Enough in Afghanistan

      In December of 2009, President Obama announced that the last American troops would leave Afghanistan in 2014. On June 22 of last year, Obama declared that 10,000 troops would be withdrawn by the end of 2011 and an additional 23,000 would be leaving Afghanistan by this summer. Currently about 80,000 troops remain in Afghanistan.

 

U.S. forces invaded Afghanistan after 9/11 with three objectives: find Osama bin Laden, destroy his al-qaeda terrorist organization and unseat the Taliban government that was shielding them. A decade later, bin Laden is dead and al-qaeda is in disarray, its remaining elements scattered across Africa and the Middle East. Those are major accomplishments, a tribute to the American military. But it's increasingly unclear how a continuing occupation in Afghanistan advances U.S. goals.

Now, it's time to bring them home.

The Gallup poll provides a good summary on the US's citizens opinion. Also, a new New York Times/CBS News poll shows that more Americans than ever want the U.S. to end its involvement in Afghanistan, with 69 percent now saying the U.S. shouldn't be fighting there. That's a huge jump from just four months ago, when 53 percent said it was time to go.

President Barack Obama needs to expedite the withdrawal of U.S. troops. It's costing us a fortune to stay there and, increasingly, appears to be doing more harm than good.

The Afghan people's anger at the United States and distrust of U.S. troops have only deepened in the past few months with a series of blunders, from soldiers' burning of Qurans to a rogue sergeant's one-man killing spree. The deaths and cultural insults are inspiring calls for vengeance that further erode Americans' ability to bring about positive change in Afghanistan.

Some members of Congress, including the Bay Area delegation, are calling on the president to hasten the timetable. Even before Sunday's killing of Afghan villagers, polls showed more than half of the U.S. public believed the U.S. should withdraw even if the Afghan army isn't adequately trained.

During Tuesday's hearing, Rep. Walter Jones, R-N.C., quoted a wounded Marine he met during a hospital visit. He asked, “Why are we still there?”

Canada, which has been Washington's key ally in Kandahar, will be out by 2011. Britain will likely withdraw soon after, along with most of NATO's European contingent. If Obama does not synch his withdrawal with his allies', it won't be long before America finds itself alone in Afghanistan.

This is why President Obama should stick to his plan to start withdrawing American troops from Afghanistan in 2011, and finish withdrawing soon after.

 

Can we conquer nature?

On March 8, 2012, the Washington post published an article about the triple disaster in Japan on 3/11 "A year after the disaster of 3/11, Japan looks inward "

Fred Hiatt starts out very interesting with "the reaction of the two countries" , Japan, America after Hurricane Katrina, and a quote from some well-known people.

With that he points out a good question : can we conquer nature?. Really, "Can we conquer nature?".

It's easy to think that man has conquered nature. We have risen from subsistence nomads to a mass of billions, settled for the most part in cities of glass, steel and air-conditioned bliss, writes Mark Wilson in this week's Mate. We have crossed oceans, bridged them and even hold them back around us as they threaten to drown our homes. It's easy to think we can do whatever we please and that man and his many inventions can conquer all.

A few years back as the oceans streamed relentlessly inland across Asia, washing away hundreds of years of development and many of the individuals responsible for it, we all lamented the force of nature and our powerlessness to stop her in full flight. Then we watched in shock and awe as Hurricane Katrina pounded New Orleans, a proud city in the most powerful nation of Earth. Despite spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a state-of-the-art military and millions more on flood protection, early warning systems and civil defence infrastructure, man was comprehensively defeated.

While I agree we can't completely defeat Nature, we can, with good planning and engineering, mitigate natures effects.

It's time we learnt a valuable lesson: nature always wins and we must adapt and if that means moving our towns away from these focal points of nature's wrath then, as hard as it is, we probably should. Our role is to grow with nature and learn from nature not to defeat and do better than nature