Maxine Waters: “Thank you so very much, Mr. Larson, for yielding and for organizing this special order. I certainly did come to the…”

“Thank you so very much, Mr. Larson, for yielding and for organizing this special order. I certainly did come to the floor today to talk about what is going on in Iraq, but as I sat here and I listened to you in this colloquy that you have about what is going on in Afghanistan, I cannot help but join you and commend you for forcing some attention on the fact that we are going backwards in Afghanistan. It is shameful, because we did abandon the struggle in Afghanistan and took our resources in a direction where we were supposed to have been finding and bringing to the bar of justice Osama bin Laden. And as we look at what is happening, we find that Mr. Karzai is simply isolated in Kabul and that he cannot even move around, that with all of the protection that we are providing, his life is in danger. The Taliban is growing stronger every day; and we told our government, we told this administration, that the poppy fields were beginning to multiply in Afghanistan. And I have to tell you, this administration has turned a blind eye to the fact that the poppy fields are just overflowing. As a matter of fact, it seems as if we even understood and we allowed the poppy fields to become a source of revenue for somebody. The warlords have basically divided up the territories, and they all have their own plots and acreage, and they all are earning money; and we are about to lose again in Afghanistan.”