Is Your Representative Speaking Out Against Escalation in Afghanistan?

[Karmadillo]

http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/133744/is_your_representative_speaking_out_against_escalation_in_afghanistan/

Is your representative speaking out against escalation of the Afghanistan war?
Norman Solomon

Last week, some members of Congress sent President Obama a letter that urged him to “reconsider” his order deploying 17,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Everyone in the House of Representatives had ample opportunity to sign onto the letter. Beginning in late February, it circulated on Capitol Hill for more than two weeks. The letter was the most organized congressional move so far to challenge escalation of the war in Afghanistan.

But the list of signers was awfully short.

* California: Bob Filner, Michael Honda
* Hawaii: Neil Abercrombie
* Kentucky: Ed Whitfield
* Maryland: Roscoe Bartlett
* Massachusetts: Jim McGovern
* Michigan: John Conyers
* North Carolina: Howard Coble, Walter Jones
* Ohio: Marcy Kaptur, Dennis Kucinich
* Tennessee: John Duncan
* Texas: Ron Paul
* Wisconsin: Steve Kagen

We desperately need a substantive national debate on U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan and Pakistan. While the Obama administration says that the problems of the region cannot be solved by military means, the basic approach is reliance on heightened military means.

One of several journalists in Afghanistan on a tour “organized by the staff of commanding Gen. David D. McKiernan,” the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl, wrote a March 23 op-ed in support of an invigorated “counterinsurgency strategy.” With journalistic resolve, he explained: “Everyone expects a surge of violence and American casualties this year; no one expects a decisive improvement in the situation for at least several years beyond that.”

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