On December 1st and 2nd, Code Pink sponsored 18 anti-Afghanistan-escalation rallies across the country. Says Code Pink co-founder Jodie Evans in the press release:
Adding troops will lead to more civilian casualties which will lead to more recruits for the Taliban [sic] — and a protracted war that the American people don’t support. This is not the “hope” so many voted for.
But that rhetoric doesn’t jive with what Ms. Evans and Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin said following their week-long trip to Afghanistan this fall (which I wrote about here). While she said Code Pink would go on opposing additional troops, Ms. Benjamin made a surprising shift at the end of her fact-finding mission:
We would leave with the same parameters of an exit strategy but we might perhaps be more flexible about a timeline. That’s where we have opened ourselves, being here, to some other possibilities. We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, ‘If the US troops left, the country would collapse. We’d go into civil war.’ A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that.
So even though Code Pink has been on the ground in Afghanistan and heard from Afghans themselves of the U.S. military’s tangible benefit to Afghan civil society, it chose to intensify its opposition against the U.S. military presence with a series of rallies.
Well, you can’t have it both ways — either you think U.S. troops are protecting the population (as the McChrystal counter-insurgency strategy is designed to do, and which Code Pink acknowledged was the case at the end of their fact-finding mission) or you think U.S. troops will cause more casualties (which they claim in this week’s press release). Of course, if Code Pink endorsed so much as an extended timeline for troop withdrawal, it would drive its core constituency into a meltdown.
At the very least, it might have shown some restraint and not convened 18 protests. This could have been an opportunity for Code Pink to use its high profile and the knowledge its founders gained during their time on the ground in Afghanistan to educate its supporters on America’s mission there. But that’s not Code Pink. Instead, Jodie Evans and Medea Benjamin passed on that chance and stuck their heads in the sand.
