To End Afghan War, Reinstitute the Draft

There’s one surefire way to end the war in Afghanistan: bring back the draft. After all, that's what worked in the '60s, writes cartoonist Jeff Danziger, who was drafted and served in Vietnam. The protests over that war ripped the country apart, grinding the war effort to a halt. “The suspicion grew that college students who resisted the war were actually not against the war,” writes Danziger in the Boston Globe. “They were against themselves being called to fight it.”

The draft wasn’t fair, targeting the poor and uneducated—“essentially the people nobody really cared about.” And the Pentagon didn’t like it, because draftees made poorly motivated soldiers. But that’s beside the point. Start conscripting today, “propose yanking 30,000 young men and women out of their lives,” and the war will be swiftly reevaluated and abandoned. That, or America’s youth will answer the call, sure their “country’s very existence is at stake," Danziger predicts. "But we’ll have to ask Dick Cheney about that.” (More draft stories.)