[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 49 (Tuesday, March 24, 2015)]
[House]
[Pages H1851-H1852]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 AFGHANISTAN: THE GRAVEYARD OF EMPIRES

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
North Carolina (Mr. Jones) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. JONES. Mr. Speaker, last week in the House Armed Services 
Committee, we had a hearing on the budget for fiscal year 2016. 
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of 
Staff, General Martin Dempsey, both testified before the committee, and 
I have great respect for both of them. I asked them if, after a decade 
in Afghanistan, keeping troops in Afghanistan for 9 more years would 
even make a difference.
  Last year in his Politico article, ``Down the Opium Rathole,'' Roger 
Simon argues, ``If you spent 13 years pounding money down a rathole 
with little to show for it, you might wake up one morning and say: 
`Hey, I'm going to stop pounding money down this rathole.' . . . 
Unfortunately, the U.S. Government does not think this way. Even though 
our combat troops are leaving Afghanistan, our money will continue to 
flow there, billion after billion.''
  Mr. Speaker, I submit this Politico article for the Record.

                     [From Politico, Oct. 29, 2014]

                         Down the Opium Rathole

                            (By Roger Simon)

       If you spent 13 years pounding money down a rathole with 
     little to show for it, you might wake up one morning and say: 
     ``Hey, I'm going to stop pounding money down this rathole.''
       Unfortunately, the U.S. government does not think this way.
       The U.S. government wakes up every morning and says: ``The 
     rathole is looking a little empty today. Let's pound a few 
     more billion dollars down there.''
       And when that rathole is Afghanistan, the billions are 
     essentially without end.
       Even though our combat troops are leaving Afghanistan, our 
     money will continue to flow there, billion after billion.
       The National Priorities Project says ``$753.3 billion has 
     been allocated for the war in Afghanistan since 2001, 
     including $89.1 billion in fiscal year 2014.''
       President Obama hopes to reduce U.S. forces in Afghanistan 
     to just 9,800 troops next year. But the money spigot will not 
     be turned off.
       Afghanistan is one of the poorest countries in the world. 
     In Asia, only Bangladesh is poorer. According to the World 
     Food Programme, half the population lives below the poverty 
     line; Afghanistan has one of the highest infant mortality 
     rates in the world; and more than half the children under 5 
     years old are chronically malnourished.
       Yet at one thing Afghanistan succeeds superbly: Afghanistan 
     illegally produces and exports opium, morphine and heroin in 
     such quantities that, according to the United Nations Office 
     on Drugs and Crime, Afghanistan is ``practically the 
     exclusive supplier of the world's deadliest drug [93% of the 
     global opiates market]. Leaving aside 19th-century China, 
     that had a population at that time 15 times larger than 
     today's Afghanistan, no other country in the world has ever 
     produced narcotics on such a deadly scale.''
       The United States has spent billions trying to stop this 
     trade, but it has failed utterly. In fact, under U.S. 
     occupation, drug production has increased.
       Opiates come from opium poppies, which are planted in 
     profusion in Afghanistan. More than eight years ago, we 
     decided to spray the poppy fields with herbicides, but this 
     was unpopular with the Afghan government, which didn't want 
     its illegal drug profits to stop. And even some 
     counterinsurgency experts feared that killing the opium 
     poppies would drive angry poppy farmers into the arms of the 
     Taliban.
       Lots of people get confused between counterinsurgency and 
     counterterrorism, by the way. A military expert once 
     explained it to me this way:
       Counterinsurgency is when you try to win the hearts and 
     minds of the people.
       Counterterrorism is when you kill the people and then try 
     to win their hearts and minds.
       The United States has tried both policies in Afghanistan 
     for years.

[[Page H1852]]

       And while the Taliban has become adept at fighting 
     counterterrorism, the Afghan government has become adept at 
     exploiting counterinsurgency.
       Take narcotics. How does a country that has few and 
     terrible roads, like Afghanistan, get 93 percent of the 
     world's opiates out of its country?
       One way is by air. And in January 2013, the U.S. government 
     said it would no longer grant contracts to a private 
     Afghanistan airline because the U.S. military's anti-
     corruption unit said the airline ``was involved in bulk opium 
     smuggling.''
       But the Afghan government howled, and the U.S. lifted its 
     ban.
       There are other examples, but only one conclusion. As 
     Michael Lumpkin, assistant secretary of defense for special 
     operations/low-intensity conflict, said in a letter on Oct. 
     7: ``In our opinion, the failure to reduce poppy cultivation 
     and increase eradication is due to the lack of Afghan 
     government support for the effort.''
       But over 12 years, the U.S. government pounded $7.6 billion 
     down the drug eradication rathole in Afghanistan.
       In a report last week, John Sopko, the U.S. special 
     inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, said: ``By 
     every conceivable metric, we've failed. Production and 
     cultivation are up, interdiction and eradication are down, 
     financial support to the insurgency is up, and addiction and 
     abuse are at unprecedented levels in Afghanistan.''
       To our government, the solution was clear: Pound more money 
     down the rathole.
       As The Washington Post recently reported: ``The State 
     Department requested $137.5 million in funding for counter-
     narcotics efforts in Afghanistan for fiscal year 2014, a $31 
     million increase over fiscal year 2012.''
       Further, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently 
     wrote a report saying we should give Afghanistan ``between $5 
     billion and $8 billion annually for at least a decade'' even 
     though most U.S. troops will (supposedly) be long gone by 
     then.
       So we have spent $7.6 billion on a drug eradication program 
     that increased drug production. And now we are planning to 
     pour $50 billion to $80 billion into that same country over 
     the next 10 years.
       And you know what worries me? Pretty soon we are going to 
     be talking about real money.

  Mr. JONES. In recent days, the waste of billions of dollars in 
Afghanistan has been dominating the headlines:
  March 20 of this year, ``Afghanistan Can't Manage Billions in Aid, 
U.S. Inspector Finds''; March 14, 2015, ``C.I.A. Cash Ended Up in 
Coffers of Al Qaeda''; May 4, 2013, ``Karzai Says He Was Assured C.I.A. 
Would Continue Delivering Bags of Cash.''
  Mr. Speaker, the squandering of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars by 
the Afghan Government is one small aspect of the rampant waste, fraud, 
and abuse in Afghanistan.
  The House is looking to vote on the budget produced by the Republican 
majority this week which continues billions of dollars the military 
deserves, but the billions of dollars going to Afghanistan are a waste. 
The Republican budget also provides billions of dollars for emergency 
war funding to get around sequestration. Why do we have sequestration 
in the first place? Because Congress has not passed an honest budget in 
years.
  A couple of weeks ago, the House Armed Services Committee had a 
hearing on U.S. policy in Afghanistan, where I asked General John 
Campbell, U.S. Army, commander of the International Security Assistance 
Force and United States Forces in Afghanistan, if he will ever have a 
successor who will be honest with Congress and the American people 
about the fact that we have done as much as we can do in Afghanistan. 
He did not give me a direct answer, but his response was this: ``For 
very little continued investment, we can make this a shining light of 
central Asia.''
  Mr. Speaker, if I had had more time, I would have asked General 
Campbell what his definition of ``very little continued investment'' is 
when we have already spent billions and billions of dollars and spilled 
blood in Afghanistan.
  There are bridges, roads, educational needs, and veterans benefits to 
provide here in the United States. Let's focus on their needs rather 
than on chasing something that will never happen. History has proven 
Afghanistan will never change. It is a graveyard of empires.
  Mr. Speaker, without a debate in Congress, President Obama signed a 
Bilateral Security Agreement with Afghanistan to keep our United States 
troops there for 9 more years. Let's cut the 9 years to 3 or 4 years 
and bring our troops home.
  Finally, with an ever-climbing $18 trillion debt, the American people 
are frustrated. Congress needs to impose spending controls to save 
taxpayer money.
  Mr. Speaker, may God continue to bless our men and women in uniform, 
and may God continue to bless America.

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