2. If the Taliban had control of Afghanistan, it would likely not allow al Qaeda in. Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. president's guy in Afghanistan, will tell you the same.
3. The Taliban would not necessarily gain full control of Afghanistan if the United States left. It never had it before, and appears unlikely to be able to take it now. These three points, as Robert Naiman has pointed out, make the leap from US withdrawal to an al Qaeda attack on the United States quite a large one.
4. Occupying and bombing Afghanistan is actually making us less safe. It is enraging people against the United States, building the Taliban and other resistance.
6. The occupation is not benefitting the Afghan people. It is not protecting their rights or their lives. It is brutally taking their lives with bombs and imprisoning them without charge or trial or the rights of prisoners of war.
7. The Taliban is made up of poor people fighting in order to eat. They need aid, diplomacy, jobs, education, and resources, not bombs and troops and mercenaries. We're paying tens of thousands of Afghans to fight as mercenaries. We could pay them to rebuild their country and have money to spare.
8. That we are supposedly succeeding against al Qaeda when arguments are needed to reauthorize the PATRIOT Act, but supposedly failing against al Qaeda when it's time to continue or escalate wars is insulting, not credible.
9. The citizens of the United States oppose the war, and it's our money and our kids, and our country being placed in danger of blowback.
10. The people of Afghanistan, according to an ABC News poll, want the United States to withdraw. It's their country, and you cannot impose democracy on them without obeying their majority opinion.
11. If we've been through eight years of this and not been able to even devise a rough description of what a "success" would look like, what are the chances that it will be identified and achieved in year nine?
12. It's called the graveyard of empires for a reason.
13. Our states' militias, the national guard, is needed at home and cannot constitutionally be sent abroad to fight for empire.
14. US soldiers signed up to defend the United States, not to commit war crimes in distant lands.
15. There is nothing worse than war that could conceivably take its place. Killing people is the worst thing there is.
Has your congress member committed to voting No on all war money, to cosponsoring Jim McGovern's bill for an exit plan, to cosponsoring Betty McCollum's bill to defund criminal government contractors, and to cosponsor Barbara Lee's bill to block funding for an escalation?
Have you asked them? Have you asked them face-to-face? Have you used the local media? Have you gone to their office, sat down, and refused to leave?
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