Adele Ferguson - Ready to bring the troops home?

“THANK YOU for saying, so succinctly, in your column ‘Afghanistan: Say we won and come home’ what many of us up here have been saying for years and having the courage to write this,” writes Peggy Burton of Coupeville.

“I belong to a group here in Coupeville called Coupeville Peace and Reconciliation or CPR. Our local papers are very much aligned with military thinking. We have NAS Whidbey in Oak Harbor, and we find it hard to get much support for a different viewpoint. When we all have courage enough to stand up against this huge military-industrial complex, then the troops can come home.”

USA Today’s front page headline in the Aug. 3 edition tells the story. “Support wanes for Obama, war plan.” The latest USA Today Gallup poll shows public support for the president’s Afghanistan war policy has plummeted amid a rising death rate and the unauthorized release of classified military documents.

Support for Obama’s management of the war has dropped to 36 percent, down from 48 percent in February. Also, only 34 percent think the war there is going well, 62 percent say it’s going badly.

We obviously gave up on finding Osama bin Laden long ago, he apparently having disappeared into Pakistan or Iran with those countries displaying no enthusiasm for hunting him down. And voices are increasing daily in the newspapers and on the air questioning why we remain in Afghanistan at all.

GEORGE WILL was the first prominent journalist to call for us to give it up. “The American undertaking in Afghanistan is a fool’s errand,” he says in his latest column.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer decries, “the alarming weakness and ineptness, to say nothing of corruption, of the Afghan central government.”

“Is Afghanistan worth it?” is the headline on Bret Stephens’ column in the Wall Street Journal. The best conservative case against the war, he said, holds that all attempts to building Afghanistan as a nation will prove futile as all past attempts to subdue it. “It is a sideshow when the focus of our efforts in the region should be Pakistan, Iran or elsewhere. If Afghans massacre each other in the wake of a U.S. withdrawal, that’s their unfortunate business.”

AL NEUHARTH, founder of USA Today, called on the president to bring all our troops home from Afghanistan sooner rather than later and admit that our presence there is a shameful waste of lives and money. “If Obama doesn’t get it and get us out, he’ll likely lose his 2012 reelection bid. Too bad for a guy with so much promise.”

Columnist Thomas Friedman asks when the president takes America deeper into the war: Do our interests merit such an escalation and do I have the allies to achieve victory? Why do we have to recruit and train our allies, the Afghan Army, to fight? That may be the only thing they all know how to do after 30 years of civil war and centuries of resisting foreign powers. What do we win if we win? At least in Iraq, if we eventually provide a decent democratizing government, we will have at enormous cost, changed the politics in the heart of the Arab Muslim world. Afghan present Hamid Karzai openly stole the election and we looked the other way.

“So why can’t America exit this budget busting war and bring our soldiers home?” asks the Seattle Times. “Let them have their religious state.”

So are you ready for our troops to come home, folks? Me too.

(Adele Ferguson can be reached at P.O. Box 69, Hansville, Wa., 98340.)