“What About Afghanistan?”, Islam and the West, NewAgeIslam.com

Islam and the West

“What About Afghanistan?”

By Robert Naiman

We know how Afghanistan and Iraq were different. Unlike Iraq, Afghanistan did appear to have some relationship to the September 11 attacks. Unlike Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the Taliban did have a relationship with Al Qaeda.

Legitimate questions can be raised about the justifications and international legality of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. But suppose we put those arguments to one side. Even if the original U.S. invasion were justified, would that mean we must acquiesce to an open-ended U.S. military occupation of Afghanistan?

Nearly seven years after U.S. forces invaded and occupied Afghanistan and overthrew the Taliban government, perhaps we could consider what Afghanistan and Iraq have in common.

- U.S. soldiers are still being killed and wounded there. While fewer U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq (517 vs. 4094, according to Iraq Coalition Casualty Count,) if you compare deaths to forces deployed a different picture emerges. There have been 189 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq in 2008 vs. 42 in Afghanistan, while there are about 150,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq and about 30,000 U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. So from the point of view of an individual soldier being deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, your chance of being killed is about the same.

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