I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.

In the video above, we’re asking you to contact your representative and support HR 5015, a timeline for withdrawal from Afghanistan. Now this one seems very easy to support, it’s not an immediate withdrawal, it’s a flexible, open timeline based on set, but by no means concrete, conditions. It’s not leaving tomorrow, it’s just telling the President to wrap it up. My colleague Derrick Crowe laid out the facts on why you should support the timeline. Basically, our strategy is a huge failure:

Last week, the military published an ironically titled “Report on Progress Toward Security and Stability in Afghanistan” that wrapped blunt admissions of strategic collapse in typical Pentagon happy talk. Short version: Violence is up 87 percent (p. 39), the insurgency has population sympathy/support in 92 of 121 key regions, and local support for International Security Assistance Force’s mission in the toilet (p. 38-39). Oh, and we’re killing more civilians, too. Oh, and Marja is crumbling under NATO’s feet. But worry not! Unnamed senior administration officials tell us, “We are on the cusp! Moving in the right direction!”

"Strategic collapse?" Wow, that sounds bad. And it’s not just Derrick saying that, David Ignatius writes that the folks at the Pentagon agree:

The official Pentagon line, after a White House review Thursday, is that there’s "slow but steady progress" in Afghanistan. But the senior military official cautions that 90 days after the offensive, "Marja is a mixed bag," with parts of the area still controlled by the Taliban and Afghan government performance spotty. A top State Department official agrees: "Transfer is not happening" in Marja.

Make that the Pentagon and the State Department. And even the Siren of elite conventional wisdom, Maureen Dowd, goes one step farther and claims we don’t have any plan at all.

Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Gen. Stanley McChrystal were paraded into the White House press room to pretend as though their dispute about the efficacy of the surge, given Karzai’s serious flaws as a partner, has been put to rest. (It hasn’t.)

The administration crooned a reassuring lullaby to the colicky Karzai: that it has a long-term commitment in Afghanistan (it doesn’t) and an endgame there (it doesn’t) and that it knows that the upcoming Kandahar offensive will work (it doesn’t).

See the pattern here? The people studying the strategy think it’s bad, the people enacting the strategy think it’s bad, and even the mainstream media bourgeoisie genetically engineered to peddle Beltway garbage think the strategy is bad. Even most politicians, challengers and incumbents, have realized the tragic error we’re making in Afghanistan.

That’s why the timeline is so easy to support. And not just because of ethereal concepts like "strategy" and "counterinsurgency," this massive policy failure has real consequences for you, for all of us.  The video tells us flat out, Obama’s strategy is costing us $33 billion (and that’s only for four months). That’s $33 billion we desperately need for other projects that aren’t ineffective military adventures. And when Derrick references those civilian casualties, they’re not just mathematical data points in some strategic calculation, they’re real Afghan people who’re dead now. There’s no "course correction" for the American soldiers we send off to be blown up by IEDs. We need HR 5015, the exit plan, and we need it quick.

Call Congress at (202) 224-3121 and ask to speak to your representative. Tell them to co-sponsor HR 5015, the McGovern bill to require an exit strategy. Then join us on Rethink Afghanistan’s Facebook page and collaborate with the tens of thousands of others around the country working to bring this war to an end.