Tag: Afghanistan

“When I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam, the critics took me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most vicious way. One day a newsman came to me and said, ‘Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?’ I looked at him and I had to say, ‘…I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference…’ Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus… There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ study war no more.”

– Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. – From “Remaining Awake Through A Great Revolution ” (Sermon) March 31, 1968

Another reason to end these wars.

When Jon Tumilson, a member of a Navy Seal team, was killed in Afghanistan, his loyal dog, Hawkeye, lay near his coffin at the funeral.

Up Date: The President’s speech with a link to the transcript is below. As expected, not big enough or fast enough nor will all the troops ever be withdrawn.

Only 10,000 troops from the last surge of 33,000 are to be withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2012 the end of next summer. Seriously, another 18 15 months. There are 100,000 service men and women serving in Afghanistan alone. Leaving the money aside, what about the them? How many more killed, maimed and psychologically scarred? For what? A war that is not winnable where the US is doing more harm than good and is not wanted. I haven’t even mentioned the cost and suffering of Afghan civilians.

No, Mr. Obama, this is not good enough.

Cost of Wars a Rising Issue as Obama Weighs Troop Levels

WASHINGTON – President Obama will talk about troop numbers in Afghanistan when he makes a prime-time speech from the White House on Wednesday night. But behind his words will be an acute awareness of what $1.3 trillion in spending on two wars in the past decade has meant at home: a ballooning budget deficit and a soaring national debt at a time when the economy is still struggling to get back on its feet.

I’m not alone in my anger and frustration with the president’s policy. Since last year the vast majority of Americans are opposed to the war in Afghanistan. That number is now two thirds, two of every three Americans.

A new poll from the Washington Post shows American have turned decisively against our military engagement in Afghanistan. Nearly two-thirds oppose the war, and even larger percentage believes in a considerable withdrawal from the region

US Mayors meeting last week in San Francisco called for the president to “bring the war dollars home” and invest in America.

That resolution will now become official policy of the mayors’ organization — a small symbol of growing opposition to the war in Afghanistan. The mayors are asking that money spent on wars abroad be used in the United States to develop cities and towns. The last time the conference approved a resolution like this was during the Vietnam War.

Nor will there be any discussion about the 865 foreign bases that the US has scattered around the world that eat up precious tax dollars:

President Obama may claim he’s got to go slow in drawing down U.S. forces fighting in Afghanistan but what’s his excuse for keeping open 268 U.S. bases in Germany? Is he expecting an attack by the Red Army? There are folks living well on those 268 bases at public expense as well as the military contractors supplying them.

No other nation begins to operate even a tiny fraction of the 865-plus bases the Pentagon runs overseas to, depending on your viewpoint, (a) protect America from dangerous potential enemies who are lurking everywhere, or (b) to dominate the rest of the world. And since 95% of all overseas bases located in somebody else’s country are operated by the USA, millions of people suspect (b) is the answer; indeed, foreigners fear Uncle Sam might subjugate them.

Democrats in congress are getting impatient as well

On Tuesday, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), one of the most conservative Democrats in the chamber, sent Obama a letter urging a change of course in the war and an acceleration of the withdrawal of U.S. troops.

“After 10 years and $443 billion, I believe it is time [to] focus our resources on rebuilding America, not on rebuilding Afghanistan,” he wrote. “It is time for the Afghan people to decide their destiny and take responsibility for governing themselves. … It is my hope that by redefining the mission in Afghanistan away from nation-building, you will pursue significant troop reductions immediately and end the scope of our current mission well before the 2014 deadline.”

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) is calling for a minimum withdrawal of 15,000 troops:

“In my judgment, a minimum of 15,000 reduction in troops would be needed for this to be a significant reduction, and since the president has committed himself a few months ago to a significant reduction, I think that’s what will happen,” Levin told reporters on Capitol Hill on Tuesday.

When asked how he came up with that number, Levin replied, “It’s based on what would it take to let the Afghans know the significance of the importance of shifting the responsibility — the principal responsibility to them for the security of their own country.”

Americans and Afghans will be paying dearly for years even after the last service person is gone from both Afghanistan and Iraq. This cannot happen fast enough for all our sakes.

Up Date: Obama spoke tonight about the troop withdrawal. 10,000 troops will leave by the end of this year. By the end summer in 2012, the other 23,000 will have left. By 2014, all combat troops will have departed but a residual force of about 25,000 will remain, forever and ever. The rest was pure political rhetoric. You can read the transcript to spare yourself the vision of another lie.  

Osama bin Laden is dead. Now after 10 years why are we still Afghanistan? What our diplomats fail to recognize about tribal customs of the Afghan people gets an explanation from Rachel Maddow. The reason for the military to be in Afghanistan is dead, of that I am certain. Are we now getting closer to bringing our troops home?

Osama bin Laden may be dead but he’s still winning the economic war he started.

By Ezra Klein, Published: May 2

Did Osama bin Laden win? No. Did he succeed? Well, America is still standing, and he isn’t. So why, when I called Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism expert who specializes in al-Qaeda, did he tell me that “bin Laden has been enormously successful”? There’s no caliphate. There’s no sweeping sharia law. Didn’t we win this one in a clean knockout?

Apparently not. Bin Laden, according to Gartenstein-Ross, had a strategy that we never bothered to understand, and thus that we never bothered to defend against. What he really wanted to do – and, more to the point, what he thought he could do – was bankrupt the United States of America. After all, he’d done the bankrupt-a-superpower thing before. And though it didn’t quite work out this time, it worked a lot better than most of us, in this exultant moment, are willing to admit.

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Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz estimates that the price tag on the Iraq War alone will surpass $3 trillion. Afghanistan likely amounts to another trillion or two. Add in the build-up in homeland security spending since 9/11 and you’re looking at another trillion. And don’t forget the indirect costs of all this turmoil: The Federal Reserve, worried about a fear-induced recession, slashed interest rates after the attack on the World Trade Center, and then kept them low to combat skyrocketing oil prices, a byproduct of the war in Iraq. That decade of loose monetary policy may well have contributed to the credit bubble that crashed the economy in 2007 and 2008.

Then there’s the post-9/11 slowdown in the economy, the time wasted in airports, the foregone returns on investments we didn’t make, the rise in oil prices as a result of the Iraq War, the cost of rebuilding Ground Zero, health care for the first responders and much, much more.

By John Hanrahan

Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz wants Americans not to be diverted by much of the rhetoric in the political debate over deficits and the calls for harsh austerity from Republican members of Congress and some GOP governors.

In contrast to the austerity hawks’ proposals, Columbia University professor Stiglitz says, “There are principled ways of cutting the deficit” and reducing the nation’s overall debt while at the same time “putting Americans back to work,” making life better for the millions of Americans in precarious economic circumstances, and halting growing economic inequality where one percent of the population controls 40 percent of the wealth and takes one-fourth of the nation’s income every year.

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“The deficit didn’t cause the downturn,” he said, “the downturn caused the deficit.”

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A few years ago, Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, a public policy professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, wrote a book, “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” the title a reference to what they estimated would be the ultimate cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. Since then, he said, they have come to realize “we were much too conservative” in estimating the costs.

• Making sure all corporations pay their share of taxes, and requiring the nation’s wealthiest 1 percent of individuals to pay more in income taxes. Even after ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, Stiglitz said, those highest-income taxpayers “would still be ahead of where they were a decade ago.”
• Imposing “moderate increases” in capital gains and estate taxes and establishing a “small financial transactions tax,” all of which could raise substantial revenue, he said.
• Stopping “government giveaways of natural resources” – oil, gas, minerals, forests – through well-structured auctions that would bring in “serious revenue.”
• Curtailing corporate welfare, “which makes our economy more inefficient and increases unemployment.”
• Increasing enforcement of federal antitrust laws. Regarding the Bowles-Simpson Commission deficit reduction recommendations, Stiglitz noted that panel’s proposal to do away with the homeowners’ mortgage deduction. He said, “Eventually, we must deal with the mortgage deduction, but not now.” Eliminating the mortgage deduction in this troubled economy “would amount to an increased tax,” hitting hardest on the already hard-hit middle-class “and would make the housing market even worse,” he said.

Even before the economic crisis hit in 2007, Stiglitz said, the vast majority of Americans “year after year were getting poorer.” Household income today, on average, is lower than it was in 1997, at the same time income and wealth inequality have became even more pronounced in the United States. Yet, he said, we “told people to pretend their income was going up and to consume more.” And people did that, going into debt while at the same time believing they were getting wealthier because of the housing bubble.

In those days before the housing bubble collapsed, “We were on artificial respiration and we didn’t even know it,” Stiglitz said.

Rahimullah Yusufzai is a Senior Analyst with the Pakistani TV channel Geo TV, and the Resident Editor of The News International in Peshawar, an English newspaper from Pakistan. He’s worked as a correspondent for Time Magazine, BBC World Service, BBC Pashto, BBC Urdu, Geo TV, and ABC News. Mr. Yusufzai has interviewed Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and a range of other militants across the tribal areas of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

Here Yusufzai talks from Peshawar, Pakistan with Real News Network’s Paul Jay about the real U.S. objectives in Afghanistan, and notes that the U.S. now has more than 100,000 troops in AfPak fighting at the most a couple of hundred Al Qaeda members, with only 50 of them in Afghanistan.

While the MSM is panting over President Obama’s unannounced visit to Bahgram Air Base in Afghanistan, his now canceled teleconferenced meeting with Afghan President Karzai and his address to the troops, the other important news that is getting lost in the frenzy.

Judging from the headlines, the media would have us all believe that the President’s Debt Commission (Cat Food Commission) had approved its final report.

Politico has since changed its headline from “Divided deficit group approves proposal” to the more accurate “Debt panel falls short on votes”

Both CNN and the NYT are touting that the report has bipartisan approval. They would like us to believe that a commission packed with deficit hawks determined to reduce the deficit on the backs of the middle class and the elderly is a great plan because the multimillionaires on the committee embraced it.

Then there is the news about jobs growth, or rather the lack of it, and the increase in unemployment numbers. The poor and unemployed are likely to stay that way and their numbers will grow between now and 2012 if the Republicans and blue dog Democrats have their way.

The Senate hearings on the repeal of DADT extended into it’s second day with some “heroes”, like Sen. Tester making really good argument for repeal now and the villains, like homophobic Sen. McCain who wants to hear from everyone in the military this will affect over the “next year”. Amazingly the biggest “hero” today was Defense Secretary Gates who told GOP Senators that “polling troops on policy decisions is a dangerous affront to our nation’s unbroken history of civilian control over the military”:

GATES: I can’t think of a single precedent in America history of doing a referendum of the American Armed Forces on a policy issue. Are you going to ask them if they want 15-month tours? Are you going to ask them if they want to be part of the surge in Iraq? That’s not the way our civilian-led military has ever worked in our entire history . . . I think in effect doing a referendum of the members of the Armed Forces on a policy matter is a very dangerous path.

Meanwhile, CNN and MSNBC are salivating over a photo-op visit to Afghanistan while Fox News just keeps spewing its usual twisting of myths and facts while babbling about ventriloquists.

I started writing this diary on July 20, put it in draft. It was based on Richard Haass’ cover story in Newsweek on July 18 of this year. It is still very relevant in that the war in Afghanistan has taken on a different aspect than when it start over nine tears ago. As pointed out by Glenn Greenwald at Salon, the US of A Breaks the Soviet Record this past week and still has not recognized waste and the futility of the effort.

It seems clear that a similar — or even grander — prize awaits us as the one with which the Soviets were rewarded.  I hope nobody thinks that just because we can’t identify who the Taliban leaders are after almost a decade over there that this somehow calls into doubt our ability to magically re-make that nation.  Even if it did, it’s vital that we stop the threat of Terrorism, and nothing helps to do that like spending a full decade — and counting — invading, occupying, and bombing Muslim countries.

This is Mr. Haass’s appearance on “Morning Joe” on July 19, 2010. It is still very pertinent

While I strongly disagree with Mr.Haass on the use of drone and missile attacks, as well as air strikes, what he says about the ground troops is very true. There are far better ways to make the US safe from terrorist attacks than invading a country, destroying property and infrastructure as the US did in Iraq and killing innocent civilians. The actions of the US and her allies  steeled the resolve of the terrorists and given them recruits and support. It is fairly obvious that the Obama administration is not thinking and has learned nothing from the 20th century Russian adventures or from the English in the 19th century.

Nothing new here, just more of the same, reinforced.

Coming Soon: Congress Revisits the Authorization to Use Military Force

By: Spencer Ackerman Monday November 15, 2010

As I tweeted and wrote for Danger Room today, the incoming chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Buck McKeon, briefly argued in a speech today that Congress should “reaffirm – in statute – the Authorization to Use Military Force of 2011.” To expand on that: McKeon mentioned the AUMF in the context of detainee policy – that is, to keep terrorism detainees out of federal courts. But it clearly goes beyond that. Here’s what a McKeon aide told me:

The objective wouldn’t the “drop a new Authorization to Use Military Force, but to reaffirm and strengthen the existing one,” says an aide to McKeon who requested anonymity, “recognizing that the enemy has changed geographically and evolved since 2001.” Sounds like the shadow wars may get some sunshine.

For the Obama administration, AUMF has operated like an Emergency Law, providing blanket authorities for things like drone strikes beyond Afghanistan that are never mentioned in the brief 2001 language. A new AUMF would at least be more specific about what powers Congress actually intends the president to have to conduct a war against al-Qaeda – as well as, perhaps, what the boundaries of those authorities might be. It’s still not a declaration of war – my understanding is there’s not an appetite for that in Congress – but it also would represent the first congressional reconsideration of the scope of a war that, in practice, is endless. That could go in any number of directions, but at least it’ll be debated.

This is a means to justify the drone attacks in Pakistan and Yemen or any other country the US deems a threat, as well as, to “justify” the illegal, indefinite detention of persons that the US decides is too dangerous to release.

We Will Always Be at War against Everyone

By: emptywheel Tuesday November 16, 2010

But there are two other aspects to a “reaffirmed and strengthened” AUMF. As McKeon’s aide notes, the enemy has changed geographically, moving to Yemen and Somalia. A new AUMF will make it easier to build the new bases in Yemen they’re planning.

The U.S. is preparing for an expanded campaign against al Qaeda in Yemen, mobilizing military and intelligence resources to enable Yemeni and American strikes and drawing up a longer-term proposal to establish Yemeni bases in remote areas where militants operate.

And I would bet that the AUMF is drafted broadly enough to allow drone strikes anywhere the government decides it sees a terrorist.

Which brings us to the most insidious part of a call for a new AUMF: the “homeland.” The AUMF serves or has served as the basis for the government’s expanded powers in the US, to do things like wiretap Americans. Now that the Republicans know all the powers the government might want to use against US persons domestically, do you really think they will resist the opportunity to write those powers into an AUMF (whether through vagueness or specificity), so as to avoid the quadrennial review and debate over the PATRIOT Act (not to mention the oversight currently exercised by DOJ’s Inspector General)? The only matter of suspense, for me, is what role they specify for drones operating domestically…

Round and round it goes, where this stops nobody knows.

Three killed in attack on Nato tankers which the Taliban claimed responsibility for because U.S. drone strikes increase on Pakistan border which happened because an increased risk of terrorist attacks in Europe, with Washington saying al Qaeda might target transport infrastructure. Terror strikes provoke drones attacks which provoke more terror attacks which provoke….Dizzy yet?

Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely:

What a surprise: bombing Muslims more and more causes more and more Muslims to want to bomb the countries responsible.  That, of course, has long been the perverse “logic” driving the War on Terror.  The very idea that we’re going to reduce Terrorism by more intensively bombing more Muslim countries is one of the most patently absurd, self-contradicting premises that exists.  It’s exactly like announcing that the cure for lung cancer is to quadruple the number of cigarettes one smokes each day.  But that’s been the core premise (at least the stated one) of our foreign policy for the last decade:  we’re going to stop Terrorism by doing more and more of exactly the things that cause it (and see this very good Economist article  on the ease with which drones allow a nation’s leaders to pretend to its citizenry that they are not really at war — as we’re doing with Pakistan).

So where does this end Mr. President? Are you now going to send ground troops into Pakistan?

Up Date: From Glenn Greenwald:

…..a 2004 Task Force convened by Donald Rumsfeld said about the actual causes of Terrorism and, specifically, the effects on Terrorism from our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  The whole Report is worth reviewing, but among the highlights:  (a) the “underlying sources of threats to America’s national security” are grounded in “negative attitudes” towards the U.S. in the Muslim world and “the conditions that create them”; (b) what most exacerbates anti-American sentiment, and therefore the threat of Terrorism, is “American direct intervention in the Muslim world” — through our “one sided support in favor of Israel”; support for Islamic tyrannies in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia; and, most of all, “the American occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan”; and (c) “Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies.”

The truth of the matter is that things could hardly be worse.  For one thing, corruption is so rampant that U.S. forces have practically given up on enforcement.  This is due structurally to the fact that the regular Afghan economy is dwarfed by U.S. military transfer payments and Opium.  Things are so bad that the central bank has failed because of corrupt real estate speculation in Dubai (among other places and Dubai is not in such great shape itself having recently been bailed out by the UAE).

Of course the Karzai family is heavily implicated in all of this and we’ve just had a Parliamentary election that was if anything even more fraudulent than last year’s disputed Presidential one.  There are credible reports of double and triple voting (seems that Iraqi ink isn’t quite so indelible after all) and thousands of forged ballots were intercepted being smuggled in from Pakistan.

Speaking of Pakistan it’s now clear that a substantial fraction of their Military/Intelligence establishment, perhaps even a majority of it, support the Taliban and are providing them with Safe Havens and logistics support; and that the Pakistani civilian government is either unwilling or unable to prevent this.

Despite the Troop surge our military situation has not improved.  We’re unable to exert control over the countryside except in limited areas for short periods of time and to prevent co-ordinated attacks against our bases by Company and Platoon size units, even the big ones near Kabul.

But only amateurs talk about tactics, Generals talk about logistics.  It is technically impossible to support any more Troops in Afghanistan than we currently have in the field.  Anything that can’t be airlifted in, which includes almost all the Bullets, Beans, and Gasoline, has to go through about half a dozen choke points that are mostly Taliban controlled.  The only way we are able to get through at all is by bribing the Taliban with “security” contracts.

Now this may seem counter intuitive to you.  Why should they allow us to supply our Troops the means to kill them?

Because we’re doing a lousy job at it and they hardly notice the pain.

Not only that, but once inside Afghanistan supplies are distributed over a road system that is naturally impassible during certain seasons and easily sabotaged.  All you have to do is block a culvert and wait for the snow melt to wash out the road, you don’t even have to use explosives.  And there are hundreds of thousands of vulnerable points, too many to constantly guard or even check on a regular basis.

Comparisons with Vietnam are inappropriate.  Afghanistan is much, much worse.

Now despite our lack of progress, any prospect of progress, indeed even a definition of progress, and 9 years of futility, The Man Called Petraeus, our new Westmoreland, is making statements like this–

This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.

“I can see light at the end of the tunnel.”- General William Westmoreland

“I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”- President Barack Obama