Although your thoughts about increased vets’ benefits and a potential peace benefit are clearly important, I doubt if they would be very useful in the dilemma faced by the woman to whom you talked: how to discuss de-funding/withdrawal with a mother of a son in Afghanistan.

More important, I think, would be to separate the question into policy and tactics. A policy decision to de-fund, de-escalate, and withdraw from the war could have either positive or negative implications for her son. The tactical decision of how to do this is the one that is relevant–that is your point #1. We would hope that the planners of a withdrawal would not take a path that would increase risk to our soldiers in the process, but would take a path of gradual withdrawal from the periphery to the center (primarily Kabul, I would imagine), with nobody left exposed or under-protected. But it is quite possible that political considerations might work against that. If it is important for the US to not look ‘weak’, to not repeat the debacle of the withdrawal from Vietnam, etc., I could see terrible tactical decisions being made.

Our problem is that we are not military tacticians. But I think that the message of protest has to include the tactical demands that address the safety of our soldiers, the victims you describe in point 5