Critiques of Obama's Afghanistan Plan

President Obama's Afghanistan Escalation Speech: An Assessment

December, 04 2009

Phyllis Bennis

http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/4065

There was one way in which President Obama's escalation speech brought significant relief to the 59% of people in this country, as well as the overwhelming majorities of people in Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and elsewhere who oppose the U.S. war in Afghanistan: It was a pretty lousy speech. That is, it had none of the power, the lyricism, the passion for history, the capacity to engage and to persuade virtually every listener, even those who may ultimately disagree, that have characterized the president's earlier addresses.

And for that failure, we should be very grateful.

Because everything else in this politically and militarily defensive speech reflected accountability not to President Obama's base, the extraordinary mobilization of people who swept this anti-war and anti-racist candidate into office, but rather to the exigencies of Washington's traditional military, political, and corporate power-brokers who define "national security."

In a speech like this, widely acknowledged to be setting the framework for the security/foreign policy/military paradigm for the bulk of Obama's still-new presidency, location matters. West Point was crucial partly for tactical reasons (nowhere but a military setting, with young cadets under tight command, could the president count on applause and a standing ovation in response to a huge escalation of an unpopular war). But it was also important for Obama to claim West Point as his own after Bush's 2002 speech there, an address that first identified preemptive war as the basis of the Bush Doctrine and a new foreign policy paradigm.

There was an important honesty in one aspect of President Obama's speech. All claims that the U.S. war was bringing democracy to Afghanistan, modernizing a backward country, and liberating Afghan women, are off the agenda - except when the Pentagon identifies them as possible "force multipliers" to achieve the military goal. And that goal hasn't changed - "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and to prevent its capacity to threaten America and our allies in the future." So now it's official. It's not about Afghanistan and Afghans at all - it's all about us.

It's a good thing the White House has dropped that rhetoric as the past eight years has brought few social improvements. Afghanistan ranks second to last in the UN's Human Development Index, and just in the last few weeks UNICEF identified Afghanistan as one of the three worst places in the world for a child to be born. As for improving the lives of women Afghanistan retains the second-highest level of maternal mortality of any country in the world - even after eight years of U.S. occupation. Is further military escalation likely to change that?

Ironic Timing

Less than two days after his escalation speech, Obama will host a jobs summit at the White House. Whatever his official message, the millions of unemployed in the U.S. know that 30,000 more troops in Afghanistan adds $30 billion this year to the already out-of-control war budget - and means that the only jobs available will be in the military. What clearer example could there be of the Afghanistan war as a war against poor people - those who die in Afghanistan and those left jobless and desperate here at home? A week later, Obama travels to Norway to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. Not even the best speechwriters will be able to portray sending thousands of young women and men across the world to kill and die as evidence of the newest Nobel laureate's commitment to global peace.

And the day of the speech itself was World AIDS Day. The UNAIDS noted that all of its country goals - treatment for 6-7 million people, screening 70 million pregnant women, providing preventive services to 37 million people - could be accomplished with just $25 billion. That's what the United States will spend fighting in Afghanistan in just three months. Timing matters.

The result was a speech that reflected Obama's centrist-in-chief effort to please all his constituencies. Some will be quite satisfied. Mainstream Republicans were delighted. They were careful not to praise too much, but as Republican Senator Saxby Chambliss noted, President Obama's escalation was "the right analysis, the right decision." General McChrystal, Obama's handpicked top commander in Afghanistan, was quite satisfied: He had asked for 40,000 new troops, and got 30,000 U.S. troops and a promise (we'll see...) of 5,000 more from NATO and other allies. More significantly, he and Bush hold-over Secretary of Defense Robert Gates got the president's endorsement of a full-scale counterinsurgency plan.

Mainstream Democrats were likely delighted - assertion of their party's military credentials, with talk of a "transition to Afghan responsibility" to soothe their constituents' outrage. They may be uneasy about the additional costs, but could take solace in Obama's promise to "work closely with Congress to address these costs as we work to bring down our deficit." Just how anyone would "address" these spiraling billions remains unclear.

The ones not happy - besides the young cadets in the audience, other soldiers facing new and endlessly renewed deployments, and their families - are the massive numbers of people who swept Obama into office on a mobilized tide of anti-war, anti-racist and anti-poverty commitments. Talk of beginning a "transition" 18 months down the line, with NO commitment for an actual troop withdrawal, isn't going to satisfy them.

And President Obama seemed to know that. So he resorted to an old tactic, long relied on by George W. Bush: book-ending his speech with the trope of 9/11, pleading for a return to the moment "when this war began, we were united - bound together by the fresh memory of a horrific attack, and by the determination to defend our homeland and the values we hold dear. I refuse to accept the notion that we cannot summon that unity again." What Obama left out, and perhaps hoped that we have forgotten, was that the human solidarity that created such unity in the wake of the 9/11 attacks - not only across the United States, but around the world as well - began to erode as soon as the war in Afghanistan began. Because we knew then, as we know today, that the war in Afghanistan was never legitimate, was never moral, was never going to keep us safe," and was never a "good war."

What did the speech say?

• Thirty thousand new U.S. troops will be sent to Afghanistan "at the fastest possible pace." In July 2011, 18 months from now, the U.S. will "begin to transfer our forces out of Afghanistan."
• No more "blank checks" to the Afghan government; the U.S. expects those it assists to combat corruption and "deliver for the people," and that those "who are ineffective or corrupt to be held accountable."
• The U.S. goals in Afghanistan are to "deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban's momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan's Security Forces and government, so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan's future."
• The government of Pakistan is our friend and ally, and "our success in Afghanistan is inextricably linked to our partnership with Pakistan."
• Unlike the Soviets and other earlier empires in Afghanistan, the U.S. has "no interest in occupying your country. We will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens. And we will seek a partnership with Afghanistan grounded in mutual respect."

What was left out

• The 18-month timeline references only the "beginning" of transferring U.S. troops out of Afghanistan; there was no reference to finishing transfer of all troops out of Afghanistan and ending the occupation. The words "exit" or "exit strategy" do not appear in the speech, and the word "withdraw" appears only in a reference to what the U.S. will NOT do.
• There was absolutely no explanation of how this year's $30 billion additional costs for the 30,000 more troops, on top of the billions more already in the pipeline, would be paid for. Obama referred only to his intention to consult with Congress to "address" these costs while bringing down the deficit. The inevitable impact this spending would have on jobs, health care, or climate change was ignored.
• The speech assumed Afghan support for the U.S. occupation, ignoring the massive evidence to the contrary. Just hours before Obama spoke, the Wall Street Journal stated matter-of-factly that "when the U.S. forces enter an area, the levels of violence generally increase, causing anger and dissatisfaction among the local population." It quoted a pro-Karzai parliamentarian who said, "If new troops come and are stationed in civilian areas, when they draw Taliban attacks civilians will end up being killed."
• Obama paid no attention to the increasingly visible opposition to the Karzai government and the U.S. occupation from the majority Pashtun population - whose southern and eastern Afghanistan territory will be the operations center for the new troop escalation. The Journal quoted a shopkeeper in the southern city of Kandahar who said, "If we get more troops, there will be more bloodshed. Only Afghans themselves can solve this problem." The Pashtuns, who make up the majority of the Taliban, are increasingly defining Afghanistan's civil war as an ethnic war against supporters of the old U.S.-backed Northern Alliance, whose Tajik and Uzbek militants now make up the majority of the Afghan National Army.
• There was no reference to the U.S.-paid mercenaries (both local and internationals, all paid through U.S. contractor corporations) in Afghanistan, whose numbers rose by 40% just between June and September, now totaling 104,101, and already outnumbering U.S. troops.
• While claiming the U.S. may not have the same interests as earlier empires, Obama has now acknowledged that the U.S. is occupying Afghan land not to protect Afghan interests, but to protect the U.S. and U.S. citizens.
• There was no acknowledgement of the widely held view that there are fewer than 100 members of al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and perhaps as few as 300 over the border in Pakistan - so the U.S. will now be deploying more than 100,000 of its own troops, plus tens of thousands of NATO and other allied troops, in a global, lethal, impoverishing war to go after 400 people.
• Obama spoke of Afghanistan as a war of necessity, saying "We did not ask for this fight. On September 11, 2001, 19 men hijacked four airplanes and used them to murder nearly 3,000 people." He ignored the fact that none of the hijackers were Afghans, none lived in Afghanistan (they lived in Hamburg), none trained in Afghanistan (they trained in Florida), and none went to flight school in Afghanistan (that was in Minnesota).
• Obama spoke of the existing involvement of NATO and other allied governments, and asked for additional troop commitments; he did not mention the massive opposition to the war all those government face (70% opposition in the UK, the highest troop contributor), with several countries pulling their troops out. He described the "broad coalition of 43 nations that support our aims," but ignored the reality that many of those nations have deployed troops numbering only in the double or even single digits - one from Georgia, two from Iceland, four from Austria, seven each from Ireland and Jordan, 10 from Bosnia, etc.
• The speech acknowledged that the recent election of President Karzai was "marred by fraud," but maintained the fiction that Karzai's presidency is somehow still "consistent with Afghanistan's laws and constitution." There was no acknowledgement of the widespread Afghan view of Karzai as simultaneously corrupt, incompetent, and dependent on the U.S. occupation, and that trying to win "hearts and minds" to back a government lacking local legitimacy ensures failure.
• Describing an alleged "partnership" with Pakistan, Obama ignored the danger of a U.S. troop escalation further destabilizing Pakistan, and sidelined the fact that recent polls indicate 59% of Pakistanis view the U.S. as the greatest threat, more than three times as those who see arch-rival India as the most threatening, and almost six times more than those who identify the Taliban. Obama stayed silent about the on-going special forces and drone strikes in Pakistan, with no indication whether his future escalation will include ratcheting up those attacks.
• There was no reference to the need for a broad regional diplomatic strategy; the word "India" did not appear in the speech and Obama ignored Islamabad's concerns vis-à-vis India, which shape much of Pakistan's historic support for the Taliban and other insurgent forces in Afghanistan. He thus disregarded the most important regional dynamics at work.
• While referencing the U.S. "transition" out of Iraq, Obama didn't acknowledge the level of violence continuing there, where more civilians continue to die than are dying in Afghanistan, nor the 113,731 mercenaries bolstering the U.S. military there. While proposing Iraq as a model for getting U.S. troops out, he ignored the reality that there are still 124,000 U.S. troops occupying Iraq.

Anti-War Escalation Needed

Near the end of his speech, Obama tried to speak to his antiwar one-time supporters, speaking to the legacy of Vietnam. It was here that the speech's internal weakness was perhaps most clear. Obama refused to respond to the actual analogy between the quagmire of Vietnam, which led to the collapse of Johnson's Great Society programs, and the threat to Obama's ambitious domestic agenda collapsing under the pressure of funding the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead, he created straw analogies, ignoring the massive challenge of waging an illegitimate, unpopular war at a moment of dire economic crisis.

Obama also did not acknowledge that about 30% of all U.S. casualties in the 8-year war in Afghanistan have occurred during the 11 months of his presidency. He did not remind us that the cost of this war, with the new escalation, will be about $100 billion a year, or $2 billion every week, or more than $11 million every hour. He didn't tell us that the same one-year amount, $100 billion, could cover the cost of ALL of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: clean water, health care, primary education and vaccinations for the people of every one of the poorest 21 countries in the world.

He didn't ask us to consider what adding another $100 billion - let alone $500 billion, or half a TRILLION dollars over the next five years - to the already ballooning deficit will do to our chances for real health care reform.

President Obama didn't ask us that. But we know the answer to that question. We need to build a movement that can respond to that answer, that can respond to the new challenges of these new conditions - because while this is not a new war, we face a new political moment. We need to build new alliances into a movement that can bring this war and occupation to a rapid end, so that we can begin to make good on our real obligations to the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as to the people of our own country who struggle to find jobs, health care, and climate justice. We need to build a movement with roots in the trade unions, in the labor movement, and among those struggling for economic rights, particularly among communities of color. We have to push Congress to make good on their "concerns" regarding this new escalation by refusing to pay for it, and to support those members of Congress who are trying to do just that. Congress hasn't given Obama a blank check for this war yet - not even a $30 billion check. And there's still time for us to make sure they don't.

We have a lot of work to do.

Phyllis Bennis is a Fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies and co-author with David Wildman of the forthcoming Ending the US War in Afghanistan: A Primer.

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Obama's West Point War Speech: A Quick Response

December, 03 2009

Paul Street

http://www.zmag.org/zspace/commentaries/4063

Like a Judas of old
You lie and deceive...
 
You hide in your mansions
While young people's blood
Flows out of their bodies
And gets buried in the mud
 
- Bob Dylan, "Masters of War," 1962
 
 
War President Barack Obama's Afghan "surge" address from West Point [1] last night was unsurprising, given the fact that, as Alexander Cockburn has noted, "Obama has...surrounded himself with the same breed of intellectuals who persuaded Lyndon Johnson to escalate the [ Vietnam ] war." [2] As Tom Engelhardt has pointed out, Obama's "civilian advisors" on Afghanistan include a large number of military men, all predisposed by career background and philosophy to advocate increased force levels. Did it really make sense to be surprised, Engelhardt wondered more than two months ago, that Obama would opt for more troops, money, and war when the president had "turn[ed] crucial war decisions over to the military...functionally turn[ing] our foreign policy over to them as well?" [3]
       
The decision to escalate was never much in doubt.
 
LIES AND DECEPTION 
 
Security Council Trickery
 
If there was anything surprising about Obama's December 1st address, it was the extent to which he was willing to distort history on behalf of his militaristic policy.  "Just days after 9/11," Obama proclaimed last night (I am writing on the morning of Wednesday, December 2, 2009), "Congress authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and those who harbored them -- an authorization that continues to this day...For the first time in its history, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 - the commitment that says an attack on one member nation is an attack on all. And the United Nations Security Council endorsed the use of all necessary steps to respond to the 9/11 attacks. America, our allies and the world were acting as one to destroy al Qaeda's terrorist network and to protect our common security."[4]
 
Obama clearly meant here to create the false impression that the United Nations Security Council (UNSC) authorized the Bush administration's attack on Afghanistan in October, 2001).  But the UNSC did no such thing since the attack met none of the UN's criteria for legitimate self-defense.  The United States ' attack on Afghanistan met none of the standard international moral and legal criteria for justifiable self-defense and occurred without reasonable consultation with the United Nations Security Council.
 
As the prominent U.S. legal scholar Marjorie Cohn noted in July of 2008, "The invasion of Afghanistan was as illegal as the invasion of Iraq."  The U.N. Charter requires member states to settle international disputes by peaceful means.  Nations are permitted to use military force only in self-defense or when authorized by the Security Council. After 9/11, the Council passed two resolutions, neither of which authorized the use of military force in Afghanistan.
 
Assaulting that country was not legitimate self-defense under article 51 of the Charter since the jetliner assaults were criminal attacks, not "armed attacks" by another country. Afghanistan did not attack the U.S. and 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers came from Saudi Arabia . Furthermore, there was no "imminent threat of an armed attack on the United States after September 11 or Bush would not have waited three weeks before initiating his October 2001 bombing campaign." As Cohn added, international law requires that "The necessity for self-defense must be 'instant, overwhelming, leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation.' This classic principle of self-defense in international law has been affirmed by the Nuremberg Tribunal and the U.N. General Assembly."[5]
 
 
"The World According to Washington"
 
The suggestion that human civilization ("the world") was united in support for Washington’s attack on Afghanistan is completely incorrect.  An international Gallup poll released after the U.S. bombing began showed that global opposition was overwhelming. In 34 of the 37 countries Gallup surveyed, majorities opposed a military attack on Afghanistan, preferring that 9/11 be treated as a criminal matter rather than as a pretext for war. Even in the U.S., just 54% supported war. [6] "In Latin America, which has some experience with US behavior," Noam Chomsky noted (in a 2008 column titled "The World According to Washington"), "support [for the U.S. assault] ranged from 2% in Mexico, to 18% in Panama, and that support was conditional on the culprits being identified (they still weren't eight months later, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported) and civilian targets being spared (they were attacked at once). There was an overwhelming preference in the world for diplomatic/judicial measures, rejected out of hand by [Washington, claiming to represent] 'the world.'"[7]
 
"Only After the Taliban Refused to Turn Over bin Laden"
 
"Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy - and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden -- we sent our troops into Afghanistan" [8], Obama said.  This was completely false. In the actual history that occurred, the U.S. refused to respond to the Taliban government's offer to turn bin-Laden over to a foreign government for a trial once elementary evidence pointing to his guilt was presented.  The U.S. deliberately made sure that bin Laden would not be turned over through legal and diplomatic channels because (quite frankly) the Bush administration wanted war and did not wish to follow the UN Charter's requirement that nations pursue "all means short of force before taking military action" (Rahul Mahajan). [9]
 
"Safe Haven" Mythology
 
Six times in his war speech Obama used the phrase "safe haven." Afghanistan, Obama wants the American people to think, is a "safe haven" for past and potential future terror attacks on the "homeland." This, too, is deceptive. As Harvard Kennedy School of Government professor Stephen Walt noted in an August 2009 Foreign Policy essay, Obama's "safe haven myth" rests on the fundamentally flawed premise that al Qaeda or its many and various imitators couldn't just as effectively plot and conduct future terror attacks from any of a large number of other locations, including Western Europe and the U.S. itself. At the same time, Walt observed, Obama's expanded engagement in the "ambitious social and political reconstruction and re-engineering of Afghanistan and perhaps even Pakistan, trying, with slight chances of success," to creating a centralized democratic state in the former country, was reinforcing al Qaeda's core claim that the West's and the above all the United States' presence in South Asia was about imperial control.  The more the U.S. is seen as "trying to restructure their societies along lines that we think are appropriate," Walt notes, "the more we play into the narrative that they use to try and attract support and recruit people in Afghanistan itself." [10]
 
       
EMPIRE AND INEQUALITY 2.0
 
"The United States is Broken...Yet we're Nation-Building in Afghanistan."
 
The president said nothing in his address about the tens of thousands of private military contractors deployed by the Pentagon in Afghanistan (57 percent of the U.S. force presence there at the end of last June!) [11] or about the deadly, largely secret Predator drone war he has dramatically escalated against Afghan and Pakistani "terrorists" and civilians [12].
 
He also failed to mention the absurdity of his decision to spend untold billions more dollars on a futile, massively expensive colonial operation abroad as misery and destitution expanded at home.  The domestic social uplift and opportunity cost of his imperial policy - the twisted misplacement of resources that Martin Luther King, Jr., described in the late 1960s as symptomatic of America's "spiritual death" [13] - is certainly enormous.  By the White House's own calculations, the Afghan escalation is going to cost $1 million a year per every single new soldier deployed [14] - a giant investment that could be diverted to meet growing unmet social needs across the U.S. 
 
Echoing Dr. King's late-1960s sermons and speeches against the U.S. military state's "perverted priorities," New York Times columnist Bob Herbert marked the day of Obama's West Point Address with an eloquent lament: 
 
"the president has arrived at a decision that never was much in doubt, and that will prove to be a tragic mistake. It was also, for the president, the easier option."
 
"It would have been much more difficult for Mr. Obama to look this troubled nation in the eye and explain why it is in our best interest to begin winding down the permanent state of warfare left to us by the Bush and Cheney regime. It would have taken real courage for the commander in chief to stop feeding our young troops into the relentless meat grinder of Afghanistan, to face up to the terrible toll the war is taking - on the troops themselves and in very insidious ways on the nation as a whole."
 
"More soldiers committed suicide this year than in any year for which we have complete records. But the military is now able to meet its recruitment goals because the young men and women who are signing up can't find jobs in civilian life. The United States is broken - school systems are deteriorating, the economy is in shambles, homelessness and poverty rates are expanding - yet we're nation-building in Afghanistan, sending economically distressed young people over there by the tens of thousands at an annual cost of a million dollars each." [15]
 
"A Chance to Shape Their Future"
 
Of course, "nation-building" is a euphemism for imperial assault and occupation.  Loot at the unimaginable devastation - more than 1 million plus killed before their time, millions more injured and displaced, and massive social and technical infrastructure destroyed - "we" (our unelected agents of Empire) have inflicted on crippled Iraq, about which Obama had the noxious imperial chutzpah to say the following last night: "Thanks to [U.S. troops'] courage, grit and perseverance, we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future." [16]
 
Yes, you read that correctly: "we have given Iraqis a chance to shape their future."
 
Call it Empire and Inequality [17] Re-Branded. Combined and interrelated, mutually reinforcing, and caught up in a dark, dialectically inseparable duet of destruction...the forces of domestic disparity and imperial violence continue their dangerous, viciously circular dalliance of death. "Like Bush's America," John Pilger notes, "Obama's America is run by some very dangerous people" [18].
 
 
Paul Street is a writer, author, activist and speaker based in Iowa City, IA.  He is the author of many books and articles, including Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004) and Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis ( New York : Rowman & Littlefield, 2007). His next book Empire's New Clothes: Barack Obama in the Real World of Power, will be released next year. Street will speak next week (twice) in the Twin Cities on the topic "Does Obama Deserve the Nobel Peace Prize?" at 7 pm, December 9 (Wednesday, at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN) and (Thursday) and at 7 pm, December 10, 2009 (at the University of Minnesota). The location for the December 9th event (Macalester) is Humanities Room 226 (map: www.macalester.edu/about/mapbyalpha.html. The location for the December 10th event (U of Minnesota ) is University of Minnesota , West Bank Blegen Hall Room 010 (map: www.umn.edu/twincities/maps/BlegH/index.html)
    
  
       
NOTES       
 
1. George W. Bush also liked to make militaristic pronouncements from military settings like West Point, Annapolis , the Carlisle War College , and the USS Abraham Lincoln.
 
2. Alexander Cockburn, "War and Peace," CounterPunch (October 9, 2009), read at http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn10092009.html
 
3. Tom Engelhardt, "A Military That Wants its Way," TomDispatch (September 24, 2009), read at, http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175118
 
4. "Text of Obama's Speech on Afghanistan " (December 1, 2009), read at
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/12/01/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5855894.shtml
 
5. Marjorie Cohn, "End the Occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan ," Znet (July 30, 2008), read at http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/18303.   "Resolutions 1368 and 1373 condemned the September 11 attacks, and ordered the freezing of assets; the criminalizing of terrorist activity; the prevention of the commission of and support for terrorist attacks; the taking of necessary steps to prevent the commission of terrorist activity, including the sharing of information; and urged ratification and enforcement of the international conventions against terrorism."
 
6. Abid Aslam, "Polls Question Support for Military Campaign, Inter Press Service, October 8, 2001; Gallup International, Gallup International Poll on Terrorism " (September 2001); Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, "' Obama's Foreign Policy Report Card': Juan Cole Grades His President -- and Very Positively," MR Zine (November 9, 2009), read at mrzine.monthlyreview.org/ hp091109.html
 
7. Noam Chomsky, "The World According to Washington ," Asia Times (February 28, 2008).
 
8. "Text of Obama's Speech on Afghanistan ."
 
9. See Rahul Mahajan, The New Crusade: America 's War on Terrorism ( New York : Monthly Review, 2002), 28-31; Noam Chomsky, Hegemony Over Survival: America 's Quest for Global Dominance ( New York : Metropolitan, 2003), 198-202. 
 
10.  Stephen Walt, "The Safe Haven Myth," Foreign Policy (August 18, 2009), read at http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/08/18/the_safe_haven_myth ; Stephen Walt, interview by Amy Goodman, "Democracy Now," August 25, 2009, read at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/8/25/the_safe_haven_myth_harvard_prof.  See also Paul R. Pillar, "Whose Afraid of a Terrorist Safe Haven?" Washington Post, September 16, 2009, read at www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/15/AR2009091502977_pf.html  "By utilizing networks such as the Internet," Pillar noted, "terrorists' organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters." A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States is alive, Pillar argues, but "that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda's role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless." Pillar was deputy chief of the counterterrorist center at the CIA from 1997 to 1999. He is director of graduate studies at Georgetown University 's Security Studies Program
 
1l. Congressional Research Service, "Department of Defense Contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan : Background and Analysis," CRS Report number R40764, September 21, 2009, http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/R40764.pdf
 
12. For a chilling account see Jane Mayer, "The Predator War," The New Yorker (October 26, 2009).
 
13. "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."  Martin Luther King Jr., "A Time to Break the Silence," Riverside Church , New York City, April 4. 1967
 
14. Christi Parsons and Julian E. Barnes, "Pricing an Afghanistan Troop Build Up is No Simple Calculation," Los Angeles Times, November 23, 2009.
 
15. Bob Herbert, "A Tragic Mistake," New York Times, December 1, 2009.
 
16. "Text of Obama's Speech on Afghanistan"
 
17. Please see Street, Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 ( Boulder , CO : Paradigm, 2004) - written at the height of self-described "war president" George W. Bush's reign, but equally applicable to the first year of the "progressive" presidency of Barack Obama, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
 
18 John Pilger, "Media Lies and the War Drive Against Iran," Pakistan Daily, October 15, 2009, read at http://www.daily.pk/media-lies-and-the-war-drive-against-iran-12189/ 

**************

The back door is left open

December 04, 2009

Gareth Porter  

http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/23285

WASHINGTON - United States President Barack Obama presented a case on Tuesday for sending 30,000 more US troops to Afghanistan that included both soaring rhetoric and a new emphasis on its necessity for US national security.

Obama said the escalation was for a "vital national interest" and invoked the threat of attacks from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area, asserting that such attacks "are now being planned as I speak".

Despite Obama's embrace of these new national security arguments, however, he has rejected within the past few weeks the critical link in the national security argument for deploying tens of thousands of additional troops - the allegedly indissoluble link between the Taliban insurgency and al-Qaeda.

Proponents of escalation have insisted that the Taliban would inevitably provide new sanctuaries for al-Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan unless the US counter-insurgency mission was successful.

But during September and October, Obama sought to fend off escalation in Afghanistan in part by suggesting through other White House officials that the interests of the Taliban were no longer coincident with those of al-Qaeda.

In fact, intense political maneuvering between Obama and the top US commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley A. McChrystal, over the latter's troop increase request revolved primarily around the issue of whether the defeat of the Taliban was necessary to Washington's al-Qaeda strategy.

The first round of the effort was triggered by the leak of McChrystal's "initial assessment", with its warning of "mission failure" if his troop deployment request was rejected. The White House fought back with anonymous comments quoted in the Washington Post September 21 that the military was trying to push Obama into a corner on the troop deployment issue.

One of the anonymous senior officials criticized a statement by Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, that the war in Afghanistan would "probably need more forces".

To avoid being outmaneuvered by the military, Obama suggested in a press conference that the legitimacy of the Afghan government might now be so damaged by the blatantly fraudulent August 20 election as to put into question a counter-insurgency strategy such as the one advanced in McChrystal's assessment.

Obama also raised a red flag about the conventional argument from national security, saying he wasn't going to "think that by sending more troops, we're automatically going to make Americans safe".

Within a week, his national security adviser, General James Jones, began to raise that issue explicitly.

In an interview with Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, Jones suggested the question of why al-Qaeda would want to move out of its present sanctuary in Pakistan to the uncertainties of Afghanistan would be one that the White House would be raising in response to McChrystal's troop request.

McChrystal's rejoinder came in a speech at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London on October 1, in which he went further than any previous official rationale for the war. "[W]hen the Taliban has success," said McChrystal, "that provides sanctuary from which al-Qaeda can operate transnationally."

He was apparently arguing the Taliban wouldn't even have to seize power nationally to provide a sanctuary for al-Qaeda.

Only three days later, however, the New York Times reported that "senior administration officials" were saying privately that Obama's national security team was now "arguing that the Taliban in Afghanistan do not pose a direct threat to the United States".

That "shift in thinking", as the Times reported, was an obvious indication that the White House was preparing to pursue a strategy that would not require the additional troops McChrystal was requesting because the Taliban need not be defeated.

One of the senior officials interviewed by the Times said the administration was now defining the Taliban as a group that "does not express ambitions of attacking the United States". The Taliban were aligned with al-Qaeda "mainly on the tactical front", said the official.

A second theme introduced by the official was that the Taliban could not be eliminated because it was too deeply entrenched in the country - quite a different goal from that of the counter-insurgency war proposed by McChrystal.

That was an expression of resistance to what was soon reported to be a McChrystal request for a "low risk" option of 80,000 troops, combined with a suggestion that 20,000 troops would be the "high risk" option.

But Defense Secretary Robert Gates was determined to turn the White House around on the issue of McChrystal's request. He was well aware of Obama's political sensitivity about not being seen as on the wrong side of his national security team, and he effectively used that to force the issue.

Gates worked with McChrystal, Mullen and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on a plan that would be presented to the White House as their consensus position on the Afghanistan strategy.

The plan, as the New York Times reported on October 27, was presented by an administration official as a compromise between the plan put forth by Vice President Joseph Biden for concentrating essentially on al-Qaeda and McChrystal's counter-insurgency plan. It would be ostensibly aimed at protecting about 10 population centers, leaving the rest of the country to be handled by special operations forces with the assistance of drones and air power.

But the catch was that McChrystal was demanding an expansive definition of "population centers", which would include most of the Taliban heartland of the country.

McChrystal was still going to get his counter-insurgency war under the Gates plan.

Notably absent from the Times report was any suggestion that Obama had given even tentative approval to the proposal. Only Obama's advisers were said to be "coalescing around" it. But "administration officials" confidently asserted that the only issue remaining was how many more troops would be required to "guard the vital parts of the country".

That confidence was evidently based on the fact that Obama's national security team had already agreed on the options that would be presented to the president for decision. Two weeks after that report, Obama's press secretary, Robert Gibbs, said the president would consider four different options at a meeting with his national security team November 11.

The four options, as the Times reported the day of the meeting, ranged from a low-end option of 20,000 to roughly 40,000 troops. And Gates, Mullen and Clinton had "coalesced around" the middle option of about 30,000 troops.

Gates and his allies had thus defined the options and stacked the deck in favor of the one they were going to support. And the fact that Obama's national security was lined up in support of that option was already on the public record. It was a textbook demonstration of how the national security apparatus ensures that its policy preference on issues of military force prevail in the White House.

Although Obama bowed to pressure from his major national security advisers to agree to the 30,000 troops, his conviction that the Taliban is not necessarily a mortal enemy of the United States could influence future White House policy decisions on Afghanistan.

Obama's speech even included the suggestion that the defeat of the Taliban was not necessary to US security. That point could be used by Obama to justify future military or diplomatic moves to extract the United States from the quagmire he appeared to fear only a few weeks ago.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. 
 

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Afghanistan: This War Won't Work

The reasons for ending the war are growing, and justifications are few.

Phyllis Bennis

January 25, 2010

http://www.ips-dc.org/articles/afghanistan_this_war_wont_work

This article was distributed by Minuteman Media and originally appeared on Common Dreams on 1/25/10.

The recent Taliban attacks on Kabul provide another wake-up call about why this war in Afghanistan simply isn't going to work. It won't bring security to Afghans. It won't turn Afghanistan into a democracy. And it won't make us safer.

In fact, the war killed more people in Afghanistan last year than the year before—40 percent more civilians, according to the United Nations. And the body count this year is already shaping up to be higher than last year. That goes for U.S. troops too.

And President Obama's escalation, the 30,000 new troops he just announced he's sending to Afghanistan? That's not helping either. The Taliban have mostly stayed in the countryside, based in the small villages where almost 80 percent of Afghans live. But now, after Obama announced that the additional troops would be deployed in Afghanistan's "population centers," meaning the cities, guess where the Taliban headed for their most recent assault?

The same thing happens when U.S. troops go after Taliban or al-Qaeda targets-they may or may not kill the "right" person, but they consistently do kill a whole bunch of people guilty only of being in the very wrong place at the very wrong time. The "wrong" people get killed.

And what happens then? The grieving and outraged family, friends, and tribe members of those "wrong" people get angry. Very angry. They start to hate those who killed their family members — us —even if they never did before. And some of them turn to violence when they never would have before. This isn't new — military and political leaders acknowledge that we're creating more terrorists than we're killing. And still the policymakers aren't hearing it.

So it doesn't make us safer. And here at home we have another problem too. Alongside the horrifying human cost — young soldiers killed, others coming home with horrifying life-shattering injuries, others returning to face traumatic brain injury and PTSD — we have to pay the financial cost for this war.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have already cost us $950 billion. Yes, BILLION. That's not counting the $137 billion Congress appropriated for spending between now and September. And that also doesn't count the cost of those 30,000 new troops going to Afghanistan, which will cost roughly $30 billion more just for their first year.

Altogether, that means by the end of this year we will have spent about $1.08 trillion. Yes, TRILLION — a number so big it's practically incomprehensible.

What else could we do with that money? Well, just the cost of the current escalation could provide about six million people with health care. Or generate 600,000 well-paid green jobs.

Which is more likely to make us safer? Opposition to the U.S. war in Afghanistan, which peaked at almost 60 percent just a month or so ago, has dropped after Obama's escalation speech at West Point. We've got a lot of work to do to make sure his administration knows this war won't make us safer, and it just costs too much-too many lives and too much money. Are you listening, President Obama?