(This chart is from the National Priorities Project website.)The chart above shows the amount of United States money spent on the unnecessary and useless wars in Afghanistan and Iraq -- about one and a half trillion dollars so far (and no end in sight). I say no end in sight, because although President Obama has said he would withdraw the American troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, that is not really what the government wants to happen. They want to leave a few thousand troops in that country, supposedly to train the Afghani troops and also to "fight terrorism".
But those troops won't stay unless the Afghan government agrees that any American soldiers that break the law will stay under U.S. military control, and will be immune from prosecution by the Afghanis. President Hamid Karzai has been opposed to that and recently very critical of the U.S. involvement in his country, but it now looks like he has changed his mind. Maybe he suddenly realized that a complete U.S. withdrawal would mean an end to the money he has been getting (those suitcases full of U.S. dollars left outside his government office in the dead of night).
Government officials traveling with Secretary of State Kerry now say that Karzai has agreed to the U.S. demands -- both to leave troops in Afghanistan past the end of 2014 with no defined end date, and to make those soldiers that stay immune to Afghan law.
Fortunately, there is still some hope that the Afghanis will not agree to that unreasonable demand, and demand all troops leave by the end of 2014. Before the agreement becomes effective, it must be approved by both an assembly of tribal elders and the Afghan parliament. The question is whether these two groups will want to respect Afghan law and demand their sovereign rights be respected, or whether they too will give in to the huge payoffs from the CIA.
Frankly, I don't understand why we invaded Afghanistan in the first place, let alone staying past the 2014 deadline. We have accomplished nothing but to replace one corrupt government with another corrupt government, and caused enormous loss of life -- for both U.S. soldiers and innocent civilians. Yet we are no closer to eliminating the Taliban and their allies than we were years ago, and there is no logical reason to believe this is a war that is even possible to win (remember Vietnam?).
In this fiscal year alone, we will be spending over $90 billion dollars in Afghanistan. And with our own economy in trouble, and the government shut down because the GOP wants to cut more from our domestic budget (including cuts to Social Security and Medicare), it simply doesn't make sense to continue spending that kind of money on a useless war in Afghanistan. We need to get out of that country, and use that money to help hurting Americans (and fix the economy).
We've already thrown well over a trillion dollars down that bottomless pit of war. How much more money (and lives) will be wasted before we bring all of our troops home? And how many more Americans will have to suffer because we are not spending that money to help them?
