Mr. Buckley, you have our prayers and my support

Our community was heartbroken to hear that one of our own, Lance Cpl. Greg Buckley Jr., was killed along with two other fellow Marines while serving our nation in Afghanistan.

Watching Buckley’s father, Greg Sr., attend his son’s funeral was gut-wrenching, and my condolences go out to his entire family.

America will honor Greg Buckley Jr. and remember him as a hero, but he was taken from this world much too early and unnecessarily, in a war that we shouldn’t be fighting. His devastated father has said as much.

Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S. history. In 2001, I supported the decision to root out the Taliban in Afghanistan and to remove the brutal dictator Saddam Hussein in Iraq. But these missions were long ago achieved.

For nearly 11 years, the war has dragged on, and NATO and U.S. troops have had several significant victories. U.S. Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden. According to Leon Panetta, a former CIA director and now the secretary of defense, we have drastically reduced the number of Al Qaeda personnel in Afghanistan, to fewer than 50.

However, there have also been significant losses, including the lives of more than 2,000 young Americans. The Taliban in Afghanistan now controls nearly half of the country, and is still able to wage attacks on our troops. Not to mention the fact that the Afghan security forces trained by American troops are now attacking U.S. forces. According to a recent New York Times article, in the past few weeks, at least nine Americans have been killed in insider attacks, and so far this year, at least 40 members of our armed services have been killed by either “active members of the Afghan forces or attackers dressed in their uniforms.”

Lance Corporal Buckley was killed in an insider attack. While he was exercising with his fellow Marines, Afghan recruits came in and said they wanted to be police officers. Instead, they shot Buckley and two other Marines.

“At the end of the day,” said Greg Sr., “what happened is my son trained somebody to murder him.”

Since his death, there have been two other incidents, just two days apart, in which coalition forces became victims of insider attacks waged by insurgents dressed as Afghan military personnel.