Editor:

At a June 2002 Loga Jurga (grand assembly) to choose a new leader for Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai got President George W. Bush and the U.S. military to force Karzai's main rival from being a candidate, giving Karzai a phony mandate.

And since then Karzai has used fraud to steal elections and there is widespread corruption and his brother is involved in the dope trade. And many Afghans do not consider Karzai their president, yet the U.S. continues to pay the price of propping Karzai up.

So how many more U.S. soldiers should die for nothing in Afghanistan?

In Kabul, Karzai is guarded by U.S. Special Forces soldiers because Karzai's own troops can not be trusted not to kill him.

In 2002 California Sen. Diane Feinstein said, "I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan."

After seven years those who supported this war may finally be waking up to the fact that this is just another stupid waste because there is nothing to win.

We need to reject this crusade of Christians against Muslims. This is supposed to be an intelligent time but we are back when the Christians undertook the military wars to that part of the world against Muslims like the 11th to the 13th centuries.

Some say Afghanistan is another Vietnam. But the only thing in common with the Vietnam War is that the U.S. is once again supporting a corrupt regime and that's the main reason we can not win.

A total of 58,000 troops died in Vietnam, over 200 each week. If that many were killed in Afghanistan next week, the political people in Washington would start to worry about their re-election.

AL HAMBURG, Torrington