A New Approach to Afghanistan

Redefining America's Mission

Click here for the Alan's complete position and speech in PDF format. 

A New Approach to Afghanistan full plan

Withdrawing over night and leaving Afghanistan vulnerable to becoming a haven for terrorists is not a good option. We need a third way that responsibly executes a smart, comprehensive counterterrorism strategy, helps to train the Afghan people to secure themselves, and ultimately leads to an end of our large scale military involvement there.

  • We should go back to our original mission of destroying Al Qaeda and ensuring that Afghanistan not become a haven for terrorists. 
  • We should set a timetable for transferring counter insurgency operations from American and International forces to the Afghan government.
  • We should encourage the opposition led by Abdullah Abdullah and others to make their voices heard and keep the pressure on the Karzai government from within.
  • We must insist that Karzai take clear and demonstrable action to weed out corrupt officials in his government and replace them with people of integrity and competence. 
  • As we push Karzai to allow for an opposition to exist as does any good democracy, we must also push the Karzai government toward negotiating with some of the elements known too broadly as "The Taliban."  
  • Rather than imposing a western style democracy on Afghanistan, we need to be more cognizant of Afghan traditions and encourage their own representative democratic tradition, the Afghan tribal, bottom-up system of the Loya Jirga grand council. 
  • We need to support economic development.  That means building more roads, bridges, schools, hospitals and micro-enterprise as an alternative to selling opium and fully fund and rapidly develop the new Civilian Response Corps.
  • We need to focus on destroying Al Qaeda globally by expanding our use of intelligence, Special Forces and drone attacks.  We should explore creating a New International Counter Terrorism Organization, a 21st century version of NATO for counter terrorism.
  • As we draw down our commitment in Afghanistan, we need to refocus our efforts in Pakistan and do everything we can to support the new democracy there.

Click here for the Alan's complete position and speech in PDF format.