not become the status quo. It is time to
focus on securing a future of economic opportunity and
prosperity for the American people and move swiftly to end
America's longest war in Afghanistan.
Mr. President, we look forward to working with you to make
that goal a reality.
Sincerely,
Joe Baca; Tammy Baldwin; Karen Bass; Lois Capps; Michael
E. Capuano; Andre Carson; Yvette D. Clarke; Steve
Cohen; John Conyers, Jr.; Jerry F. Costello; Elijah E.
Cummings; Danny K. Davis (IL); Peter A. DeFazio; Rosa
L. DeLauro; Theodore E. Deutch; John J. Duncan, Jr.
(TN); Donna F. Edwards; Keith Ellison; Sam Farr; Bob
Filner; Barney Frank; Marcia L. Fudge; John Garamendi;
Raul M. Grijalva; Luis V. Gutierrez; Alcee L. Hastings;
Maurice D. Hinchey; Mazie K. Hirono; Rush D. Holt;
Michael M. Honda; Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.; Sheila Jackson
Lee; Eddie

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Bernice Johnson; Hank Johnson, Jr.; Timothy V. Johnson;
Walter B. Jones; Barbara Lee; John B. Larson; John
Lewis; Zoe Lofgren; Ben Ray Lujan; Carolyn B. Maloney;
Edward J. Markey; Doris O. Matsui; Jim McDermott; James
P. McGovern; Michael H. Michaud; George Miller; Gwen
Moore; James P. Moran; Christopher S. Murphy; Grace
Napolitano; Eleanor Holmes Norton; John W. Olver; Bill
Pascrell, Jr.; Ron Paul; Donald M. Payne; Chellie
Pingree; Jared Polis; David E. Price; Mike Quigley;
Rep, Charles B. Rangel; Laura Richardson; Lucille
Roybal-Allard; Linda T. Sanchez; Loretta Sanchez;
Janice D. Schakowsky; Bobby Scott; Jose E. Serrano;
Albio Sires; Louise McIntosh Slaughter; Jackie Speier;
Pete Stark; Mike Thompson (CA); John F. Tierney;
Edolphus Towns; Niki Tsongas; Maxine Waters; Anthony D.
Weiner; Peter Welch; Lynn C. Woolsey, Members of
Congress.

Ms. MOORE. Mr. Speaker, I rise to support this resolution with great
reluctance.
I have had many great conversations and discussions with the sponsor
of this resolution since coming to Congress about the issues of war and
peace and justice. He even came to my district last year to join me in
a town hall on the war in Afghanistan. He's been a great leader on this
issue and a great friend.
I agree with the gentleman about the need to bring our troops home
from Afghanistan as soon as possible. Recently, I joined a number of my
colleagues in writing to the President to make clear our belief that
the troop withdrawals from Afghanistan should be ``substantial,
significant, and orderly.'' The gentleman from Ohio did not join that
letter although as I said, I know he shares the same goals of all those
who signed it.
A few weeks ago, I voted for an amendment to H.R. 1 that would limit
funding for the war in Afghanistan to $10 billion, with the hope that
those funds would be used by the Defense Department to plan and
implement a timetable for the safe and expeditious withdrawal of our
troops.
I want an end to these wars. One of the criteria that I have used for
supporting those efforts and similar efforts in the past by a number of
my colleagues is that we have to allow our military planners to
implement that withdrawal in a way that is safe, orderly and
responsible.
I doubt that the 30 day-withdrawal deadline in this bill meets that
criteria. The bill itself recognizes that by giving the President the
option to delay that withdrawal through the end of the year.
Although I am eager to withdraw, I am beset with a nagging question:
how practical is it to move 100,000 troops and the associated equipment
out of a country half way around the world in 30 days in an orderly,
safe, and responsible fashion?
I support getting our troops out of Afghanistan. But we have to do so
wisely. We can't waive a magic wand today and they are gone tomorrow or
dismiss concerns about their safety. That is why on the issue of how
that withdrawal is conducted, I have always supported legislation that
defers that question to our military planners.
Again, even the letter that was sent to the President recently by a
number of my colleagues, such as Barbara Lee and Jim McGovern, who like
myself opposed the escalation of this war and want all of our troops
home soon, does not dictate size or set a timetable for those
withdrawals after July 2011.
That letter however did make clear that ``a significant redeployment
from Afghanistan beginning in July 2011 will send a clear signal that
the United States does not seek a permanent presence in Afghanistan.''
Even though July does not begin for over 100 days from now, sending
that letter in March allows the military to have plenty of time to plan
for a sizeable withdrawal.
This was the same gist of several bills by Mr. McGovern last year
that asked the military to give us their withdrawal plan by a certain
date, including any reasons for why a redeployment might be delayed,
rather than having Congress mandate that date.
Again, I support this resolution reluctantly because it sends an
important signal to the Afghanistan government and its people that the
U.S. is not intent on an endless occupation and that after ten years in
America's longest war in history, we cannot morally or financially
continue to afford this war. To the extent this resolution does that, I
am in full support. However, again, my concerns remain about its
method.
Mrs. MALONEY. Mr. Speaker, once again we are debating this issue. And
once again I will vote in support of ending our involvement in
Afghanistan.
Our ongoing commitment in Afghanistan has proved exceedingly
difficult and costly--and at a time when we can ill-afford the $100
billion a year to sustain it. After years of war, the economic and
military costs are straining our servicemembers, their families, and
the country--they are simply too high.
President Obama increased our commitment there while also defining a
goal of withdrawal. But our increased efforts have not yielded enough
progress.
I have joined with my colleagues in sending a letter, led by Rep.
Barbara Lee, to the President supporting his planned drawdown of the
U.S. military presence in Afghanistan beginning no later than July of
this year.
It is time to bring this war to a responsible end.
Our brave men and women in uniform have fought well and continue to
deserve our full support and commitment to return them home safely to
their families and loved ones. They have fought with honor, at great
cost, in the face of great challenges. I am humbled by their sacrifice.
While I support the President and our military leadership, I believe
we must send a message that the U.S. cannot sustain further commitments
in Afghanistan.
I believe the resolution before us today sends that message, and that
is why I support it.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. All time for debate has expired.
Pursuant to the order of the House of Wednesday, March 16, 2011, the
previous question is ordered.
The question is on the concurrent resolution.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that
the ayes appeared to have it.
Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The yeas and nays were ordered.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, further
proceedings on this question will be postponed.

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