[Congressional Record Volume 158, Number 31 (Tuesday, February 28, 2012)]
[House]
[Page H973]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           LEAVE AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Tennessee (Mr. Duncan) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. DUNCAN of Tennessee. Mr. Speaker, I voted to go to war in 
Afghanistan, but I did not vote for a forever, permanent war that has 
now lasted almost three times as long as World War II. We should have 
ended our involvement in Afghanistan many years ago, and many young 
American lives would have been saved.
  The first war against Iraq and Kuwait lasted just 7 months. With the 
recent killings of four more Americans and with massive anti-American 
demonstrations being conducted by hundreds of thousands of Afghani 
citizens, we need to greatly speed up our withdrawal. We need to leave 
Afghanistan the sooner the better.
  We've spent hundreds of billions there over the last decade, a great 
amount of which has really been just pure foreign aid. We've built 
schools and medical facilities and helped their farmers. We have 
trained their police and military and have had thousands of Afghanis on 
our payroll.

                              {time}  1030

  We've had to borrow approximately 41 percent of all of these mega-
billions we have spent to help the Afghan people. No country has done 
nearly as much, Mr. Speaker, for another country in the entire history 
of the world as we have done for Afghanistan.
  Now, the people there have made it very clear that they do not 
appreciate what we have done for them. In fact, not only are they 
ungrateful, but they are showing, through their actions, that they have 
anger or even hatred toward us. We should stop spending all these 
billions of taxpayer dollars just as soon as we possibly can.
  I did not criticize President Obama when he apologized for the 
burning of the Korans. However, I did not think it was something that 
rose to the level that required a Presidential apology. Some person or 
persons made a mistake in burning the Korans. They should have 
apologized, or the commander of the Air Force base, or perhaps our 
Ambassador.
  However now, where is the apology from the Afghan leadership about 
the Americans who have been killed or for all of the hatred and anger 
directed toward our country? Where is the gratitude for all that 
America and Americans have done for the Afghan people over the last 10 
or 11 years?
  We have a national debt of over $15 trillion that is headed far 
higher at a more rapid rate than ever before. It is far past the time 
that we should have been taking care of our own country and putting our 
own citizens first.
  We need to let the Afghan people run Afghanistan, and we need to stop 
trying to be everything to everybody all over the world. We simply 
cannot afford it, and we are jeopardizing the future of ourselves, our 
children, and our grandchildren if we continue trying to run the whole 
world.

                          ____________________