The irrepressible Robert Greenwald explains why Joe Klein is the stupid one in the debate about taking our troops out of Afghanistan, at Huffington Post:
…Let’s talk about stupid for a minute.
The U.S. has increased troop levels in Afghanistan every year since the initial invasion, and every year we’ve seen an increased level of violence in Afghanistan. President Obama and General Petraeus promised–twice!–that huge troop increases would help “protect the population” of Afghanistan and break Taliban momentum. Yet over the course of their major escalations, the heightened troop levels failed to protect Afghan civilians, who suffered more war-related deaths than the year before. And, according to NATO and the Pentagon’s own statistics and reporting, the estimated number of insurgents is exactly the same as last year, and they continue to grow in geographic and operational reach. After all this failure of troop increases to stem the violence, Secretary Gates just announced another troop increase.
That sounds pretty stupid to me.
American workers are drowning in an economic crisis. Huge numbers of us remain unemployed, and hundreds of thousands are giving up on finding work at all. States all over the country are slashing their social safety nets to shreds, cutting things like health care for kids in poverty, while at the same time the federal government is charging their state an amount larger than their states’ deficits to continue the Afghanistan War. While 68 percent of Americans worry that the war’s costs affect our ability to fix problems here at home, we’re wasting $2 billion a week on a war that’s not making us safer.
That sounds pretty stupid to me…
[continues at Huffington Post]
