Alissa J. Rubin | Kabul | May 22

NYT – The leading American diplomat in Afghanistan, Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker, will leave his post this summer after less than a year, an American Embassy spokesman said Tuesday.

“The ambassador has with regret confirmed that he is going to be stepping down,” said the spokesman, John Rhatigan, who is based in Kabul.

Mr. Crocker, who had originally said he expected to serve for two years, played a central role in negotiating a difficult strategic partnership agreement between the United States and Afghanistan despite months of crisis and deep tension over night raids and the American detention of Afghan detainees. Both of those issues had to be worked through, in the form of side deals, before the partnership agreement could be signed on May 1. That broader deal charted a continuing relationship between the two countries for the next decade.

The pending departure of Mr. Crocker is likely to influence the timetable for appointing a new commander for the Afghanistan mission, as well, Pentagon and military officials say.

The current senior officer in Afghanistan, Gen. John R. Allen of the Marine Corps, is expected to be named commander of NATO forces, which includes leading the American military’s European Command.

Jeez, I hope this doesn’t inflame Afghanistan’s fear of abandonment…

As the country’s big wars on the Eurasian continent wind down, American war-making and war preparations fly ever more regularly under the radar.  There has, for instance, been much discussion about the Obama administration’s policy “pivot” to Asia — the only warlike act in the region so far has, however, been a little noted drone strike in the Philippines.  At the same time, remarkably little attention has been paid to a massive build-up of U.S. forces in the Persian Gulf, and — though both seem to be underway (and connected) — who talks about the “pivot” to the Western Indian Ocean or the “pivot” to Africa?

For those keeping a careful eye out, U.S. drone (and air) bases in the region have been proliferating — in the Seychelles Islands, in Ethiopia, and at an unidentified site on the Arabian peninsula, among other places.  Recently, however, Wired’s Danger Room website reported that an Italian blogger had put the pieces together and offered impressive evidence of a larger war-making effort in the region, involving not only drones but F-15E fighter jets, possibly being used to bomb Yemen. Meanwhile, there are U.S. drone strikes in Yemen almost daily and at least 20 special forces operatives are reportedly now on the ground there, helping direct some of the fighting and even taking casualties.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Africa Command (Africom), set up in 2007, has been gaining clout.  In 2011, 100 special operations troops, mainly Green Berets, were moved into Central Africa, officially to aid in the hunting down of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army.  Recently, it was reported that a brigade of regular U.S. combat troops will soon be assigned to the command and given training duties throughout the region. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been organizing a proxy war, supported by drone attacks, against al-Shabab rebels in Somalia, using Ugandan, Kenyan, and other African troops as those proxies.  And more’s afoot.  It’s just that, if you weren’t an obsessive news watcher, you would have next to no way of knowing that any of this was taking place.

War American-style, already long detached from the lives of most Americans, is growing more so: ever more secret, presidential, and beyond the control of, or accountability to, citizens or Congress.  In only one way is this not true: we taxpayers still fork over the massive sums that make our perpetual state of war and war state possible.  As Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer of the invaluable National Priorities Project report, the expense of all this is blowing a hole in your wallet and our treasury.  To offer but one small example, if someday soon the Pakistani/Afghan border is reopened to U.S. war supplies, you will be paying the Pakistanis $1,500-$1,800 for every truck that crosses it, at an estimated cost of at least $1 million a day (with other “fees” likely).  And yet, it’s remarkable how little Americans know about what’s coming out of their pockets when the subject is “national security,” or where exactly it’s all going. Which is why we need Hellman and Kramer (and their new book, A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget) to keep us in the loop.  Tom

War Pay
The Nearly $1 Trillion National Security Budget
By Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer

Recent months have seen a flurry of headlines about cuts (often called “threats”) to the U.S. defense budget. Last week, lawmakers in the House of Representatives even passed a bill that was meant to spare national security spending from future cuts by reducing school-lunch funding and other social programs.

Here, then, is a simple question that, for some curious reason, no one bothers to ask, no less answer: How much are we spending on national security these days? With major wars winding down, has Washington already cut such spending so close to the bone that further reductions would be perilous to our safety?

In fact, with projected cuts added in, the national security budget in fiscal 2013 will be nearly $1 trillion — a staggering enough sum that it’s worth taking a walk through the maze of the national security budget to see just where that money’s lodged.

If you’ve heard a number for how much the U.S. spends on the military, it’s probably in the neighborhood of $530 billion. That’s the Pentagon’s base budget for fiscal 2013, and represents a 2.5% cut from 2012. But that $530 billion is merely the beginning of what the U.S. spends on national security. Let’s dig a little deeper.

The Pentagon’s base budget doesn’t include war funding, which in recent years has been well over $100 billion. With U.S. troops withdrawn from Iraq and troop levels falling in Afghanistan, you might think that war funding would be plummeting as well.  In fact, it will drop to a mere $88 billion in fiscal 2013. By way of comparison, the federal government will spend around $64 billion on education that same year.

Add in war funding, and our national security total jumps to $618 billion. And we’re still just getting started.

The U.S. military maintains an arsenal of nuclear weapons. You might assume that we’ve already accounted for nukes in the Pentagon’s $530 billion base budget.  But you’d be wrong. Funding for nuclear weapons falls under the Department of Energy (DOE), so it’s a number you rarely hear. In fiscal 2013, we’ll be spending $11.5 billion on weapons and related programs at the DOE. And disposal of nuclear waste is expensive, so add another $6.4 billion for weapons cleanup.

Now, we’re at $636 billion and counting.

How about homeland security? We’ve got to figure that in, too. There’s the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which will run taxpayers $35.5 billion for its national security activities in fiscal 2013. But there’s funding for homeland security squirreled away in just about every other federal agency as well.  Think, for example, about programs to secure the food supply, funded through the U.S. Department of Agriculture. So add another $13.5 billion for homeland security at federal agencies other than DHS.

That brings our total to $685 billion.

Then there’s the international affairs budget, another obscure corner of the federal budget that just happens to be jammed with national security funds. For fiscal 2013, $8 billion in additional war funding for Iraq and Afghanistan is hidden away there. There’s also $14 billion for what’s called “international security assistance” — that’s part of the weapons and training Washington offers foreign militaries around the world. Plus there’s $2 billion for “peacekeeping operations,” money U.S. taxpayers send overseas to help fund military operations handled by international organizations and our allies.

That brings our national security total up to $709 billion.

We can’t forget the cost of caring for our nation’s veterans, including those wounded in our recent wars. That’s an important as well as hefty share of national security funding. In 2013, veterans programs will cost the federal government $138 billion.

That brings us to $847 billion — and we’re not done yet.

Taxpayers also fund pensions and other retirement benefits for non-veteran military retirees, which will cost $55 billion next year. And then there are the retirement costs for civilians who worked at the Department of Defense and now draw pensions and benefits. The federal government doesn’t publish a number on this, but based on the share of the federal workforce employed at the Pentagon, we can estimate that its civilian retirees will cost taxpayers around $21 billion in 2013.

By now, we’ve made it to $923 billion — and we’re finally almost done.

Just one more thing to add in, a miscellaneous defense account that’s separate from the defense base budget. It’s called “defense-related activities,” and it’s got $8 billion in it for 2013.

That brings our grand total to an astonishing $931 billion.

And this will turn out to be a conservative figure. We won’t spend less than that, but among other things, it doesn’t include the interest we’re paying on money we borrowed to fund past military operations; nor does it include portions of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration that are dedicated to national security. And we don’t know if this number captures the entire intelligence budget or not, because parts of intelligence funding are classified.

For now, however, that whopping $931 billion for fiscal year 2013 will have to do. If our national security budget were its own economy, it would be the 19th largest in the world, roughly the size of Australia’s. Meanwhile, the country with the next largest military budget, China, spends a mere pittance by comparison. The most recent estimate puts China’s military funding at around $136 billion.

Or think of it this way: National security accounts for one quarter of every dollar the federal government is projected to spend in 2013. And if you pull trust funds for programs like Social Security out of the equation, that figure rises to more than one third of every dollar in the projected 2013 federal budget.

Yet the House recently passed legislation to spare the defense budget from cuts, arguing that the automatic spending reductions scheduled for January 2013 would compromise national security. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta has said such automatic cuts, which would total around $55 billion in 2013, would be “disastrous” for the defense budget. To avoid them, the House would instead pull money from the National School Lunch Program, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Medicaid, food stamps, and programs like the Social Services Block Grant, which funds Meals on Wheels, among other initiatives.

Yet it wouldn’t be difficult to find savings in that $931 billion.  There’s plenty of low-hanging fruit, starting with various costly weapons systems left over from the Cold War, like the Virginia class submarine, the V-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft, the missile defense program, and the most expensive weapons system on the planet, the F-35 jet fighter. Cutting back or cancelling some of these programs would save billions of dollars annually.

In fact, Congress could find much deeper savings, but it would require fundamentally redefining national security in this country. On this issue, the American public is already several steps ahead of Washington. Americans overwhelmingly think that national security funding should be cut — deeply.

If lawmakers don’t pay closer attention to their constituents, we already know the alternative: pulling school-lunch funding.

Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer are research analysts at the National Priorities Project. They wrote the soon-to-be-published book A People’s Guide to the Federal Budget, and host weekly two-minute Budget Brief videos on YouTube.

[Note: This is the latest National Priorities Project piece on TomDispatch about the true cost of national security. In a piece last year by Chris Hellman, the total cost of national security was calculated in a slightly different manner; it included interest payments on the borrowing that funded past military operations. In the national security numbers described above, such interest payments have been omitted.

For further reading on national security spending see “U.S. Security Spending Since 9/11,” an examination of the nearly $8 trillion the United States has spent on defense since the September 11th attacks. Also see “Debt, Deficits, and Defense: A Way Forward” by the Sustainable Defense Task Force.]

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch and join us on Facebook.

Copyright 2012 Chris Hellman and Mattea Kramer

Robert Naiman:

At the intersection of Cermak and Michigan streets in Chicago yesterday, veterans who served in Afghanistan and Iraq told their stories when they threw back their service medals in protest at NATO leaders, echoing a famous protest against the Vietnam War.

A lot of media coming out of Chicago last night focused on street skirmishes between a handful of apolitical adventurists and the Chicago police. But some media got the real story.

Zach LaPorte, a 28-year-old mechanical engineer from Milwaukee who served in Iraq in 2005 and 2006, said, “I witnessed civilian casualties and civilians being arrested in what I consider an illegal occupation of a sovereign nation,” Reuters reported. Former U.S. Army Sergeant Alejandro Villatoro of Chicago, who served during the Iraq 2003 invasion and in Afghanistan in 2011, said: “There’s no honor in these wars… There’s just shame.”

For those who keep track of this sort of detail, Barbara Lee (D-CA) introduced an amendment yesterday to end the occupation of Afghanistan. Cosponsored by John Conyers (D-MI), Walter Jones (R-NC), Peter Welch (D-VT) and Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Lee’s amendment would have ended the war in Afghanistan “by limiting funding to the safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors from Afghanistan.” It failed 113-303. Most Democrats– 101 of them– voted YES, to end the pointless occupation. They were joined by 12 Republicans. But 79 Democrats crossed the aisle to voted with Boehner and Cantor. Any interest in knowing which side your congresscritter was on? All the names are listed on the link above. A few highlights though: generally speaking Blue Dogs were pro-war and members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus were anti-war. And the Democratic House leaders… mostly pro-war. Let’s look at some names worth remembering– first candidates for higher office:

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI), Mazie Hirono (D-HI), and Chris Murphy (D-CT) are running for Senate and they voted to end the occupation. New Dems Shelley Berkley (NV) and Martin Heinrich (NM) and Blue Dog Joe Donnelly (IN) voted for more war.

Karen Bass (D-CA), Xavier Becerra (D-CA), Bruce Braley (D-IA), Donna Edwards (D-MD), John Larson (D-CT) and Jared Polis (D-CO) are either being groomed for Democratic leadership or are already junior leaders and they all voted to end the occupation. The top House leaders though, Clyburn, Hoyer, Israel, and even Pelosi, all voted for more war, as did wannabes Ron Kind (WI), Allyson Schwartz (PA) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD). Debbie Wasserman Schultz (FL) “wisely” avoided voting at all.

In contested up-coming primaries pitting Democrats against each other, Berman and Sherman, both vicious warmongers, each voted for more war. But in Michigan, progressive Hansen Clarke voted to end the war and conservative Gary Peters voted to extend it. Worth taking note. Also worth remembering, conservative pro-war Blue Dog Adam Schiff who was recently imposed on the uber-progressive areas of West Hollywood, Los Feliz, Hollywood, Atwater and Silverlake voted to continue the war and occupation. A notorious neo-con, he’s FAR too conservative for the district and needs to be replaced in 2014. Perfect district for Dennis Kucinich.

UPDATE: One More Failed Amendment

Nancy reminded me of this one with this tweet:

As you can see, an equal number of Republicans and Democrats (19 from each team) crossed the aisle– the Republicans to join Nancy and 163 Democrats in standing up for the Constitution, the mostly Blue Dog Dems to join Boehner and Cantor in shitting on the same document. The Democrats who showed once again that they haven’t earned the right to represent the party of working families are:

John Barrow (Blue Dog-GA)
Sanford Bishop (Blue Dog-GA)
Dan Boren (Blue Dog-OK)
Ben Chandler (Blue Dog-KY)
Jim Costa (Blue Dog-CA)
Henry Cuellar (Blue Dog-TX)
Joe Donnelly (Blue Dog-IN)
feisty, principled contrarian Keith Ellison (D-MN)
Larry Kissell (Blue Dog-NC)
Sandy Levin (D-MI)
Lipinski Jr. (Blue Dog-lite-IL)
Jim Matheson (Blue Dog-UT)
Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY)
Mike McIntyre (Blue Dog-NC)
Bill Owens (Blue Dog-lite-NY)
Colin Peterson (Blue Dog-MN)
Mike Ross (Blue Dog-AR)
Dutch Ruppersberger (Blue Dog-lite-MD)
Terri Sewell (Blue Dog-lite-AL)

And, keep in mind, when the DCCC solicits money from you, basically all of it that doesn’t go for feathering the nests of the employees and their cronies goes to support corrupt, conservatives like the kewl dudes on the list above– and the putrid recruits who are even worse than these who have been dug up by “ex”-Blue Dog Steve Israel. Every time you get a plea from the DCCC, just give a contribution directly to a candidate you already know can be trusted– like Alan Grayson or Carol Shea-Porter… or anyone on this list.

With the vast majority of Americans, including people of all political persuasions, supporting a withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan, it’s high time for Congress to catch up. A bipartisan group of representatives joined forces to put together an amendment to the defense authorization bill voted on this week that would have put the House of Representatives on the record supporting accelerated withdrawal. Reps. Jim McGovern (D-MA), John Garamendi (D-CA), Adam Smith (D-WA and ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee), Ron Paul (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), and Chris Gibson (R-NY) did the painstaking legislative work of finding language everyone could agree on and getting the Democratic leadership on board.

The Republican leadership, however, refused to give the American people’s concerns a hearing on the House floor. They had put language in the NDAA that endorses keeping 68,000 troops on the ground until the end of 2014 (meaning no more withdrawals after this summer), and a “credible force” on the ground after that. They were determined to keep that language, and knew that the McGovern et al amendment would pass.

Rep. McGovern fought passionately against their refusal to allow a vote, holding up the Rules Committee proceedings for an hour in the face of harassment from Republican colleagues.

“Mr. Chairman I think we’ve gotten this, that Mr. McGovern is not happy. I think this is also behavior, that I wonder if people have been out drinking tonight, or whether they are mad or angry or incapable of controlling themselves, and I would question that tonight,” Texas Rep. Pete Sessions, the chairman of the GOP’s campaign committee, said of Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) at a late-night meeting of the House Rules Committee.

“I take offense to that,” McGovern said, according to a transcript of the exchange. “I have an amendment to the rule Mr. Chairman and I would say to the gentleman that you know, there are some issues worth fighting over and for me, ending this war is one of them. And I’m sorry the gentleman doesn’t think that —- take that very seriously.”

Sessions shot back: “Simply asked a question. If the shoe fits.”

Representatives slammed Republican intransigence on this issue on the House floor Thursday morning, including Democratic leaders Reps. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and Republican Armed Services Committee member Walter Jones. Rep. McGovern made a last-ditch effort on Thursday to use procedural rules to squeeze in a vote on the amendment, but ultimately Republicans succeeded in squelching the debate on what Rep. Smith rightly called the most important issue in the bill.

We knew there was no good reason for Republicans to block the vote and it came down to fear of letting the American people’s opposition to the war get a vote. CNN spoke to some Republican sources and confirmed as much:

Republicans were concerned the amendment could pass, according to two GOP congressional sources…

…One of the Republican sources stressed that there were a combination of factors for not allowing a vote on the timetable proposal, including “a lack of White House engagement.” GOP leaders expected a bloc of their own members to support the measure and they couldn’t rely on the White House to lobby Democrats against it.

The source stressed Republicans didn’t want to “roll the dice” and have a vote setting firm dates for the administration’s war policy, which would expose significant reservations about the president’s plan, which GOP leaders have largely supported.

Democratic Rep. Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, who pushed for the vote on the timetable amendment with North Carolina Republican Rep. Walter Jones, decried the decision to deny a vote on his proposal on Thursday. “What is the Republican leadership afraid of? Are they afraid a bipartisan majority of this House will vote to follow the will of the American people and change our Afghanistan policy?” he said.

The Republican leaders pulled a sneaky move by allowing a twenty-minute debate and vote on Rep. Barbara Lee’s Afghanistan amendment so they could claim to be giving the issue its due. However, they picked the amendment (which we strongly supported), which limits funding to safe and orderly withdrawal, because they knew its strong position would not have the same level of support. The amendment ultimately failed, 113-303, though it gained more votes than in previous years, including from a number of Republicans. See the roll call here.

While it’s disappointing after all of our grassroots and lobbying work to be denied a vote on the Afghanistan withdrawal amendment, it is a testament to the power of the organizing work the peace movement has done that we have pro-war Republicans running scared. Now we have to let them know this fight isn’t over.

Washington | May 19

AFP – France’s President Francois Hollande used his White House debut on Friday to restate his intention to get French combat troops home from Afghanistan this year – breaking with NATO’s 2014 schedule.

Hollande met President Barack Obama for the first time since taking office three days ago, ahead of a testing weekend of international summits, with G8 leaders at Camp David and NATO chiefs at a 61-nation gathering in Chicago.

“I recalled to President Obama that I had made a promise to withdraw our combat troops from Afghanistan at the end of 2012,” Hollande said, as the two leaders spoke to reporters in the Oval Office.

“I also stipulated that there would still be support in another form,” Hollande said, adding that the French withdrawal would be done in consultation with French allies in the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Obama did not dispute Hollande’s position, but stressed that NATO states must sustain their commitment to help “Afghans build security and continue down the path of development.”

Washington is currently soliciting funding from its allies to ensure training and financing for Afghan armed forces after NATO combat troops leave – which it estimates could cost around $4 billion a year.

Apart from Afghanistan, both sides sought common ground, with Obama styling the partners as complimentary as cheeseburgers and French fries, though alarm over the euro zone tempered Hollande’s visit.

Yesterday, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA) held a press conference with a bipartisan group of representatives to call on President Obama to accelerate the end to the war in Afghanistan.

“I believe that it is time for Members of Congress to stand with seven out of ten Americans who oppose the war in Afghanistan,” said Congresswoman Lee.  “There is no military solution in Afghanistan, which is why I am pushing Republican leadership to allow me to offer an amendment to the NDAA that would bring about a responsible and immediate end to the war in Afghanistan.  The amendment would end combat operations while protecting our troops by ensuring that any dollar directed to Afghanistan can only be spent for the safe and orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops and military contractors.”

Congresswoman Lee was joined by Representatives Walter Jones (R-NC), Ron Paul (R-TX), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Laura Richardson (D-CA), Janice Hahn (D-CA), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Peter Welch (D-NY), and James McGovern (D-MA).  Congresswoman Lee thanked her colleagues for joining her at the press conference, noting that “the silence on Capitol Hill on this issue has been deafening.”

Ninety representatives joined Rep. Lee in sending a letter to President Obama calling on him to announce an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan at next week’s NATO summit. Read the letter and see the list of signers here.

On the heels of the announcement of a plan that leaves the door open to a large military presence in Afghanistan for another twelve years, this is an important time for Congress to make a statement.

Rep. Lee has an amendment that will be voted on TODAY that limits Afghanistan war funding to use for a safe and responsible withdrawal of our troops. Call the congressional switchboard today at 202-224-3121, ask for your representative, and ask him or her to vote YES on the Lee amendment to end the war.

(Title corrected – mb)

Props to McClatchy Newspapers & special correspondent Jon Stephenson for doing what should have been done weeks ago by a major US news outlet: interviewing survivors of US Army Staff Sgt Robert Bales’ notorious massacre in Afghanistan earlier this year:

“I told the women inside our room: ‘Let’s run! Let’s get out of here,’ ” recalled Rafiullah, who like many Afghans goes by only one name. In the next compound, a short distance from the house where Rafiullah had been sleeping, Haji Mohammad Naim awoke to the sound of dogs barking wildly in the street.

“Then there was shooting, and the dogs stopped barking,” said Naim, who’s in his 50s.Shortly afterward, there was pandemonium at Naim’s front door as Rafiullah and a handful of terrified women and children poured into his yard, seeking shelter. Minutes later, another woman and a young girl emerged from the darkness.

“She was screaming and crying,” Naim said of the woman. “She said, ‘My husband has been martyred,’ ” meaning that he’d been killed.

Suddenly a silhouette appeared, moving rapidly behind a bright light. Naim thought that U.S. forces were raiding his village, and he expected a squad of soldiers to arrive. Instead, he saw just one man.

“He got closer, and then he started shooting at me,” Naim said.

The story that Rafiullah and Naim recently told a McClatchy reporter is the first public account by survivors in their village of the events of March 11, when a man whom U.S. officials have identified as Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales allegedly shot and killed 17 people in two Afghan villages.

Oh, and just to add a salt-mine of insult to rub into still-open wounds:

Zardana, Rafiullah’s sister, is the victim most in need of specialized care. Shot in the head, she remains partially paralyzed in the U.S. base hospital. Her uncle, Juma Khan, said U.S. officials had yet to follow through on a pledge to get her more sophisticated care in the United States.

Yeah, why indeed, huh, Steve?

(infographic courtesy McClatchy)

Islamabad | May 17

AFP – Several Western embassies here on Wednesday received letters containing suspicious powder and threats to poison Nato soldiers in Afghanistan, Pakistan officials said.

Islamabad police chief Bani Amin said that embassies had received small packets containing black powder, which had been sent for laboratory analysis.

The letters said “poison” would be hidden in the Nato supplies should Pakistan decide to lift a nearly six-month blockade on supplies for American and Nato troops fighting the Taliban in neighbouring Afghanistan.

Senior Pakistani security officials said that the French embassy, and the Australian and British High Commissions had received suspicious packages.

“Embassies have received one sachet each. The problem is that it is in a meagre quantity and difficult even to test. It seems somebody has committed some mischief. We are sending it to a laboratory,” Amin said.

Congress will vote on the Afghanistan war as soon as tomorrow. This will likely be our biggest chance to push for the war’s end this year. These votes come on the heels of President Obama’s announcement of a plan that could keep troops on the ground for the next twelve years. Congress needs to hear from you now.

Thank you to all of you who sent emails last week. Now, I’m asking you to join groups around the country in a national call-in day.

Call the congressional switchboard at (202) 224-3121. Ask for your representative’s office. When you’re connected, use this sample message as a guide and add your own words:

My name is [your name] and I live at [your address]. I oppose keeping US troops in Afghanistan for another 12 years. I strongly encourage [your representative's name]  to vote for amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act to speed up military withdrawal from Afghanistan.

Then, click here to tell me how your call went.

Thank you for raising your voice.