National Defense Authorization Act For Fiscal Year 2010 - Conference Report

Floor Speech

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Mr. BYRD. I thank the Chair.

Mr. President, I am a student of history and a firm believer in applying the lessons of history to present planning and to future planning. There is no profit--none--in making the same mistakes over and over. There is no future--none--in building on a foundation of shifting sand. Our military planners and our Afghanistan policy analysts, as well as Members of this Senate, would do well to spend some time considering the history, the geography, and the cultures of Afghanistan.

Throughout the long centuries, Afghanistan's geopolitical value has been its location along the great Silk Road that carried both trade goods and armies between Europe and Asia through the forbidding Hindu Kush mountains. Afghanistan has limited natural resources. Afghanistan has a climate and a geography that produces very little for export. So the fiercely--and I say fiercely--independent tribes that populate this harsh and barren land have long earned a living instead from the goods and the armies that travel across it.

Tribesmen have used the dry rocky plains and the steep, bare, cavern-riddled mountains to great advantage--to extort both armies and traders for security and shelter or as a base from which to raid.

In weary succession, rulers and nations have witnessed their dreams of conquest and their dreams of empire in Afghanistan dashed. From Alexander the Great in 326 BC, to Genghis Kahn in the 13th century, to the British in the 19th century, to the Russians in the 20th century, no invading army has ever conquered Afghanistan, earning it the sobriquet ``Graveyard of Empires,'' the graveyard of empires or, to say it another way, graveyard of foreigners.

In one horrific example, in 1842, the British lost more than 16,000 troops and civilians in a single 110-mile retreat from Kabul to Jalalabad. History tells us--and we had better listen to history--that Afghanistan does not take kindly to foreign intervention. Yet--now, get this--here we are discussing a proposed counterinsurgency strategy that would vastly increase the U.S. presence in Afghanistan in the vain hope of spawning the establishment of a Western-style, modern democracy and economy in a land that in many areas and in many ways is still frozen in the time of Alexander the Great.

As a junior United States Senator I traveled to Afghanistan in the 1960s--way back there in the 1960s. Yes, I went to Afghanistan in the 1960s and, let me say to you, it was an eye-opening experience. Men, human beings, were treated like beasts of burden, actually pulling carts like oxen. Yes, I saw it. Living conditions were primitive. Corruption was widespread. While life in Afghanistan's cities has changed somewhat in the intervening decades, many of the scenes that I see in the news still look very familiar to me. The fundamental changes that are wished for by some NATO and U.S. planners, particularly in the least developed rural areas where the tribal theocratic Taliban rule is most entrenched, would certainly be a long shot--and I mean that, a long shot--and likely will be a long shot and quite unwelcome.

What is really at stake for the United States in Afghanistan? We all know that Afghanistan is not a threat to us militarily. The Taliban is not a threat to us militarily. Al-Qaida, however, is a demonstrated threat to us, with ambitions and a philosophy that must--must--keep us vigilant. But the link between al-Qaida and Afghanistan is a tenuous link, one based only on the temporary expediency of location, an expediency that has already been replaced as the al-Qaida leadership has moved and may move again. Building a western style Democratic state in an Afghanistan that is equipped with a large military and police force and a functioning economy based on something other than opium poppies may or may not deny al-Qaida a safe haven there again. It will, however, guarantee that the United States--that is us--must invest large numbers--not just a few, large numbers--of troops and many billions of dollars in Afghanistan for many--not just a few, many--years to come, energy and funds that might otherwise go toward fueling--in other words building and strengthening--our own economic recovery, better educating our children or expanding access to health care for more of our own people, and yet there are many here in this body, many here in the Senate who believe that we should proceed with such a folly in Afghanistan.

I am not one of them. But there are many, I say, here in the Senate, who believe that we should proceed with such a folly in Afghanistan. During a time of record deficits, some actually continue to suggest that the United States should sink hundreds of billions of borrowed dollars into Afghanistan, effectively turning our backs on our own substantial domestic needs, all the while deferring the costs and deferring the problems for future generations to address. Our national security interests lie in defeating--no, I go further, in destroying al-Qaida. Until we take that and only that mission seriously, we risk adding the United States to the long, long list of nations whose best laid plans have died on the cold, barren, rocky slopes of that far off country, Afghanistan.

I yield the floor. I suggest the absence of a quorum.

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