South
Corvallis
1007 SE 3rd St
(541)753-3115
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North
Corvallis
BY CAMILLA MORTENSEN
Nation Building at Home
A Q&A with Sen. Jeff Merkley on Afghanistan
NW 29th & Grant
(541)452-3115
7-9 Daily
B
www.firstalt.coop
efore President Obama made
his June 22 announcement
of a troop drawdown in
Afghanistan — the White House goal
is to withdraw 33,000 troops from
Afghanistan by September 2012
— Oregon Sen. Jeff Merkley was
agitating for a new strategy in that
country. Merkley and 26 other senators
sent a letter to the president on June
15 expressing “our strong support for
a shift in strategy and the beginning
of a sizable and sustained reduction
of U.S. military forces in Afghanistan,
beginning in July 2011.” The letter is
available at http://wkly.ws/12t
Did the letter have an effect on Obama’s
decision to start pulling troops out?
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We went into Afghanistan with three
goals: One was taking out the Taliban, one
was taking out the al-Qaeda training camps
— and when I say ‘take out the Taliban’
I mean their role as the government of
Afghanistan — and the third was to hunt
down the perpetrators of 9/11. Those
goals are essentially completed, but along
the way we adopted this nation-building
strategy or objective. And by all estimates
that I can put my hands on, this is a mistake.
Essentially, trying to create a strong
central government in a nation that has no
tradition of a strong central government,
trying to do so by pouring funds into
Afghanistan, feeds the corruption which
makes the various institutions that we are
trying to build incompetent and even an
affl iction to their people because people
start buying positions.
This nation-building strategy doesn’t
make sense. And it was with that
background that I was really pushing for
the president to undertake a sizable and
sustained withdrawal with the goal of
getting all of our regular combat forces out
of Afghanistan.
I think the letter did have an impact. I
think it did help say to the administration,
that this isn’t some crazy idea that one or two
people are advocating for, this is something
that is absolutely resonating across America
that we are on the wrong track and to seize
this moment to change tracks.
The president did not go nearly far
enough fast enough as far as I’m concerned.
But I think he went much further than he
might have had we not been working to
express our viewpoints.
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10 JUNE 30, 2011
EUGENE WEEKLY
Mayor Kitty Piercy sponsored a res-
olution before the U.S. Conference of
Mayors urging Congress and Obama
to bring home U.S. troops from
Afghanistan and Iraq, and allow billions
in war spending to be redirected to
U.S. cities struggling with budget cuts.
Does such a resolution have an effect
higher up the political spectrum?
I think it does. It captures a notion that
we need to do less nation building abroad
and more nation building at home, and
it does so with people on the frontlines
across America who are seeing the impact
of devastated budgets.
The $100 billion a year, if you were
just taking that and creating a work-jobs
program, thinning our overgrown second-
growth forests and so on, you could create
with that money fi ve million $20,000 jobs
or subsidize jobs that pay far more. When
you think about the impact of fi ve million
jobs being created in America, that’s a
huge impact. In Oregon we have 1 percent
of the nation’s population. That would
be like 50,000 jobs created overnight in
Oregon. Nothing else we’ve done would
come close to that sort of economic impact,
getting people back on track with having
employment and a fi nancial foundation for
their family
We are barely able to maintain,
sometimes not able to maintain, the
infrastructure that we have built, let alone
build new infrastructure. What the mayors
are capturing is a point I keep raising
because I think it needs to be a national
debate, which is we are spending way too
much on foreign wars and foreign bases
and not nearly enough on infrastructure.
Is there any disconnect between your
support for building the drone testing
industry in Oregon — much of it would
be funded by the military — while calling
to remove troops from Afghanistan?
No, actually they are quite different
questions. Regardless of whether or not
we are overseas, you are going to have
basic infrastructure that continues to be
developed here in the U.S. If Oregon has
the opportunity to create jobs and industry
here rather than in some other state because
we have the appropriate space, then that
needs to be thoroughly explored.
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A longer version of this interview can be found at www.
eugeneweekly.com
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