Ron Paul on Afghanistan

Ron Paul discusses U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan and growing unrest over Obama’s expansion of the war and nation building efforts.

Source: Campaign for Liberty
Date: 9/14/2009

Transcript

Ron Paul: Finally we’re going to talk about something other than medical care. The summer was saturated with the news and discussions in all the town hall meetings about what we’re going to do about healthcare in this country. Even though that is a very important subject and it’s going to continue for few months longer, right now though, the Congress is starting into a debate which I consider every bit as important, if not a lot more important. And that has to do with Afghanistan.

They’re talking about debating whether or not we should send more troops into Afghanistan. And fortunately, I see some of the Democrats now splitting from the President on this issue. The President has always maintained that we need more troops; this is the “good war”. He called it the long war, but it’s the good war. Not like Iraq, that was the bad war. And now that there is a split there is a chance that we might be able to slow up this interventionism in this region. But right now though it looks like the President will prevail because Presidents generally do prevail because they’ll scare the people and they’ll say “If you don’t, our national security will be threatened”.

The one thing for certain is that our national security is not threatened by us not being in Afghanistan. Our national security is much more threatened by us being in Afghanistan. Or for that reason, any place in that region at all. That’s where our real problems come from. It is argued that they need 240,000 more troops and some say let’s just train the Afghan people. And we need a 130,000 trained Afghan people to do this. But who’s going to pay for this? It won’t do any good. If we have a puppet government there and Karzai is running it and it is our money and their troops are doing our bidding, we’re still occupiers. It won’t help, it will still move us towards bankruptcy and it doesn’t solve the problem one bit. But at least this discussion is getting out and I consider it very, very dangerous what’s happening over there.

At the same time when we’re talking about expanding the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan, there is a relentless outcry about the Iranians by us trying to aggravate the Iranians into some type of a conflict. But up until now we have continued the same old process, the same foreign policy. We were led to believe with the Obama administration that policies might change, but the same people control foreign policy as they do monetary policy. And we will see our presence there for a long time, until we go bankrupt.

So many nations have gone bankrupt because of their overseas militaristic policies. And we’re embarking on the same approach. I am sure Osama Bin Laden is laughing and the Russians are laughing at us because we’re more or less trapping ourselves in this pretence that we’re going to spread democracy and goodness around the world.

Last week they finally got around to investigating the NATO bombing in which some civilians got killed. They come up with the number that 99 civilians were killed. Though our side keeps saying “Oh no, they were all terrorist”. You know, the definition of a terrorist used to be that a so-called terrorist when they were fighting the Soviets, we called them the freedom fighters. But now they are the terrorists.

Regardless, when Muslims are killed with our presence over there, we anger more and more people. That’s why I argue that our national security is more threatened because of our bankruptcy. At the same time we just anger more and more people.

There is a lot to be said that our founders tried to get us to follow, and that is: mind our own business, stay out of entangling alliances of people around the world, and stay out of nation building. That day will probably come, but it will come on the heels of a bankruptcy, because we’re moving rapidly toward that direction as we see the dollar tumble and our deficits skyrocket. But the sooner we come to our senses the better off we all will be.

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