U.S. airstrikes slaughtered 95 Afghan children in the Farah province last week, leaving a total of 140 civilians dead. And yet as Tom Hayden pointed out in The Nation this week, our Democrat-dominated Congress seems unwilling to criticize the Obama administration as it rushes to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime funding. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has been holding hearings over the past few weeks with U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani military advisers, assessed that the supplemental only "exacerbates" failed strategies by allocating $84 billion to military escalation, leaving $10 billion for foreign aid.
At a time when we're facing soaring unemployment and an economic crisis, it's incredible to me that Congress is so quick to simply go along with Obama on this one, particularly when the run up to the war in Iraq is so fresh in our minds and when we've seen this pattern before from Democratic Presidents. And there are many who share this incredulity.
US airstrikes in Afghanistan like the one that killed over 100 civilians last week have reached all-time destructive highs. According to Air Forces Central, US warplanes dropped a record 438 bombs in Afghanistan during April. The number of dropped bombs has increased steadily over the past few months, and just yesterday, Gen. James Jones claimed the US will continue conducting airstrikes despite President Karzai's admonishment that these bombings are counterproductive, turning Afghan civilians against the United States. Yet as the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan continues to deteriorate, Congress will decide this week whether to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime spending.
Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan like retired Corporal Rick Reyes are meeting with members of Congress early this week, urging them not to approve this massive supplemental wartime funding bill until more critical questions are answered about the war. We still don't know, for instance, how the Obama administration intends to prevent increases in US airstrikes and military presence from becoming recruiting tools for Taliban extremists or al Qaeda terrorists. We still don't know how the administration will be able to stop military escalation from further destabilizing a nuclear-armed Pakistan. Nor has the administration been forthright about benchmarks or an exit strategy, or whether funding more war will hamper US economic recovery.
What happened today in Washington was, as Senator Russ Feingold called it, "historic." Thirty-eight years nearly to the day when a young John Kerry shocked the nation with his fiery anti-Vietnam war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rick Reyes, a former US Marine Corporal, delivered an equally puissant testimony in which he expressed his disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan. How appropriate Kerry should be sitting directly across from Reyes as Committee Chairman, listening attentively as Congress heard one of the first major voices of dissent on this war.
The son of Mexican immigrants who joined the Marines to escape a violent gang life in Los Angeles, Reyes served as an infantry rifleman in Afghanistan and Iraq. He upheld his duty to serve our country honorably, and immediately after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan "with the conviction of fighting for justice and the American way." All of that changed when Reyes realized US military forces faced the impossible task of fighting militant Taliban members who blended in with the local Afghan population, routinely resulting in the injuries or deaths of innocent civilians.
STATE BLOGS
