With Afghanistan back in the news because of Trump’s address to the nation last night, let us never forget all the blood and treasure we lost in Afghanistan during Obama’s reign of terror from 2009-2017. Almost 2,500 American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan and Iraq during Obama’s reign of terror. That number always seems to get ignored by the media. When W. Bush was president, we routinely saw ‘body count’ reports in the news after soldiers died in Iraq or Afghanistan. Of the 2,499 killed in Afghanistan under Obama, 1,906 have been killed in and around Afghanistan, the rest were killed in Iraq.
| 2,499 U.S. soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq under Obama |
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—2,499 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan and Iraq so far under President Obama, according to the independent Iraq Coalition Casualty Count.
—Of those, 1,906 have been killed in and around Afghanistan, and 593 in Iraq.
—Under Obama, the United States has been at war for 2,687 days. That’s longer than under George W. Bush — or any other U.S. president, for that matter.
—Obama has conducted airstrikes on seven countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Libya and Syria. (That’s three more countries than George W. Bush bombed.)
—U.S. combat forces are deployed on the ground in three countries: Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria. That’s one more war than Obama inherited, and which his successor will likely have to contend with.
Obama the candidate is often remembered for pledging to end America’s wars in the Middle East. But he didn’t oppose war outright; he said he was opposed to “dumb” wars. (In his estimation, the war in Iraq was a dumb one, and the war in Afghanistan a necessary one.) A “smart war,” to Obama, means fewer U.S. soldiers on the ground. To his credit, he has drawn down the number of soldiers on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, from 200,000 under Bush to fewer than 14,000. Doing that, though, has meant an increased reliance on technology like drones.