US Congress rebels could end Afghan war
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Meanwhile in the United States, a rebellion is growing in Congress against the war. Wisconsin Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, House Democrat Jim McGovern from Massachusetts, and House Republican Walter Jones from North Carolina have introduced legislation that would require President Obama to establish a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan. The bill has quickly picked up 29 co-sponsors, and could reach 100 within the next few weeks.
How does this get us out of Afghanistan? My colleague Robert Naiman of Just Foreign Policy explains:
"A signal like this is likely to have dramatic political effects in Afghanistan, just as these things had dramatic political effects in Iraq. In 2007, Congress never succeeded legislatively in writing a military withdrawal timetable into U.S. law. But the fact that the majority of the House and Senate went on the record in favor of a timetable had dramatic effects in Iraq. It put pressure on the Bush Administration to compromise its objectives, to start serious negotiations with people it had previously been trying to kill."
The result was a signed agreement between the U.S. and Iraq for a timetable to withdraw U.S. troops.
That is how the Afghan war will end. The pressure will build until President Obama and his military have no choice but to begin the U.S. exit from Afghanistan.
The majority of Americans are against the war, and every week thousands of Americans continue to put pressure on their representatives in Congress, who can also read the polls in an election year. The war has dragged on long after the public turned against it, and long after Washington abandoned any pretense of a coherent story to justify it - a result of our limited, corrupted form of democracy. But this Congressional rebellion is the beginning of the end of this war.
This column was published by The Guardian Unlimited on April 23, 2010.
Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. He received his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Michigan. He has written numerous research papers on economic policy, especially on Latin America and international economic policy. He is also co-author, with Dean Baker, of Social Security:The Phony Crisis (University of Chicago Press, 2000) and president of Just Foreign Policy.
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