More soldiers requested? At what cost, President Obama?

december 2 2009

The pressure on our government is increasing to go against former decisions to stop sending soldiers to Afghanistan.
One of the promises of the elections here was that the mission would end at a certain time (next year), and that after that no soldiers would be send to Afghanistan anymore.

Now america is requesting to send more soldiers and ofcourse our prime minister and his party are trying to fulfill that request.
As we say: "he wants to be a good boy and doesn't want to go against america."

In the past participation in military missions was requested with referral to WW2, when we were occupied by the Germans and America was one of the many nations that took part in fighting the Germans and freeing us from war.
(Conveniently is forgotten that they bombed our town by accident, killing many people, including 5 family members of me.)

Well, I think we've repayed our debt by now, especially when I see what the consequences are of that request.

As I said, the prime minister and his party are afraid of the political and economical consequences of saying "no", forgetting that the human and economical burden of sending more soldiers will be the negative consequence, as will loss of political trustworthiness of our government..

Even worse.
Other parties in our government are against sending more military personnel and when they want to please their constituency this will need to go against the other party/parties which probably will result in the fall of our government.
I'm not sure if that's what america wants.

Putting our government under pressure means medling into our internal affairs, making our government violating agreements with the people here. In the end resulting in international political friction between america and our country.
We were finally regaining some confidence in america.

Well, President Obama e.o. get yourself informed well about the role of our military in and outside our country (we have, by law, a defensive army), the impact of your requests and the political construction of our country.

Maybe it's of help to make a good inventarisation of what you want to be done in Afghanistan and what's really necessary to get the jobs done.
Maybe you don't need soldiers. I think you need good instructors, craftsmen and people who can help the government there fight corruption, disorganisation and matters like that.