[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 157 (2011), Part 8]
[House]
[Page 10870]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                     ENDING THE WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Chair recognizes the gentleman from 
Arizona (Mr. Grijalva) for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GRIJALVA. Madam Speaker, I am here to join with my colleagues in 
thanking the gentlelady from California (Ms. Woolsey) for all that she 
has done to provide leadership on an issue that has been critical to 
the American people on an issue that she could very justifiably say, 
``I told you so.''
  Since I've been in this House, it's been my distinct privilege to 
consider her a friend and to enjoy the leadership and the insight that 
she has provided to many of us. Her position on Afghanistan is correct 
and a necessary position as we see these times before us. Americans who 
feel the sting of doing more with less are connecting the dots between 
Federal spending priorities and the pain that they're feeling at home 
right now.
  Americans struggling to put their kids through college without any 
Pell Grants or running out of unemployment benefits with no new job on 
the horizon cannot ignore the cost of this war. The war has cost 
taxpayers in my congressional district more than $580 million so far. 
That's about 11,000 elementary school teachers that could be hired for 
a year or 84,000 students that could go to community college or a 
university or a trade school or a career school.
  These are just some of the bad trade-offs we are making by spending 
our national resources on a war instead of fixing the problems that we 
have here at home. Ask yourself, which would you rather have, a war 
that is not making us safer and not worth the cost, or a more educated, 
prosperous America?
  We cannot afford the nearly $10 billion per month while families 
struggle to stay afloat and the slow recovery of our Nation continues. 
Keeping America safe does not require 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. Al 
Qaeda is no longer in Afghanistan but scattered across the world. It 
did not take 100,000 troops to find Osama bin Laden, and it does not 
take a military occupation of Afghanistan to protect us from terrorist 
threats.
  I am deeply proud of the hard work and incredible sacrifice of our 
brave men and women in uniform. We know they are carrying out the 
mission in Afghanistan with dedication and extraordinary competence. 
Through this nearly 10-year military campaign, they have done all that 
we have asked of them and represented our Nation's very best values and 
ideals. Now it's time to bring our troops home, and bring them home to 
a new reality. Since the year 2000, we have lost 2 million jobs in this 
country while we have added 30 million people to our population. After 
10 years of a failed fiscal policy that brags about job creators 
through tax cuts, incentives and subsidies to corporations, this failed 
policy continues to be promoted as a solution to our economy and to the 
recession that we find ourselves in.
  We need to bring our troops home. We need to integrate them fully 
back into our society and into our country. One of the best ways to do 
that is to provide jobs and opportunity. And one way is for the 
government to create jobs in public service and public works. By 
putting America back to work, we are beginning to crawl out of the hole 
that we have been in for the last 10 years.
  Afghanistan is a stark example of flawed priorities. As we go forward 
with the discussion of the debt ceiling, with how to balance this 
budget and how to articulate priorities that the American people want, 
let us not forget that one of the priorities the American people have 
insisted on time and time again is to end these two misadventures in 
Iraq and Afghanistan, bring those troops home, redirect those resources 
to the needs that the American people face right now, and in this way, 
begin not only to make our economy better, but return some moral 
imperative to this Nation.

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