Wikileaks Exposes Futility of War in Afghanistan
The bad news about the war in Afghanistan keeps coming. When the website Wikileaks recently published close to 100,000 internal military documents, we learned that the war is even deadlier and more futile than we thought. The documents reveal the incompetence and corruption of Afghani government officials and security forces. They show American troops' involvement in gruesome attacks on civilians and targeted killings of suspected insurgents. Perhaps worst of all, they suggest that Pakistan's complex allegiances in the region work to undermine US military strategy.
As Representative Jim McGovern said, "There's no end! There's nothing in these documents that give us any reason to be hopeful that the end is near. If anything, it shows we're sinking deeper and deeper into a quagmire."
Despite the Wikileaks revelation about the deterioration of the war effort over the past few years, Congress nevertheless approved $33 billion dollars in the war spending last week. This just goes to show how distant the government is from American public opinion, which increasingly opposes the war.
The bad news doesn't end there. Last week we learned that 66 American soldiers died in July. That is the highest number of casualties per month since the war began. It's clear that this war is costly, deadly, immoral, and senseless.
