Code Pink: warmongers?
Hardly, but don’t automatically assume you know this anti-war women’s group position on Afghanistan. You may remember the Pink-sters disrupting Hill hearings on Iraq War funding and on campus at Berkeley protesting a Marine Corps recruiting station.
But when it comes to Kabul, you may be surprised. The Christian Science Monitor is reporting that Code Pink is “rethinking” its position on Afghanistan. Following a fact-finding visit to Afghanistan, co-founders Medea Benjamin and Jodie Evans, found – well – some facts that convinced them to change their tune. Says Benjamin:
“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 [our stance].”
Protecting Afghans from the Taliban is precisely what General McChrystal’s counterinsurgency plan is designed to do. In the process, the US aims to train up to 200,000 more members of the Afghan security forces to extend that veil of protection more permanently, and without US assistance. To do it effectively, he needs more troops because by sending more troops, there will hopefully be less war.
