Eshoo opposes Afghan troop surge

I'm grateful that Eshoo is speaking out against the troop surge, but the story and her statement don't address an important question: Will she vote against funding this misguided action? That's the real test, to my mind.

She just lost my vote.

Scholar, she never had mine, but I can say that so far three of my democrat(misguided folks, but great people) friends have said the same thing as you.

Does anyone remember what the Taliban did to women last time they had control of Afghanistan? But Afghanistan is a graveyard- so who cares, right?
But we are not there to save the Afghans. We are there to stop the spread of terrorists. Is that unimportant?
I fear these liberals are now playing to a declining base.
I hope they are all voted out next year.

A rare sensible opinion from the usually misguided Bay Area caucus.

I have voted for her in every election but she clearly doesn't understand the issue here. We are trying to fight terrorism not occupy the country as others have tried to do.
She really needs to talk to some knowledgeable before she makes these statements that make her sound uninformed.

Anna Eshoo, as a typical liberal, does not understand the world. Our presence in Afghanistan is not merely to get Osama Bin Laden. Northwest Pakistan and Northeast Afghanistan (Waziristan) are not nor have ever been controlled by their governments.

This is where Al Qaeda and the Taliban hang out. Our presence in Afghanistan keeps Pakistan from destabilizing. If the Pakistan government were overthrown then Muslim extremists would be in posession of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal. This would be catastrophic for the whole world.

But Anna Eshoo would rather curry favor with the Move-on.org crowd then to help ensure the safety of the free world. She needs to be voted out of office. She is a real dunce.

Once again, Hank distorts reality to turn this discussion into a liberal vs. conservative (or nonliberal) argument. If this is the case, why is it that so many conservatives and military experts (not exactly known for their raving liberal views) on the same side of the issue as Eshoo?

I support Eshoo on this, and hope she joins other congress members in voting against funding.

Hank -
Calling Anna Eshoo a dunce tells me more about you than it does about her. I've seen her in action at the hearings she held in Council chambers earlier this year on the Health Care bill and I was impressed with her fairness, thoughtfulness, and obvious intelligence. I've voted for her in the past and I expect to again.
That said, I disagree with her position on Afghanistan for many of the reasons you give. As a Move-on member for years (and I've told them I disagree with their position as well), I find that I agree with Obama's characterization of Afghanistan as a "war of necessity, not of choice" and am disappointed that the left has failed in not supporting him. It was obviously not an easy decision for him to make but neither was it unexpected, given his clear position during last year's campaign.
We failed Afghanistan once after they supported our efforts to defeat the Soviet Union back in the late 70's-early 80's, which arguably allowed the Taliban to take over the country, provide shelter to Osama bin Laden & Al Qaeda, and ultimately plan and execute the 9/11 attacks. Had Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush showed Obama's courage & resolve, 9/11 likely would never have happened and Afghanistan would not have degenerated into the failed state it is today.

Most of the 9/11 blame goes to the Clinton Administration. With Jamie Gorelick preventing the intelligence community and the FBI from sharing intelligence information to Clinton's reluctance to get Bin Laden when the president of Sudan through a back channel via the CIA offered Bin Laden to Clinton. However, the Clinton Administration, fumbling around just did not know what to do.

Bush is also at fault by not realizing how much Clinton had crippled the intelligence community. And of course you have Sandy Berger caught red-handed stealing documents from the National Archives that revealed the Clinton Administration's ineptitude in it's half hearted comical and bumbling efforts to get Bin Laden. Give me an aspirin. I got a headache. Oh I forgot there is no aspirin. Clinton bombed the aspirin factory.

Hank -

You have your Republican blinders on again.

It's pretty clear from the 9/11 commission report that while Clinton may have fumbled the ball, the Bush administration dropped it completely. Richard Clark was Director of Counterterrorism under both administrations and he testified that he couldn't get the time of day with Condi Rice and others when he sent memos and reports underscoring the threat of Al Qaeda and bin Laden. Even when CIA was presenting evidence of something imminent, Bush chose to remain in Texas on vacation. Bush had 9 months to do something about bin Laden and we all know that he did nada.

Besides, my original point was that the US abandoned Afghanistan back in the 1980's after they had served their purpose in helping defeat the Soviet Union. This in turn lead to chaos in Afghanistan and the ascendancy of the Taliban, which in turn created a home for Al Qaeda where they plotted the 9/11 attacks. Obama has done the honorable thing in committing to support the war in Afghanistan against the Taliban and Al Qaeda. We shouldn't repeat the mistakes of Reagan & HW Bush and abandon Afghanistan once again, lest we're willing to also have a repeat of 9/11.

Where was Mr. Clarke when Bill Clinton chose to make those pin-prick cruise missile strikes on empty terror camps in Afghanistan and on an alledged pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan. And where was Mr. Clarke when Bill Clinton chose to send in B-52s to incinerate 2000 non-terrorist pro-American Serbs instead of sending them (or special forces) off to the mountains of Afghanistan?

Clinton, preoccupied with saving his a** after the impeachment hearings chose to make an Impeachment war over Kosovo, but Richard Clarke (and I don't question his patriotism, or what he did try to do - only where his fingerpointing should have been made) fell into lockstep with Clinton, Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger, and the rest who are much more responsible for ignoring the threat of Al Qaeda than the Bush Administration (remember, Clinton had 8 years to deal with Osama - and Richard Clarke, if anyone should know that well)

Richard Clarke occupied the same Oval Office that Oliver North once worked out of. There the similarity ends. Yes, President Reagan, God Bless Him, should be rightly blamed for not dealing with terrorists after the bombing of the Marine barracks. But he does deserve credit, as does Colonel North, for the bombing of Libya, and the swift retaliation on the hijackers of the "Achille Lauro". North was the architect of the latter action, and what did Richard Clarke do that was comparable.

Mr. Clarke did try time and time again to alert Clinton about Al Qaeda and the Taliban. But Billy was too busy with the bims. He wouldn't even meet with James Woolsey, his CIA director (see Gerald Posner's book), something Mr. Clarke doesn't mention here.
yes, President Bush can be faulted, but he had only eight months to deal with Al Qaeda and was in the process of cobbling together a plan despite the incompetency of the FBI and of Mr. Tenet, the holdover at CIA whom he should have jettisoned right away. Bill Clinton gave us that FBI, Mr. Tenet, and an emasculated Intelligence.

Furthermore, Mr. Clarke can also be faulted for being cocksure of himself. Tommy Franks points that out in his book, and Clarke did some unfortunate self-promotion on 60 Minutes a good two years before 9/11 about how we were unprepared but hey he was doing a wonderful job. I do believe Mr. Clarke meant well, and maybe working with a Colonel North (whom Clarke's friends in the Kerry camp despised) they would have been a team that Osama would have been reckoned with. It was his misfortune to serve the Carterites and Slick.

And he was NO Ollie North who did get things done. If North was still running that office instead of Clarke, we would have been BOMBING TERRORISTS in Afghanistan, not innocent civilians in Belgrade.