Mendte: Get Out Of Afghanistan
NEW YORK, NY. (KPLR) – Obama also talked about bringing home 34 thousand troops from Afghanistan.
Larry Mendte points out a number the president didn’t bring up.
Of all of the issues addressed and all of the promises made in the state of the union address, I was most interested in what President Obama didn’t say.
He got rousing applause when he announced that 34 thousand more troops will be coming home from Afghanistan by the end of the year.
But that still leave 33,000 troops in Afghanistan, more than when President Obama took office in January of 2009.
And have we all forgotten that President Obama when he ran for president in 2008 he promised the troops would be home by the summer of 2011, most in the media embarrassingly either forgot or just ignored that self-imposed deadline.
The president now says he hopes to have a significant number of the remaining troop’s home by December 2014.
That is a lot different than his 2012 campaign promise that all troops would be home by the end of 2014.
You see the reason the president didn’t say in the state of the union when all troops will be home is because he doesn’t know.
Right now we are negotiating with Afghanistan to leave troops at a base in this endless war, well past and those left behind would still engage in combat and still take casualties.
The president and the Afghan government know that without us troops the Taliban and al Qaeda and other splinter groups will fill the vacuum and the war will be a 13 year failure.
And so we may never leave. That’s what the president didn’t say.
He also didn’t mention that out of the 1,547 Americans who have died in Afghanistan in the four years since he was sworn into office, less than half that number (639) died in the first 8 years of the war.
Here is what I wished the president would have said; the war in Afghanistan has cost us to much money and too many American lives, we are pulling out all troops immediately. We have done all we can, the Afghan government must stand or fall on its own.
That would have taken courage. That would have brought me to my feet. If he said we are going to get out now; but alas, those are three words i fear we will never here.
