U.S. Rep. Timothy V. Johnson

U.S. Rep. Timothy V. Johnson today issued the following statement as he joined with Rep. Dennis Kucinich, Rep. Ron Paul, Rep. Walter Jones, and others in forcing a House of Representatives vote to remove U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

House Congressional Resolution 248 calls for the removal of Armed Forces from Afghanistan by the end of this year.

“This war must stop,” Rep. Johnson said. “We have lost more than 1,000 American lives there in nine years of Operation Enduring Freedom. Last year was the deadliest yet, costing over 300 lives. Close to 5,000 have been wounded.

“The story of civilian losses is increasingly alarming – 6,000 killed or wounded in 2009 alone. Many of those from Improvised Explosive Devices that were placed to target NATO troops but killed and maimed innocent civilians instead. Many have left in the face of this danger – now 2.5 million Afghan refugees, with another 275,000 displaced from their homes internally.

“After more than eight years of war – 50 percent longer than our involvement in both world wars – we have succeeded only in inflaming the terrorist movement and in laying waste to an independent nation. Agricultural production has fallen dramatically. Almost half the country lacks adequate food. Health care is nearly non-existent. Some 24,000 women are dying yearly from complications related to childbirth.

“The Afghanistan hawks in the House will say we are winning this war, that we are making progress in taking back the province of Helmand, that we’ve taken back the city of former Taliban city of Marja and installed Abdul Zahir as the town administrator. What they don’t tell you is that this town has been ‘taken back’ three times before, that Zahir is yet another corrupt Afghan puppet who served four years in prison in Germany for assault and that the last time the Afghanistan government held the town, the townspeople threw out the police before the Taliban even returned.

“We are asking our troops to sacrifice life and limb to prop up a government that Transparency International recently ranked as the second most corrupt in the world. Election monitoring agencies estimated that in last August’s elections, one in four votes were fraudulent. The vice president is a known drug dealer.

“Afghanistan is and has historically been a country of tribal governments. It is their tradition and culture. It is our occupation that has inflamed a guerilla war against us. Matthew Hoh, the senior U.S. diplomat to Afghanistan who resigned last year in frustration with our policies, said exactly that. A growing number of military and policy experts, from the Carnegie Endowment to George Will, agree on just that point. The President’s own national security advisor estimated the presence of al Qaida in Afghanistan at less than 100 fighters.

“The fact is terrorists bent on harming the U.S. are not indigenous to any country. Al Qaida has launched strikes from Yemen, Somalia, Pakistan, London and Madrid. They’re like the Wack-A-Mole game at the county fairs – you knock one down and they pop up out of another hole. That’s how we should attack them, with surgical strikes, vigilance and superior intelligence – not an Army in a war we cannot sustain.

“This war is and has been a futile undertaking with no end-game in sight. We have now budgeted, against my vote, $130 billion for this year for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. According to the Congressional Research Service, $937 billion has been spent on the two wars since 2001.

“The cost of sending an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan will be about $33 billion a year, or more than $1 million per soldier. That is 2.5 times the whole economy of Afghanistan.

“If we had not spent this money, our national debt and deficit would not be at such outrageous levels and our budget outlook would not be so grim.

“As part of the coalition that put this resolution together, people should see this is not a partisan issue. This is a matter of strategic foreign policy and the intelligent allocation of the hard-earned tax dollars of our citizens. The U.S. military is capable of doing whatever is asked of them, and they have done so valiantly. However, I cannot be part of asking them to fight a war with no end in sight.”