On Tuesday, members of UF Students for a Democratic Society held a rally with anti-war groups from Gainesville — Code Pink, Veterans for Peace, UF Students for Justice in Palestine and UF College Libertarians — to protest our continued occupation of Afghanistan.
Tuesday marked the U.S.’s 13th year of war against the Afghan people — as we know, 13 years too long.
Disturbingly, this anniversary comes just one week after President Barack Obama’s renewed promise to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan until 2024. It doesn’t take a scholar to understand that 13 years of unjust, failed war is not going to be fixed by an additional decade of occupation and warmongering.
More than 40,000 NATO troops remain in Afghanistan in this year, with the overwhelming majority of those troops being American.
As long as America wrongfully has military presence in Afghanistan, we can expect resistance. It’s obvious that this situation will not be resolved by continuing our occupation.
The cost of life has been too high. Although, for many Americans, it is easy to forget that we are still involved with Afghanistan.
The same is not true for Afghans, who have no way to escape the horrors of U.S. occupation. The situation for them seems to only be getting worse, as Afghan civilian deaths have been rising since 2012 and are higher than they were in 2009.
Within the first six months of 2014, more than 4,000 Afghan civilians had been killed. In the Panjwai massacre, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales gunned down and murdered 16 Afghan civilians.
In the past 13 years, more than 20,000 Afghan civilians have been murdered due to American occupation, and 2,000 U.S. soldiers have lost their lives.
At what point will the U.S. government realize occupation does not work? It doesn’t work for American citizens, and it certainly doesn’t work for the 20,000 dead Afghans.
During the event, speakers expressed their anger at our country’s seemingly endless wars in the Middle East.
“I don’t remember consenting to this,” said Angel Lauver.
And it’s true. When did we consent to this? I am a citizen of the U.S., and I didn’t have any say in whether we went to war, nor whether we will continue to stay at war.
Our nation’s foreign policy is so deeply imperialistic that a 13-year-long war is almost entirely normalized.
We invade new countries so quickly that citizens barely have a chance to notice.
We can see that from our recent bombing of Syria and ongoing operations in Pakistan, Yemen and Iraq.
This is why groups like Students for a Democratic Society know that as Americans, we have a duty to condemn any sort of aggression in the Middle East. The cost has been too high, and as somebody who has grown up in the U.S., I long for a day when I can finally see my country not at war.
Farah Khan is a lead organizer with UF Students for a Democratic Society.
[A version of this story ran on page 7 on 10/10/2014]
