THW remove all troops from Afghanistan Brief:
Pros:
1. Would drastically reduce costs-
a. Costs are already estimated at 1.3-3 Trillion.
b. 4,000 deaths already, and 33,000 injured.
c. To have any effect we would have to have a surge of an extra 35,000 troops…. At least.
2. We have no objective in Afghanistan.
a. They’ve got a 27% literacy rate, 40% unemployment, and 80 something political parties… they aren’t even stabilized. The only thing uniting them is hatred of the U.S.
3. Would allow Afghanistan’s people to start becoming stable on their own, with a little help of course! But we feel that we have no right to tell these people how to live their lives.
4. Implement a plan that imposes policies:
a. allowing opium to be produced in Afghanistan, but only to where they can sell to Pharmaceutical companies (there is an morphine shortage worldwide) … this would ease tensions in tribal Afghanistan, cause they could produce their biggest cash crop, but it would keep it out of the Taliban’s hands, so they couldn’t sell it off as illegal narcotics. This plan has been modeled and shown to be effective off the Nixon-Kissinger program implemented in Turkey.
b. Sending in Strike teams to combat the Taliban/Al Qaeda instead of having ground based troops… which is far more costly to maintain.
i. This would ease tensions with our allies over troop commitments.
c. Recognizing this is not a nation-building effort, but an effort to support the people of Afghanistan to build their own nation…
Cons:
1. We need to stay in Afghanistan! We need to show that as Americans we are willing to stick something through to the end. However, we need to take action quickly as is suggested by Obama’s own General McChrystal… If we continue to wait, the Taliban will continue to gather even more momentum.
2. They’ve got a 27% literacy rate, 40% unemployment, and 80 something political parties… they aren’t even stabilized. We can bring stabilization! By bringing in a decidedly pro-Western gov’t, the divided tribal Afghans would unite under a solid gov’t that would remove the Taliban from power, and start to increase their literacy and unemployment rates, and would start to unify these 80 political parties.
3. We don’t want another Vietnam, so we oppose and say we will stay, and we will win! We will set particular goals, specifically, to decrease the presence of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, to increase literacy rates and employment rates by at least 100% of their current rates, and to raise up a pro-western gov’t to unite the people by doing said things above.
