Open Letter to President Obama – Afghanistan

Dear Mr. President,

I hope this letter reaches you in some form or the other. It is extremely important that you not make the major mistake by which your presidency will be defined. It is extremely important that you not make the mistake Lyndon Johnson did in Vietnam.

No not escalate the war in Afghanistan. Listen to your generals and then make the correct decision. Remember, generals are always generals and will opt for war in most situations because that is how they are trained to solve problems. Generals and armies are for destroying countries and their inhabitants. They are not for nation building.

The most important thing you must remember is just one thing.

No matter how long the U.S. military stays in Afghanistan, no matter how many people we kill there (unless we kill everyone), no matter who we coerce, no matter who we ‘pay off’, no matter how clean the next elections are, no matter how good a leader of Afghanistan we put in place, no matter how many Americans are killed, no matter how much money we spend on the war; at the end of the day, we will leave Afghanistan (unless you plan to make it part of the U.S. somehow)! At that point the Taliban and al-Qaeda will return. Why? Because they live there! They raise their children there. And, for every father we kill, for every mother, brother, sister, and cousin we kill; some child will swear a blood oath to take us down!

The countries we are engaged in have much less to lose in an indefinite war than we do. To win, all they have to do is survive. By surviving, they will wear our economy down to third world status, for the majority of Americans. By surviving, they will become heroes to many people at the bottom of the societies in the Islamic world. By surviving, they will become dispersed throughout the Islamic world and more sophisticated in guerrilla technique. And, with access to nuclear munitions, there is no way to estimate what they will be able to do in ten or twenty or fifty years of continuous war with us.

There is only one way out of the quagmire the republicans left for you: Apologize to the Islamic world for what we have done there for the last 50 years. Pledge to help rebuild everything the Western powers have destroyed. Take a neutral approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Remove our troops back to the states which will host them. Use current technology, special-forces, and the CIA to contain al-Qaeda as best they can. This is the optimal solution: minimize casualties and economic waste and maximize good will.

Please do not let the republicans determine your foreign policy. They are extremely bad at foreign policy! Please, do not let the three wars we are engaged in (Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan) consume us. We have much to do domestically to recover from the Bush recession. We cannot afford endless war in Asia.

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavors and I hope you maintain the good will of the world, expressed in your Peace Prize.

Sincerely,

jborrow33