Friday, January 07, 2011

Op-ed: Afghanistan: War of Choice Not Necessity

In August 2009 Obama declared before the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Afghanistan “is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity.” Is that true?...

Anand Ghopal, who has covered Afghanistan for both the Wall Street Journal and Christian Science Monitor, reports that after the Taliban government fell in Kabul in 2001, members of the ruling group, resigned to Afghanistan’s new situation, expressed a willingness to surrender to U.S. forces. The surrendering Taliban leaders offered not to participate in politics if the new government would not arrest them. “But [but U.S.-picked leader Hamid] Karzai and other government officials ignored the overture — largely due to pressures from the United States and the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s erstwhile enemy,” Ghopal added. The surrendering Taliban were subject to “widespread intimidation and harassment.... Many of the signatories of the letter [offering surrender] were to become leading figures in the insurgency.”
Read the full op-ed, "Afghanistan: War of Choice Not Necessity."

1 comment:

  1. "Insurgency": a label used by U.S. war profiteers and moralists to prevent Americans from knowing the Afghanistan resistors are patriots trying to resist foreign occupation.

    Large amounts of taxdollars are used (spent) in Afghanistan to bribe collaborators and non-participants. It's outrageous. I thought everyone was on our side. Good vs evil.

    The Bush family and their cohorts started this Viet Nam type mess, and Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate should have known better to contribute or escalate it.

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