Dear Congresswoman Capps

This morning’s article in the L.A. Times tells me that though our forces have been “killing Taliban militants by the hundreds…there has been ‘no apparent degradation in their capacity to fight.’ The Taliban have the momentum, especially in the east and north. There is no change in the overall balance of power, and the Taliban are still making problems.”

It appears that since General Petraeus has not been able to win (or purchase) the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, the Pentagon and its hawkish puppeteers are pushing a new panacea for our problems there: “Instead of continuing a nation-building campaign, which critics argue is seeing billions lost to corruption and flowing indirectly to the Taliban, the U.S. could battle the enemy with a smaller footprint of conventional forces supporting special operations troops and Predator drone strikes.”

Where do you see this going, ma’am? Over the course of nine years we haven’t been able to instill democracy there. I think that’s largely due to the fact that democracy can’t thrive where a large percentage of the population has been turned into an outlaw class and its leaders are being assassinated. Yes, they’ve turned to assassination, too, so bodies in the morgue have become like ballots in the ballot box.

So your friends the hawks want us to give up on “nation building” and rely, instead, entirely on death squads and Predator drones. What do we call the system that emerges from the rubble? And how do we condemn those who retaliate by finding ways to kill Americans, possibly in the thousands?

I know that you alone cannot end the war in Afghanistan or bring home the 100,000 American troops still in Iraq and actively involved in military missions there. But you can, on behalf of your war-weary constituents, cast your vote against continued war funding and use your voice to convince other arm-chair liberals to do the same.

The people of both Afghanistan and Iraq deserve the right to shape their own futures. Their present is a horrible one, thanks to people in the Pentagon who continue to tell us we’re winning, even as record numbers of our sons and daughters come home dead or horribly mangled.

Please stop supporting war.