[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 8]
[House]
[Pages 11118-11119]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                 DEALING WITH THE ISSUES IN AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Rohrabacher) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. ROHRABACHER. Mr. Speaker, let me note that one of the prior 
speakers from the other side of the aisle was talking about the tax cut 
going to the richest part of America, which they defined as any family 
earning over $75,000 a year.
  Now, I would hope that every working family out there, where a man 
and woman working as hard as they do in order to make ends meet, 
realizes that if their total family income is over $75,000, the people 
on this side of the aisle have been labeling them as the rich, as the 
wealthy, as the people who need to be exploited in order to help all 
the other people.
  This is quite disturbing. It is certainly disturbing to me. I do not 
come from a wealthy family and the people I know work really hard in 
order to have a family income of $75,000 a year. Let me note that in 
our package, we are hearing a complaint that we are helping families 
that earn $75,000 a year, we are hearing complaints we have included a 
child tax credit, we are hearing a complaint we have ended the marriage 
penalty tax, that we have tried to give the seniors a little relief on 
their earnings limitations, things that were dramatically reversed in 
the opposite direction during the Clinton years when the Democrats 
controlled both Houses of Congress and the presidency.
  They just went to work on all of the ordinary Americans. Of course, 
ordinary Americans are anyone who earns under $75,000. But if you 
earned $75,000 a year, you are the enemy and you are the target, 
according to our colleagues on the other side of the aisle.
  But that is not the subject I wish to talk about today. Just very 
quickly, let me note I have spent a great deal of time in Afghanistan 
over the years. People in this body understand that I have taken 
special care with the issue of Afghanistan. I warned this body for 
years during the Clinton administration that we had to do something 
about the Taliban or it would come back to hurt us, and it did, in a 
big way on September 11, when 3,000 of our own people were slaughtered 
by an attack that had been based in Afghanistan.
  I rise today to warn my colleagues that the situation in Afghanistan 
is not going in the right way. Although much progress has been made, 
there are some things we need to worry about. Let us remember that the 
Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, some of the same people, these 
mujahedin fighters who fought against the Soviet Union, and I was there 
in Afghanistan at the time with them, those very same people were 
recruited by this administration, by the United States, to help us 
defeat the Taliban and drive al Qaeda, which was a terrorist gang 
headed by bin Laden, out of Afghanistan.

                              {time}  1515

  Their bravery, along with that of our Special Forces teams, had a 
magnificent victory in Afghanistan. We drove them out; but since that 
time, we have not done what is right by the Afghan people again. When 
they helped us drive out the Soviet Union troops and end the Cold War, 
we let them sleep in the rubble. There has not been the progress in 
helping them rebuild their country in Afghanistan that they need to 
experience. America needs to pay attention to this. There are prices to 
pay when we do not do what is right.
  The heroin crop in Afghanistan has quadrupled over the last year and 
a half. That is because the people are desperate. They have no other 
source of income. We have to go in there and help those people rebuild 
their country, and we are not doing so.
  What is worse than that is our embassy, under the control of the 
United States State Department, is pushing to undermine the Northern 
Alliance that drove out the Taliban and defeated al Qaeda, they are 
undermining these brave militia men and instead, shifting power over to 
another group in Afghanistan, many of whom were allied with the 
Taliban. Now, if you think that is screwed up, it is hard to fathom 
when you take a look at it.
  What the people in the northern part of Afghanistan are looking for 
is the right to elect their own provincial leaders, their governors, 
and their own mayors and city councilmen; they are asking for that 
right before they would disarm. Our embassy is pushing a centralized 
system on the people of Afghanistan modeled after the French, of all 
people, where the government, the central government would appoint the 
heads of the local police and the schools and whatever. Well, no wonder 
the Northern Alliance who fought the Taliban are not willing to give up 
their arms until they know they have a right to cast ballots to 
determine their own destiny.

[[Page 11119]]

  Our State Department, for some reason, does not have faith in the 
American system of government to the point that we are willing to share 
that with the people of Afghanistan. We need to keep track of what is 
going on over there. The people in Congress, the administration needs 
to keep closer track of what is happening and make sure that democracy 
works and the people of Afghanistan can share in the prosperity of this 
era.

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