"We can not grow our economy on the military industrial complex." - Congressman John Garamendi.
We just finished a call with the Congressman regarding his amendment to get us out of Afghanistan. I am thrilled with his plan ... and the fact that he took the time to talk to us.
These calls with Congressmen are something that Beth Becker is arranging and we always get a nice little group with detailed questions.
The discussion this evening centered on the plan to quickly cut our troop level to just 25,000 in country and then only 10,000 the year after that. This is the key phrase that Congressman Garamendi wants us to use:
We need to move from counter insurgency to counter terrorism.
Our fight was with al Queda and we just lopped the head off their network. The large troop presence as we try to tamp down what is sad, but a normal level of disputes in Afghanistan is just not in our best interests nor those of the Afghan people.
It's also not helping in Pakistan. We push things around in Afghanistan, the aggressive Taliban take themselves to Pakistan's tribal areas and set up shop there, and things get worse rather than better. If we stop giving cause for action things will settle down there.
I got to ask about my pet topic - getting our ragged gunship fleet fixed up so we're not sending our Special Forces out without close air support.
The Congressman wasn't on the specific committee that handles this, but he quickly said yes in principle to doing a better job of supporting our Special Forces, and he mentioned that they had unsuccessfully tried to defund two F-35 fighters and shift that money into Special Operations.
I have to say that I am just a bit disappointed in this community - people have all the energy in the world to complain about D.C. not listening, but we've had two calls with Congressmen today, and we left "money on the table" - we could have got a couple more questions in with each of them, and we didn't do it ...
So, given that I sit right across from Beth while she is arranging this stuff, what do I have to do to make it easier for you guys to turn up?