The following few paragraphs come near the end of a much longer article by Alfred M. McCoy, "The Opium Wars in Afghanistan." You can find the full article at: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/31-0
McCoy, a truly outstanding scholar, helps the reader to understand the historical and ongoing role that the US has played in the destruction of Afghanistan's agricultural system, unintentionally perhaps in fostering an economy that revolves largely around the cultivation of poppies, and preserving a system that brings rewards to a few and miserable poverty for the many.
In the paragraphs taken from the article, McCoy offers an "alternative" to the strategy of surging the troops (now in process). McCoy's alternative is succinct, doable, and makes a lot of sense.
-------------------------------
"....Is there any alternative? Even were the cost of rebuilding Afghanistan's rural economy -- with its orchards, flocks, and food crops -- as high as $30 billion or, for that matter, $90 billion dollars, the money is at hand. By conservative estimates, the cost [23] of President Obama's ongoing surge of 30,000 troops alone is $30 billion a year. So just bringing those 30,000 troops home would create ample funds to begin the rebuilding of rural life in Afghanistan, making it possible for young farmers to begin feeding their families without joining the Taliban's army.
"Short of another precipitous withdrawal akin to 1991, Washington has no realistic alternative to the costly, long-term reconstruction of Afghanistan's agriculture. Beneath the gaze of an allied force that now numbers about 120,000 soldiers, opium has fueled the Taliban's growth into an omnipresent shadow government and an effective guerrilla army. The idea that our expanded military presence might soon succeed in driving back that force and handing over pacification to the illiterate [24], drug-addicted Afghan police [25] and army [26] remains, for the time being, a fantasy. Quick fixes like paying poppy farmers not to plant, something British and Americans have both tried, can backfire and end up actually promoting yet more opium cultivation. Rapid drug eradication without alternative employment, something the private contractor DynCorp tried so disastrously [27] under a $150 million contract in 2005, would simply plunge Afghanistan into more misery, stoking mass anger and destabilizing the Kabul government further.
"So the choice is clear enough: we can continue to fertilize this deadly soil with yet more blood in a brutal war with an uncertain outcome -- for both the United States and the people of Afghanistan. Or we can begin to withdraw American forces while helping renew this ancient, arid land by replanting its orchards, replenishing its flocks, and rebuilding the irrigation systems ruined in decades of war...."
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
New report on corruption in Afghanistan confirms previous studies and estimates
The corruption in Afghanistan is well established and helps to divert foreign aid from its intended purposes into the hands of powerful warlords and friends of the Karzai government. There is a vicious cycle implicit in this situation, namely, that those in powerful positions are able to consolidate their power, while the poor majority of Afghan people see little or no progress out of their misery. In the meantime, US/NATO forces are directed at the "Taliban," leaving the warlords free to keep the corrupt system from which they benefit in motion. Malalai Joya provides background on this problem in her book, A Woman Among Warlords.
"According to an article in the Sunday Telegraph, on January 20, 2007, 'Defence officials in the United States and Britain estimate that up to half of all aid in Afghanistan is failing to reach the right people....
"Endemic corruption combined with the vacuum of leadership in Kabul has made Afghanistan fertile ground for narcotrafficking. Afghanistan is a country capable of growing food to feed its own people, but most of our best agricultural land is planted with poppy seed because it's a cash crop for export"....
A new UN report documents the continuation of corruption in Afghanistan. Here are excerpts from one of numerous reports on the study.
------------------------------
Corruption deepens poverty in Afghanistan-U.N. report
30 Mar 2010 18:16:49 GMT 30 Mar 2010 18:16:49 Source: Reuters
http://www.alertnews.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE62T1SV.htm
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA, March 30 (Reuters) - Corruption is entrenched in Afghanistan, leaving the poor at the mercy of the powerful while security-obsessed international forces often turn a blind eye to abuses, a United Nations report charged on Tuesday.
Despite $35 billion injected into the economy since 2002, one in three Afghans, or 9 million people, live in absolute poverty while another third survive just above the poverty line, it said.
"A key driver of poverty in Afghanistan is the abuse of power. Many Afghan power-holders use their influence to drive the public agenda for their own personal or vested interests," said the report issued by the U.N. human rights office....
"The 26-page report is based on the results of a survey conducted in 14 provinces, interviews with officials and community leaders as well as research by groups including Oxfam.
Many communities believe, rightly or wrongly, that food aid had been either embezzled or diverted elsewhere, it found....
"According to an article in the Sunday Telegraph, on January 20, 2007, 'Defence officials in the United States and Britain estimate that up to half of all aid in Afghanistan is failing to reach the right people....
"Endemic corruption combined with the vacuum of leadership in Kabul has made Afghanistan fertile ground for narcotrafficking. Afghanistan is a country capable of growing food to feed its own people, but most of our best agricultural land is planted with poppy seed because it's a cash crop for export"....
A new UN report documents the continuation of corruption in Afghanistan. Here are excerpts from one of numerous reports on the study.
------------------------------
Corruption deepens poverty in Afghanistan-U.N. report
30 Mar 2010 18:16:49 GMT 30 Mar 2010 18:16:49 Source: Reuters
http://www.alertnews.org/thenews/newsdesk/LDE62T1SV.htm
By Stephanie Nebehay
GENEVA, March 30 (Reuters) - Corruption is entrenched in Afghanistan, leaving the poor at the mercy of the powerful while security-obsessed international forces often turn a blind eye to abuses, a United Nations report charged on Tuesday.
Despite $35 billion injected into the economy since 2002, one in three Afghans, or 9 million people, live in absolute poverty while another third survive just above the poverty line, it said.
"A key driver of poverty in Afghanistan is the abuse of power. Many Afghan power-holders use their influence to drive the public agenda for their own personal or vested interests," said the report issued by the U.N. human rights office....
"The 26-page report is based on the results of a survey conducted in 14 provinces, interviews with officials and community leaders as well as research by groups including Oxfam.
Many communities believe, rightly or wrongly, that food aid had been either embezzled or diverted elsewhere, it found....
Ambassador Eikenberry's cautionary cable to the Obama administration regarding the surge
This post focuses on excerpts from one of two classified cables sent by US Ambassador to Afghanistan, Gen. Eikenberry, to the Secretary of State in November, 2009. The cables were leaked that month and published in the New York Times shortly thereafter. You can see the original cables in their entirety at: http://documents.nytimes.com/eikenberry-s-memos-on-the-strategy-in-afghanistan#document/p1 The text of the cables is now available and/or commented on at numerous Internet sites. The cables have thus become a part of the public record, whatever their original status.
On the Democracy Now program yesterday (3-30-10), Daniel Ellsberg was interviewed. He is the citizen, then employed at the RAND Corporation with access to classified materials, who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers to the public during the Vietnam War. During the DN interview, Ellsberg drew parallels between the Pentagon Papers and the Eichenberry cables and discussed the implications and the need to have transparent public discussions on matters of importance to the American citizenry.
New York Time journalists Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Landler provide some background and context for understanding the implications of the Eikenberry cables in their article, "US Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan," Nov. 11. 2009. You can find the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/us/politics/12policy.html_r=2.
In the first of the two cables, Amb. Eikenberry offers his views on why President Obama should not send additional US troops to Afghanistan, or "surge" the number of troops going there. We here at stopafghanwar are in accord with Eikenberry's position, as far as it goes. We would also support a firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country.
Amb. Eikenberry later modified his views, at least publicly at congressional hearings, and did not then demur from the surge-of-troops policy.
Bob
-----------------------------
First Eikenberry cable: (excerpts follow)
....Here are my reasons for this assessment:
1) President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibiltiy and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal—a secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responssibiliy for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance, or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest futher. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending “war on terror” and for military bases to use against surrounding powers....
2) We overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over. Success of the proposed counterinsurgency strategy hinges upon Afghan forces steadily assuming responsibility for security and fully taking over this duty by 2013....The Army’s high attrition and low recruitment rates for Pashtuns in the south are crippling. Simply keeping the force at current levels requires tens of thousands of new recruits every year to replace attrition losses and battlefield casualties; those requirements would steepen dramatically under the proposed strategy. Building an effective Afghan National Police, which is in many ways more crucial to extend the Afghan government’s reach into villages and districts will prove even tougher. The Police receive lower benefits and face higher risks in many places than the Army....
3) We underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government. The proposed strategy assumes that once the clearing and holding process has been accomplished in a given area, the rebuilding and tranferring to Afghans can proceed apace followed by a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal. In reality, the process of restoring Afghan government is likely to be slow and uneven, no matter how many U.S. and other foreign civilian experts are involved. Many areas need not just security but healthcare, education, justice, infrastructure, and almost every other basic government function. Many have never had these services at all. Establishing them requires trained and honest Afghan officials to replace our own personnel. That cadre of Afghan civilians does not now exist and would take years to build....
5) The proposed strategy may not be cost-effective. Sending additional combat brigades will require tens of billions of dollars annually for years to come, costs not detailed in DOD [Department of Defense] charts....
– In particular, we should weigh whether a relatively small additional investment in programs for development and governance would yield results that, if not as visible as those from sending more troops, would move us closer to achieving our goals at far lesser cost and risk, both in lives and dollars. Accelerating our work on signature projects to deliver greater access to electricity, water, and education could have a high payoff in stability over the long term. With a greatly stepped-up development effort we can could be in a position at some point to call off further troop deployments, as Afghans begin to see their lives improving and their needs addressed....
Respectfully,EIKENBERY
On the Democracy Now program yesterday (3-30-10), Daniel Ellsberg was interviewed. He is the citizen, then employed at the RAND Corporation with access to classified materials, who leaked the classified Pentagon Papers to the public during the Vietnam War. During the DN interview, Ellsberg drew parallels between the Pentagon Papers and the Eichenberry cables and discussed the implications and the need to have transparent public discussions on matters of importance to the American citizenry.
New York Time journalists Elisabeth Bumiller and Mark Landler provide some background and context for understanding the implications of the Eikenberry cables in their article, "US Envoy Urges Caution on Forces for Afghanistan," Nov. 11. 2009. You can find the article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/12/us/politics/12policy.html_r=2.
In the first of the two cables, Amb. Eikenberry offers his views on why President Obama should not send additional US troops to Afghanistan, or "surge" the number of troops going there. We here at stopafghanwar are in accord with Eikenberry's position, as far as it goes. We would also support a firm timetable for the withdrawal of US troops from the country.
Amb. Eikenberry later modified his views, at least publicly at congressional hearings, and did not then demur from the surge-of-troops policy.
Bob
-----------------------------
First Eikenberry cable: (excerpts follow)
....Here are my reasons for this assessment:
1) President Karzai is not an adequate strategic partner. The proposed counterinsurgency strategy assumes an Afghan political leadership that is both able to take responsibiltiy and to exert sovereignty in the furtherance of our goal—a secure, peaceful, minimally self-sufficient Afghanistan hardened against transnational groups. Yet Karzai continues to shun responssibiliy for any sovereign burden, whether defense, governance, or development. He and much of his circle do not want the U.S. to leave and are only too happy to see us invest futher. They assume we covet their territory for a never-ending “war on terror” and for military bases to use against surrounding powers....
2) We overestimate the ability of Afghan security forces to take over. Success of the proposed counterinsurgency strategy hinges upon Afghan forces steadily assuming responsibility for security and fully taking over this duty by 2013....The Army’s high attrition and low recruitment rates for Pashtuns in the south are crippling. Simply keeping the force at current levels requires tens of thousands of new recruits every year to replace attrition losses and battlefield casualties; those requirements would steepen dramatically under the proposed strategy. Building an effective Afghan National Police, which is in many ways more crucial to extend the Afghan government’s reach into villages and districts will prove even tougher. The Police receive lower benefits and face higher risks in many places than the Army....
3) We underestimate how long it will take to restore or establish civilian government. The proposed strategy assumes that once the clearing and holding process has been accomplished in a given area, the rebuilding and tranferring to Afghans can proceed apace followed by a relatively rapid U.S. withdrawal. In reality, the process of restoring Afghan government is likely to be slow and uneven, no matter how many U.S. and other foreign civilian experts are involved. Many areas need not just security but healthcare, education, justice, infrastructure, and almost every other basic government function. Many have never had these services at all. Establishing them requires trained and honest Afghan officials to replace our own personnel. That cadre of Afghan civilians does not now exist and would take years to build....
5) The proposed strategy may not be cost-effective. Sending additional combat brigades will require tens of billions of dollars annually for years to come, costs not detailed in DOD [Department of Defense] charts....
– In particular, we should weigh whether a relatively small additional investment in programs for development and governance would yield results that, if not as visible as those from sending more troops, would move us closer to achieving our goals at far lesser cost and risk, both in lives and dollars. Accelerating our work on signature projects to deliver greater access to electricity, water, and education could have a high payoff in stability over the long term. With a greatly stepped-up development effort we can could be in a position at some point to call off further troop deployments, as Afghans begin to see their lives improving and their needs addressed....
Respectfully,EIKENBERY
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Interview excerpts - Daniel Ellsberg on Obama's good war in Afghanistan
Below I quote some points made on Democracy Now by Daniel Ellsberg, interviewed by Anjali Kamat and Amy Goodman, March 30, 2010. Ellsberg drew parallels between the war in Afghanistan and the Vietnam War. In the excerpts from the interview that follow I focus on some of his responses on Afghanistan – for the most part. Ellsberg’s position on the Afghanistan War is to bring it to an end as soon as it is reasonable to do so. (Go to democracynow.org for the full interview.)
A little background on Daniel Ellsberg - We [Democracy Now] are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.
Daniel Ellsberg - [excerpts from interview follow]
Obama’s war - President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965…with very much the same results in the end, tragic results.
Secret cables - Secret cables from the US ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry were leaked by someone in January…He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.
Drugs are necessary to Afghan government- Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government….In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.
Counterinsurgency will not work - What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.
Additional US troops will make the problem worse - ….when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point, and that, too, was a first installment.
Training of Afghans for Afghan army [and police] will continue to go badly - ….That is not going to come from the Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will not be drawn down next year - ….four years from now we will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.
Afghan civilian casualties -….He [Gen. McChrystal] also, for the first time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.
Congress will have to withhold funding for the war to end, but that’s unlikely - ….The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No, very, very unlikely
A little background on Daniel Ellsberg - We [Democracy Now] are joined by a man who played a major role in efforts to end the Vietnam War in the 1970s. In 1971, the then-RAND Corporation analyst Daniel Ellsberg leaked to the media what became known as the Pentagon Papers, a 7,000-page classified history outlining the true extent of US involvement in Vietnam. After avoiding a life sentence on espionage charges, Daniel Ellsberg has continued to speak out against US militarism until the present day.
Daniel Ellsberg - [excerpts from interview follow]
Obama’s war - President Obama is taking every symbolic step he can to nominate this as Obama’s war, just as the Vietnam War became Nixon’s war in November of 1969, just about the time I was copying the Pentagon Papers in hopes of forestalling that, and Johnson made Vietnam his war, Johnson’s war, and McNamara’s war in June of 1965…with very much the same results in the end, tragic results.
Secret cables - Secret cables from the US ambassador in Kabul, Lieutenant General, retired, Karl Eikenberry were leaked by someone in January…He’s describing the President, Karzai, to whom he’s accredited and who he just visited with President Obama. And Karzai has presumably read Eikenberry’s assessment of him as—that he is not an adequate strategic partner for the United States, and for reasons of corruption and inefficiency.
Drugs are necessary to Afghan government- Allegedly, we hear that Obama’s reason for going seventeen hours over to Afghanistan was to convey in person our desire that he clean up his government….In Karzai’s government, as in the Mafia, corruption are us, drugs are us. Corruption is his government. That’s his constituency, his source of income. There is no chance whatever that he’ll, for instance, root out his brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, from Kandahar, which is our next base of operations, despite the fact that our chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff says no success is possible in Kandahar while corruption is still the heart of that, while drug dealing is the heart of that, so long as Wali, the President’s, Karzai’s brother, is in charge there.
Counterinsurgency will not work - What it ignores is that the recruiting tool of our adversaries there is predominantly the presence of foreign troops. And when we add more foreign troops, we are sustaining that recruiting tool. And for every enemy trying to eject foreigners from his country that we kill, and especially his families, the wedding parties, and the funeral parties after we’ve hit the wedding parties, all of those recruit more people in a way that will—assures us that, contrary to what President Obama is saying, we will not prevail. When he does say we aren’t going to quit, in the short run, at least, he’s right, unfortunately. We have many years ahead of us.
Additional US troops will make the problem worse - ….when we have those extra 30,000 to 40,000 troops there and are up to the level of 100,000, which, with NATO troops, will bring us up to the level at which the Soviets occupied Afghanistan and failed after ten years, the thought that that’s the last request by McChrystal is simply absurd. McChrystal himself was asking for 80,000 troops at this point, and that, too, was a first installment.
Training of Afghans for Afghan army [and police] will continue to go badly - ….That is not going to come from the Afghan troops, who desert about as fast as we recruit them and who are not very highly motivated working for foreigners, like the government of Vietnam soldiers we worked with. They are not going to fill that gap.
The number of US troops in Afghanistan will not be drawn down next year - ….four years from now we will have more troops in Afghanistan than we have two years from now.
Afghan civilian casualties -….He [Gen. McChrystal] also, for the first time, talks about wanting to reduce civilian casualties. But by increasing the number of US troops over there greatly and increasing the number of engagements, even if you reduce the rate of civilian deaths per engagement, the overall effect is going to be that you’re killing the relatives of people who are going to enlist in the insurgency.
Congress will have to withhold funding for the war to end, but that’s unlikely - ….The head of the Appropriations Committee, David Obey, Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, Harry Reid in the Senate have all said they oppose further escalation, just like Eikenberry, the general who is our ambassador in Afghanistan. But does that mean they will vote against the appropriations that send those people over there to die and to kill? No, very, very unlikely
Monday, March 29, 2010
Some evidence challenges upbeat message to US troops in Afghanistan
Yesterday, President Barack Obama paid an unannounced visit to Afghanistan. During his short time there, he addressed an audience of US troops. If you go to the whitehouse.gov website, you can read and/or hear the full address.
The White House emphasizes on its web site the following paragraph from the President’s speech that sums up what Obama, his administration, and military advisers view as the principal missions of the US occupation in Afghanistan. There is nothing new in what the President said in this regard, only the same themes that we have long ago found unpersuasive and why we support a reasonable, but committed, timeline for withdrawing our troops.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/28/one-night-afghanistan
In his remarks, President Obama reiterated the mission before the troops:
Our broad mission is clear: We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That is our mission. And to accomplish that goal, our objectives here in Afghanistan are also clear: We’re going to deny al Qaeda safe haven. We’re going to reverse the Taliban’s momentum. We’re going to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces and the Afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the Afghan people.
Here are some recent articles that dispute or raise serious doubt about success in Obama’s Afghan mission statement, namely, (1) the training of Afghan army recruits is going badly, (2) similarly it is going badly for the training of Afghan police recruits, (3) the US is turning parts of the huge Bagram military base in Afghanistan into another Gitmo, and (4) the US military goal of reducing or ending poppy cultivation is being put on hold.
First, the McClatchy Washington Bureau reports that US marines find it exasperating to team up with Afghan soldiers. http://mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/24/91014/afghan-soldiers-way-below-standard.html.
Second, an article written by T. Christian Miller, Mark Osenball and Ron Moreau for Mother Jones magazine documents how the training of Afghan police is going badly, even after the US has spent $6 billion on the effort. See: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/6-billion-later-afghan-cops-aren’t%E2%80%99t-ready-serve
Pratap Chatterjee provides further documentation of the poor police training results for Afghan recruits in his article for TomDispatch.com, “How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck.” See: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175220/tomgram%3A-pratap-chatterjee%2C-failing-afghanistan%27s-cops
Third, here are two “headlines” from Democracy Now’s program of March 23. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/23/headlines
Report: US Mulls Bagram as Next Gitmo
The Los Angeles Times is reporting the Obama administration is considering a plan to jail foreign prisoners at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan instead of at Guantanamo Bay. Using Bagram would allow the administration to meet its pledge to close Guantanamo while still denying prisoners the right to challenge their detentions in US courts. The plan would also help the White House evade scrutiny for the torture and mistreatment of prisoners because they would remain jailed off US soil. The Los Angeles Times also reports US officials decided to kill a foreign suspect in Somalia last year in part due to uncertainty over where he would be jailed if captured. The suspect, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, was killed in a US air strike after US officials decided they wouldn’t know where to imprison him.
US Halts Poppy Eradication in Afghan Areas
The US military, meanwhile, has confirmed it’s ended poppy eradication in several areas of Afghanistan. US forces have previously targeted Afghan farmers responsible for poppy crops that produce large quantities of opium and heroin. But the US says it’s ended the eradications in a bid to win over Afghan support. A US military official said, “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.”
These are all sources that bring President Obama’s upbeat address to the troops in Afghanistan yesterday into question.
There is another somewhat relevant point. Obama has sometimes been compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. However, if you compare what Obama has said about our missions in Afghanistan and how it is “a good war,” with MLK’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break the Silence,” you may quickly understand how they fundamentally differ on the use of military force in resolving conflicts abroad. Obama sees the use of military force as a good strategy in Afghanistan, whereas MLK found military force to be counterproductive in Vietnam – and, of course, was a historically major voice for non-violence and negotiations in the use of American power and influence in the world. For MLK, there were no good wars. You can find MLK’s speech at http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
The White House emphasizes on its web site the following paragraph from the President’s speech that sums up what Obama, his administration, and military advisers view as the principal missions of the US occupation in Afghanistan. There is nothing new in what the President said in this regard, only the same themes that we have long ago found unpersuasive and why we support a reasonable, but committed, timeline for withdrawing our troops.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/28/one-night-afghanistan
In his remarks, President Obama reiterated the mission before the troops:
Our broad mission is clear: We are going to disrupt and dismantle, defeat and destroy al Qaeda and its extremist allies. That is our mission. And to accomplish that goal, our objectives here in Afghanistan are also clear: We’re going to deny al Qaeda safe haven. We’re going to reverse the Taliban’s momentum. We’re going to strengthen the capacity of Afghan security forces and the Afghan government so that they can begin taking responsibility and gain confidence of the Afghan people.
Here are some recent articles that dispute or raise serious doubt about success in Obama’s Afghan mission statement, namely, (1) the training of Afghan army recruits is going badly, (2) similarly it is going badly for the training of Afghan police recruits, (3) the US is turning parts of the huge Bagram military base in Afghanistan into another Gitmo, and (4) the US military goal of reducing or ending poppy cultivation is being put on hold.
First, the McClatchy Washington Bureau reports that US marines find it exasperating to team up with Afghan soldiers. http://mcclatchydc.com/2010/03/24/91014/afghan-soldiers-way-below-standard.html.
Second, an article written by T. Christian Miller, Mark Osenball and Ron Moreau for Mother Jones magazine documents how the training of Afghan police is going badly, even after the US has spent $6 billion on the effort. See: http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/03/6-billion-later-afghan-cops-aren’t%E2%80%99t-ready-serve
Pratap Chatterjee provides further documentation of the poor police training results for Afghan recruits in his article for TomDispatch.com, “How Afghan Police Training Became a Train Wreck.” See: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/175220/tomgram%3A-pratap-chatterjee%2C-failing-afghanistan%27s-cops
Third, here are two “headlines” from Democracy Now’s program of March 23. http://www.democracynow.org/2010/3/23/headlines
Report: US Mulls Bagram as Next Gitmo
The Los Angeles Times is reporting the Obama administration is considering a plan to jail foreign prisoners at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan instead of at Guantanamo Bay. Using Bagram would allow the administration to meet its pledge to close Guantanamo while still denying prisoners the right to challenge their detentions in US courts. The plan would also help the White House evade scrutiny for the torture and mistreatment of prisoners because they would remain jailed off US soil. The Los Angeles Times also reports US officials decided to kill a foreign suspect in Somalia last year in part due to uncertainty over where he would be jailed if captured. The suspect, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, was killed in a US air strike after US officials decided they wouldn’t know where to imprison him.
US Halts Poppy Eradication in Afghan Areas
The US military, meanwhile, has confirmed it’s ended poppy eradication in several areas of Afghanistan. US forces have previously targeted Afghan farmers responsible for poppy crops that produce large quantities of opium and heroin. But the US says it’s ended the eradications in a bid to win over Afghan support. A US military official said, “We don’t trample the livelihood of those we’re trying to win over.”
These are all sources that bring President Obama’s upbeat address to the troops in Afghanistan yesterday into question.
There is another somewhat relevant point. Obama has sometimes been compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. However, if you compare what Obama has said about our missions in Afghanistan and how it is “a good war,” with MLK’s 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam – A Time to Break the Silence,” you may quickly understand how they fundamentally differ on the use of military force in resolving conflicts abroad. Obama sees the use of military force as a good strategy in Afghanistan, whereas MLK found military force to be counterproductive in Vietnam – and, of course, was a historically major voice for non-violence and negotiations in the use of American power and influence in the world. For MLK, there were no good wars. You can find MLK’s speech at http://americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm
Sunday, March 28, 2010
American-led or -only wars, preparation for wars, out-of-the-limelight wars
Chalmers Johnson documents the extension of the US military across the third world in his book, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. He estimates that by 2004 the Defense Department ackowledged some 725 military bases in other countries. He writes: "The bases in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, and elsewhere served primarily as high-ranking officers' watering spots and comfortable sites for their remote-contro command posts" (p. 24).
The US bases are not confined to the Middle East, but also exist in parts of Europe, Central Asia,
South America, and increasingly in Africa. He notes: "The American network of bases is a sign not of military preparedness but of militarism, the inescapable companion of imperialism" (24).
The American military, by far the largest in the world, has been built, expanded, and sustained by a number of imperatives. The American industrial-complex generates its own momentum. Military chiefs want the opportunities to use their vast armies. Corporate executives producing weapons or supplies want to keep expanding. The communities with military bases or other facilities want them kept open. The elected officials in Washington, D.C., are exposed to great lobbying pressure from the weapons-makers and the communities in their districts or states that have military installations.
Another great and growing imperative for the imperalistic reach of the US military is identified by Michael T. Klare in his books, the most recent of which is titled Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (pub. 2008). His basic point is that there is increasing demand for diminishing resources of all kinds (e.g., oil). Out of this intensifing competition, US military bases serve to offer some protection, if only symbolic, of how the US government will use every means to protect and advance the interests of her corporations in the competition to control increasingly scarce resources, wherever they are located. Indeed, the US economy, as it is presently organized, is ever-more dependent on these foreign resources.
There is also the imperative of national hubris, the pride elites have for being a superpower, if only in symbolic terms. America first, the nurturing of patriotism of a certain kind among many Americans, is an extension of this hubris of the higher circles. The alliances that foster domination of friendly nations over their own citizens or others residing in their vicinity is a paramount considertion (e.g., Israel over Palestinians).
In the following article, renown documentarian, journalist, and author John Pilger calls our attention to some of these imperatives. They all have relevance for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other potential wars. Pilger's hope is that US power and the power of its allies (e.g., the United Kingdom) will be increasingly challenged by their own citizens. If this does not happen, we will face ever-emergent wars, or "permanent war."
Bob
-----------------------------------
Barack Obama, Britain and the age of permanent war - http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/18021/1/
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.
By John PilgerNew Statesman26 March 2010
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence", Robert Gates, complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war, they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marjah" from the Taliban's "command-and-control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
Silent witness
“War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is shown to have no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by comparing the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) to the public reckoning today of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of well-known writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them has spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, Unicef noted, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Partners in crime
Norman Mailer once said he believed the US, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent".
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced, perhaps, but the results are unambiguous. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior UN officials in Iraq during the US- and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.
The US bases are not confined to the Middle East, but also exist in parts of Europe, Central Asia,
South America, and increasingly in Africa. He notes: "The American network of bases is a sign not of military preparedness but of militarism, the inescapable companion of imperialism" (24).
The American military, by far the largest in the world, has been built, expanded, and sustained by a number of imperatives. The American industrial-complex generates its own momentum. Military chiefs want the opportunities to use their vast armies. Corporate executives producing weapons or supplies want to keep expanding. The communities with military bases or other facilities want them kept open. The elected officials in Washington, D.C., are exposed to great lobbying pressure from the weapons-makers and the communities in their districts or states that have military installations.
Another great and growing imperative for the imperalistic reach of the US military is identified by Michael T. Klare in his books, the most recent of which is titled Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy (pub. 2008). His basic point is that there is increasing demand for diminishing resources of all kinds (e.g., oil). Out of this intensifing competition, US military bases serve to offer some protection, if only symbolic, of how the US government will use every means to protect and advance the interests of her corporations in the competition to control increasingly scarce resources, wherever they are located. Indeed, the US economy, as it is presently organized, is ever-more dependent on these foreign resources.
There is also the imperative of national hubris, the pride elites have for being a superpower, if only in symbolic terms. America first, the nurturing of patriotism of a certain kind among many Americans, is an extension of this hubris of the higher circles. The alliances that foster domination of friendly nations over their own citizens or others residing in their vicinity is a paramount considertion (e.g., Israel over Palestinians).
In the following article, renown documentarian, journalist, and author John Pilger calls our attention to some of these imperatives. They all have relevance for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and other potential wars. Pilger's hope is that US power and the power of its allies (e.g., the United Kingdom) will be increasingly challenged by their own citizens. If this does not happen, we will face ever-emergent wars, or "permanent war."
Bob
-----------------------------------
Barack Obama, Britain and the age of permanent war - http://stopwar.org.uk/content/view/18021/1/
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.
By John PilgerNew Statesman26 March 2010
Here is news of the Third World War. The United States has invaded Africa. US troops have entered Somalia, extending their war front from Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen and now the Horn of Africa. In preparation for an attack on Iran, "bunker-buster" bombs are said to be arriving at the US base on the British island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.
In Gaza, the sick and abandoned population, mostly children, is being entombed behind underground American-supplied walls to reinforce a criminal siege. In Latin America, the Obama administration has secured seven bases in Colombia from which to wage a war of attrition against the popular democracies in Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador and Paraguay. Meanwhile, the secretary of "defence", Robert Gates, complains that "the general [European] public and the political class" are so opposed to war, they are an "impediment" to peace. Remember, this is the month of the March Hare.
According to an American general, the invasion of Afghanistan is not so much a real war as a "war of perception". Thus, the recent "liberation of the city of Marjah" from the Taliban's "command-and-control structure" was pure Hollywood. Marjah is not a city; there was no Taliban command and control. The heroic liberators killed the usual civilians, the poorest of the poor. Otherwise, it was fake. A war of perception is meant to provide fake news for the folks back home, to make a failed colonial adventure seem worthwhile and patriotic, as if The Hurt Locker were real and the parades of flag-wrapped coffins through Wootton Bassett were not a cynical propaganda exercise.
Silent witness
“War is fun", the helmets in Vietnam used to say with bleakest irony, meaning that if a war is shown to have no purpose other than to justify voracious power in the cause of lucrative fanaticisms such as the weapons industry, the danger of truth beckons. This danger can be illustrated by comparing the liberal perception of Tony Blair in 1997 as one "who wants to create a world [where] ideology has surrendered entirely to 'values'" (Hugo Young, the Guardian) to the public reckoning today of a liar and war criminal.
Western war-states such as the US and Britain are threatened not by the Taliban or any other introverted tribesmen in faraway places, but by the anti-war instincts of their own citizens. Consider the draconian sentences handed down in London to scores of young people who protested against Israel's assault on Gaza in January last year. Following demonstrations in which paramilitary police "kettled" thousands, first offenders have received two and a half years in prison for minor offences that would not normally carry a custodial sentence. On both sides of the Atlantic, serious dissent exposing illegal war has become a serious crime.
Silence in other high places allows this moral travesty. Across the arts, literature, journalism and the law, liberal elites, having hurried away from the debris of Blair and now Obama, continue to fudge their indifference to the barbarism and aims of western state crimes by promoting retrospectively the evils of their convenient demons, such as Saddam Hussein. With Harold Pinter gone, try compiling a list of well-known writers, artists and advocates whose principles are not consumed by the "market" or neutered by their celebrity. Who among them has spoken out about the holocaust in Iraq during almost 20 years of lethal blockade and assault? And all of it has been deliberate. On 22 January 1991, the US Defence Intelligence Agency predicted in impressive detail how a blockade would systematically destroy Iraq's clean water system and lead to "increased incidences, if not epidemics, of disease". So the US set about eliminating clean water for the Iraqi population: one of the causes, Unicef noted, of the deaths of half a million Iraqi infants under the age of five. But this extremism apparently has no name.
Partners in crime
Norman Mailer once said he believed the US, in its endless pursuit of war and domination, had entered a "pre-fascist era". Mailer seemed tentative, as if trying to warn about something even he could not quite define. "Fascism" is not right, for it invokes lazy historical precedents, conjuring yet again the iconography of German and Italian repression. On the other hand, American authoritarianism, as the American cultural critic Henry Giroux pointed out recently, is "more nuance, less theatrical, more cunning, less concerned with repressive modes of control than with manipulative modes of consent".
This is Americanism, the only predatory ideology to deny that it is an ideology. The rise of tentacular corporations that are dictatorships in their own right and of a military that is now a state within the state, set behind the façade of the best democracy 35,000 Washington lobbyists can buy, and a popular culture programmed to divert and stultify, is without precedent. More nuanced, perhaps, but the results are unambiguous. Denis Halliday and Hans von Sponeck, the senior UN officials in Iraq during the US- and British-led blockade, are in no doubt they witnessed genocide. They saw no gas chambers. Insidious, undeclared, even presented wittily as enlightenment on the march, the Third World War and its genocide proceeded, human being by human being.
In the coming election campaign in Britain, the candidates will refer to this war only to laud "our boys". The candidates are almost identical political mummies, shrouded in the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes. As Blair demonstrated a mite too eagerly, the British elite love America because America allows them to barrack and bomb the natives and call themselves "partners". We should interrupt their fun.
Friday, March 26, 2010
Conference in July to support "bring the troops home now"
AfterDowningStreet.org
We're on Facebook and Youtube and Twitter
AN INVITATION FROM: After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, U.S. Labor Against the War, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [list in formation]
Announcing…
A National Conference
To Bring the Troops Home Now!
July 23-25, 2010, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Albany, New York
The purpose of this conference is to bring together antiwar and social justice activists from across the country to discuss and decide what we can do together to end the wars, occupations, bombing attacks, threats and interventions that are taking place in the Middle East and beyond, which the U.S. government is conducting and promoting. Attend and voice your opinion on where the antiwar movement is today and where we go from here.
In these deeply troubled times, Washington's two wars and occupations rage on, resulting in an ever increasing number of dead and wounded; more and more civilians killed in drone bombing attacks; misery, deprivation, dislocation and shattered lives for millions; and a suicide rate for U.S. service members soaring to unprecedented heights. At the same time, trillions are spent on these seemingly endless Pentagon conflicts waged in pursuit of profits and global domination while trillions more are lost by working people in the value of their homes, in the loss of their jobs, pensions and health care, and in cuts for public services and vitally needed social programs.
We are witness to the massive bailout of banks and corporations while union contracts are shredded, work is outsourced, jobs are shipped off-shore, workers are evicted from their homes, and our youth and students face a bleak future of rising tuition costs, an ever-declining quality of education, and diminishing employment opportunities. They are offered instead the opportunity to become cannon fodder as the military serves as the employer of last resort while prison awaits many others.
The poor and working people in the U.S. suffer the horrors of unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, untreated illnesses and unavailable health insurance, crumbling infrastructure, and temporary and part time work at starvation wages. These multiple crises impact communities of color with disproportionate severity. Meanwhile people in a growing number of countries around the world are subjected to death and destruction by the world’s most powerful military machine.
There is another dimension to this tragedy. The U.S. is at war to control and plunder the very fossil fuel resources whose continued use threatens the future of the human race.
We demand the immediate and total withdrawal of U.S. military forces, mercenaries and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, we recognize that the Middle East cauldron today also encompasses Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine and Israel, while Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries in Latin America are targeted for intervention, subversion, occupation and control as a consequence of a militarized U.S. foreign policy. Our challenge is not only to end wars and occupations, but to fundamentally change the aggressive policies that inevitably lead our country to militarism and war.
The fight for better times, for a world of peace, justice and freedom, requires that we join together to make it happen, that we fight for the broad unity within the antiwar movement and across all the movements for social justice that has to date escaped us and that we collaborate to engage the American people in massive and united mobilizations against the warmakers and for the justice we deserve.
We have not forgotten the lessons of the civil rights movement, the struggle against the Vietnam War, the feminist and gay rights movements, and the monumental struggles that paved the way to the organization of American trade unions. History has demonstrated time and again that all critical social change is a product of the direct and massive intervention of the people.
We seek an inclusive conference where antiwar individuals and organizations come together to democratically discuss, debate and approve a plan of action aimed at winning the support and allegiance of the majority who have the power to compel a fundamental re-ordering of priorities.
We announce in advance that our goal is to develop strategies that unite us in action – for mass mobilizations and a variety of other tactics that suit the agendas of the constituent groups and individuals who participate in the conference proceedings. Our method is democracy. One person one vote! Our goal is unity in action while respecting our diversity and differences in political program and orientation.
Join us in Albany, New York, July 23-25, 2010!
Issued by the United National Antiwar Conference (UNAC) Planning Committee
For more information, write UNAC2010@aol.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 21675, Cleveland, OH 44121 or call 518-227-6947 or visit our website at http://www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Print postcard: PDF.
We're on Facebook and Youtube and Twitter
AN INVITATION FROM: After Downing Street, Arab American Union Members Council, Black Agenda Report, Campaign for Peace and Democracy, Campus Antiwar Network, Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War, National Assembly to End the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and Occupations, Peace of the Action, Progressive Democrats of America, U.S. Labor Against the War, The Fellowship of Reconciliation, Veterans for Peace, Voices for Creative Nonviolence, and Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom [list in formation]
Announcing…
A National Conference
To Bring the Troops Home Now!
July 23-25, 2010, Crowne Plaza Hotel, Albany, New York
The purpose of this conference is to bring together antiwar and social justice activists from across the country to discuss and decide what we can do together to end the wars, occupations, bombing attacks, threats and interventions that are taking place in the Middle East and beyond, which the U.S. government is conducting and promoting. Attend and voice your opinion on where the antiwar movement is today and where we go from here.
In these deeply troubled times, Washington's two wars and occupations rage on, resulting in an ever increasing number of dead and wounded; more and more civilians killed in drone bombing attacks; misery, deprivation, dislocation and shattered lives for millions; and a suicide rate for U.S. service members soaring to unprecedented heights. At the same time, trillions are spent on these seemingly endless Pentagon conflicts waged in pursuit of profits and global domination while trillions more are lost by working people in the value of their homes, in the loss of their jobs, pensions and health care, and in cuts for public services and vitally needed social programs.
We are witness to the massive bailout of banks and corporations while union contracts are shredded, work is outsourced, jobs are shipped off-shore, workers are evicted from their homes, and our youth and students face a bleak future of rising tuition costs, an ever-declining quality of education, and diminishing employment opportunities. They are offered instead the opportunity to become cannon fodder as the military serves as the employer of last resort while prison awaits many others.
The poor and working people in the U.S. suffer the horrors of unemployment, foreclosures, homelessness, untreated illnesses and unavailable health insurance, crumbling infrastructure, and temporary and part time work at starvation wages. These multiple crises impact communities of color with disproportionate severity. Meanwhile people in a growing number of countries around the world are subjected to death and destruction by the world’s most powerful military machine.
There is another dimension to this tragedy. The U.S. is at war to control and plunder the very fossil fuel resources whose continued use threatens the future of the human race.
We demand the immediate and total withdrawal of U.S. military forces, mercenaries and contractors from Afghanistan and Iraq. Moreover, we recognize that the Middle East cauldron today also encompasses Iran, Pakistan, Yemen, Palestine and Israel, while Haiti, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries in Latin America are targeted for intervention, subversion, occupation and control as a consequence of a militarized U.S. foreign policy. Our challenge is not only to end wars and occupations, but to fundamentally change the aggressive policies that inevitably lead our country to militarism and war.
The fight for better times, for a world of peace, justice and freedom, requires that we join together to make it happen, that we fight for the broad unity within the antiwar movement and across all the movements for social justice that has to date escaped us and that we collaborate to engage the American people in massive and united mobilizations against the warmakers and for the justice we deserve.
We have not forgotten the lessons of the civil rights movement, the struggle against the Vietnam War, the feminist and gay rights movements, and the monumental struggles that paved the way to the organization of American trade unions. History has demonstrated time and again that all critical social change is a product of the direct and massive intervention of the people.
We seek an inclusive conference where antiwar individuals and organizations come together to democratically discuss, debate and approve a plan of action aimed at winning the support and allegiance of the majority who have the power to compel a fundamental re-ordering of priorities.
We announce in advance that our goal is to develop strategies that unite us in action – for mass mobilizations and a variety of other tactics that suit the agendas of the constituent groups and individuals who participate in the conference proceedings. Our method is democracy. One person one vote! Our goal is unity in action while respecting our diversity and differences in political program and orientation.
Join us in Albany, New York, July 23-25, 2010!
Issued by the United National Antiwar Conference (UNAC) Planning Committee
For more information, write UNAC2010@aol.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 21675, Cleveland, OH 44121 or call 518-227-6947 or visit our website at http://www.nationalpeaceconference.org
Print postcard: PDF.
Friday, March 19, 2010
Afghan children face world's worst conditions
The International News
Afghan children face world’s worst conditions
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id+229911
Friday, March 19, 2010
HEART: Afghanistan is the hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for Unicef said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse. “The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child,” Daniel Toole said on a visit to Afghanistan this week. “If I could take one challenge, it’s survival.”
Three decades of war and a worsening insurgency have made it ever tougher for an Afghan child just to survive, Toole told Reuters during a visit aimed at highlighting what Unicef calls the worst conditions for children on earth. One of the girls he had just met in a woman’s shelter was only nine years old when she was forced to marry a total stranger. Another was just 11.
More than a quarter of Afghan children — 257 out of 1,000— will die before they reach their fifth birthday and 165 out of every 1,000 will die in the first year of their lives, more than any place in the world, according to Unicef data from 2008.
Afghanistan also has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world after Sierra Leone, with 1,800 women per 100,000 live births dying during child birth, according to Unicef estimates from 2005.
“On top of that, we overlay the conflict, and so children are being displaced, their food production has been disrupted, so the chances of being yet further endangered by the security situation ... make it that much more dramatic,” said Toole.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst levels since a US-led invasion in late 2001 overthrew the Taliban. Since then, intense fighting between insurgents and foreign and Afghan troops has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes. An increasing number of children are also fleeing across Afghanistan’s borders, said Toole, with many turning up as far away as Western Europe without their parents. Last April, 24 Afghan children aged between 14 and 16 were found living on a sidewalk of a railway station in Rome. The Save the Children aid group said Afghan children now made up one of the biggest groups of unaccompanied minors in the city.
Other major problems facing children in Afghanistan, particularly girls, said Toole, is underage marriage and sexual abuse. Forty-three per cent of girls aged 20-24 were married before they were 18, according to Unicef figures from 2009. Girls are often married against their will to men more than twice their age and are forced to have sex with their husbands before they reach puberty.
Toole described a visit he made to a women’s shelter supported by Unicef in the western city of Herat. The shelter is the only place in the city where girls who have been sexually abused or married at a young age can seek refuge. “Two young girls, one who was nine who was married. She didn’t even know she was being married until she arrived and was told, ‘here is your husband’. Another married at 11 against her will,” said Toole after meeting the girls at the shelter.
“Dramatic stories, painful stories, but I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. I found myself thinking, ‘how many girls have had this happen and can’t get to this centre?’,” he said. But despite the difficulties facing Afghan children, Toole said progress was being made, especially in education with an increasing number of girls being sent to school. “There is a lot of improvement but there is still so much more to do here, even if I just think about survival,” Toole said.
Afghan children face world’s worst conditions
http://www.thenews.com.pk/print1.asp?id+229911
Friday, March 19, 2010
HEART: Afghanistan is the hardest place in the world to be a child, the South Asia regional director for Unicef said, with high child mortality rates, poor levels of nutrition and rampant sexual abuse. “The situation in Afghanistan as a whole is one of the most dramatic in South Asia and also in the world. Afghanistan is the most difficult place to be born as a child,” Daniel Toole said on a visit to Afghanistan this week. “If I could take one challenge, it’s survival.”
Three decades of war and a worsening insurgency have made it ever tougher for an Afghan child just to survive, Toole told Reuters during a visit aimed at highlighting what Unicef calls the worst conditions for children on earth. One of the girls he had just met in a woman’s shelter was only nine years old when she was forced to marry a total stranger. Another was just 11.
More than a quarter of Afghan children — 257 out of 1,000— will die before they reach their fifth birthday and 165 out of every 1,000 will die in the first year of their lives, more than any place in the world, according to Unicef data from 2008.
Afghanistan also has the second highest maternal mortality rate in the world after Sierra Leone, with 1,800 women per 100,000 live births dying during child birth, according to Unicef estimates from 2005.
“On top of that, we overlay the conflict, and so children are being displaced, their food production has been disrupted, so the chances of being yet further endangered by the security situation ... make it that much more dramatic,” said Toole.
Violence in Afghanistan is at its worst levels since a US-led invasion in late 2001 overthrew the Taliban. Since then, intense fighting between insurgents and foreign and Afghan troops has forced thousands of civilians to flee their homes. An increasing number of children are also fleeing across Afghanistan’s borders, said Toole, with many turning up as far away as Western Europe without their parents. Last April, 24 Afghan children aged between 14 and 16 were found living on a sidewalk of a railway station in Rome. The Save the Children aid group said Afghan children now made up one of the biggest groups of unaccompanied minors in the city.
Other major problems facing children in Afghanistan, particularly girls, said Toole, is underage marriage and sexual abuse. Forty-three per cent of girls aged 20-24 were married before they were 18, according to Unicef figures from 2009. Girls are often married against their will to men more than twice their age and are forced to have sex with their husbands before they reach puberty.
Toole described a visit he made to a women’s shelter supported by Unicef in the western city of Herat. The shelter is the only place in the city where girls who have been sexually abused or married at a young age can seek refuge. “Two young girls, one who was nine who was married. She didn’t even know she was being married until she arrived and was told, ‘here is your husband’. Another married at 11 against her will,” said Toole after meeting the girls at the shelter.
“Dramatic stories, painful stories, but I think it’s the tip of the iceberg. I found myself thinking, ‘how many girls have had this happen and can’t get to this centre?’,” he said. But despite the difficulties facing Afghan children, Toole said progress was being made, especially in education with an increasing number of girls being sent to school. “There is a lot of improvement but there is still so much more to do here, even if I just think about survival,” Toole said.
US and NATO allies prepare for attacks on Kandahar and Kunduz
The article below (after comments and quote) is from Aljazeera-English, http://english-aljazeera.net/news/asia/2010/03/2010318152734763348.html
Al-Jazeera reports on the initial forays of US-led military actions around Kandahar in the south and the preparation of NATO (German) troops for offensives in the northern province of Kunduz. The goals of the military actions, as reported by Al Jazeera, are to "shape, take, hold, and build." So far, the military strategy of the US/NATO has not demonstrated that targeted towns and areas can be held and then built up through reconstruction projects. One criticism from right-wing politicians in the US is that the Obama government needs to put even more troops in the country to achieve the goals. We who are opposed to the US intervention and escalation of the "war" in Afghanistan, and who question the rationality of the very notion of a "war on terrorism," remain hopeful that there will be a government commitment to withdrawing combat troops by 2011. We also hope that some reconstruction of what the US government military as helped to destroy, directly and indirectly over the last 30 years, will actually be implemented.
In his book Revolution at the Gates, Philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests that this war on terrorism in Afghanistan seems the height of hubris, misguided at that, and an economic drain on US resources. Still, as Zizek asks, why Afghanistan?
"The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot fail to strike us: if the greatest power in the world destroys one of the world's poorest countries, in which peasants barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of impotent acting out? In many ways, Afghanistan is an ideal target: a country that is already reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades...we cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of Afghanistan will also be determined by economic considerations: is it not best procedure to act out one's anger at a country for which no one cares, and where there is nothing to destroy" ( p. 234).
But there are economic reasons to propel this tragic US-led assult that shore up some of the underpinnings of the US empire. It is good for the inflated US military to be able to use its "assets" somewhere in the world. It is profitable for US weapons' producers. It is profitable for US contractors. It is useful for US Afghan allies who endorse the military focus on the Taliban and who benefit from US aid and lack of attention otherwise to how they govern. It helps to distract attention away from the corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Middle East and in Central Asia.
Bob
----------------------------------
Al Jazeera reports:
Major Afghan offensive 'under way'
McChrystal said efforts to gradually retake control of Kandahar will "ramp up" in coming weeks [Reuters]
The US has said a new offensive to drive the Taliban from the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar is under way and will steadily "ramp up" in the months ahead.The military and political efforts against the Taliban around Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city, are the next step in the US-led strategy to end a war now in its ninth year.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, said the offensive had begun with initial military and political efforts, including operations to secure key roads and districts."Kandahar is already being shaped," McChrystal said on Thursday, adding that efforts will "ramp up" in the coming weeks and months ahead, lasting "a significant time".
A major offensive in Kandahar, once a Taliban stronghold, would follow the current military operation in neighbouring Helmand province,which appears to have largely pushed back the Taliban and given the government a chance to take control.'Reversing momentum'"What you are going to see in the months ahead, without giving too much detail, is a number of activities to shape the political relationships in and around Kandahar," he said.
McChrystal said there would also be a "series of activities" to boost security, like more partnering with Afghan police inside Kandahar city and boosting troop levels in the surrounding areas.
"If you control the environs around Kandahar, you go a long way to controlling Kandahar," he said.
To win over Afghans, US must listen
McChrystal has not given a timeline for the operation but said last week in Kabul that troops would be at full force for Kandahar operations by the early summer.
Kandahar is the next target in major military operations to eradicate the Taliban from areas they have controlled, in many cases in tandem with drug cartels, over the years since their regime was overthrown in 2001.
Operation Moshtarak- "together" in Dari and Pashto - is the first major test of the strategy of Barack Obama, the US president, to take on the Taliban and end the eight-year conflict with one of the biggest offensives since the 2001 US-led invasion.It is designed to clear Taliban fighters from the Marjah region of the southern province and hold it so that the civilian administration can establish itself.
The strategy comprises military, political and civilian approaches in four stages dubbed "shape, take, hold and build" and aims to ensure that once eradicated, the Taliban threat does not re-emerge.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Kabul, the Afghan capital, said: "These are the very early stages of the Kandahar offensive.
"We are at the 'shape' phase of the operation, however, there are military offensives being carried out around the city of Kandahar to facilitate a larger offensive in the coming weeks."The campaign in Kandahar is seen as a crucial test of Obama's strategy to reverse Taliban momentum after more than eight years of war.
Initial stages of the strategy aimed at speeding up the war's end began in Kandahar province around November, a Western official told the AFP news agency, on condition of anonymity.
"The emphasis increased last November, and most of it is invisible because it is aimed at understanding the situation on the ground, the political landscape and the human terrain," he said.
"We all understand how important and iconic Kandahar is for the Taliban - it was their first foothold."Taliban stronghold
Zalmai Ayobi, a spokesman for Kandahar governor Turyalai Wisa, said consultations had begun with tribal elders and community leaders as the long-term goal was to "expand good governance to all districts and villages".
Kandahar city, is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul and the birthplace of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their overthrow in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Suicide attacks are frequently carried out in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold [Reuters]
The Taliban claimed responsibility for a multiple suicide bomb attack on the city last Saturday that killed 35 people,saying it was intended to sabotage the planned offensive.
Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff at the International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) said there would "definitely" be an operation in the northern province of Kunduz, where most of Germany's 4,300 troops in Afghanistan are based.
He declined to give details but Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kaemmerer, an Isaf spokesman, said it would be similar in "type not the scale" to Moshtarak.
The number of foreign troops under US and Nato command is set to rise to 150,000 by August, with most of the new deployment heading to the south.
The 15,000 US, Nato and Afghan troops currently deployed to Helmand's Marjah and Nad Ali areas for Operation Moshtarak will remain in the province for other offensives there, the spokesman said.
Newly arrived troops would be sent to Kandahar, he said, adding that foreign troops would remain in both provinces to ensure security was maintained and the Taliban did not re-emerge.
But in the battle to win the support of local people, perceptions that Kandahar's leaders are corrupt could be an obstacle to long-term success, military officials have said.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the elected leader of Kandahar's provincial council, has long denied allegations that he has ties to the three-billion-dollar-a-year illicit drug trade.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Al-Jazeera reports on the initial forays of US-led military actions around Kandahar in the south and the preparation of NATO (German) troops for offensives in the northern province of Kunduz. The goals of the military actions, as reported by Al Jazeera, are to "shape, take, hold, and build." So far, the military strategy of the US/NATO has not demonstrated that targeted towns and areas can be held and then built up through reconstruction projects. One criticism from right-wing politicians in the US is that the Obama government needs to put even more troops in the country to achieve the goals. We who are opposed to the US intervention and escalation of the "war" in Afghanistan, and who question the rationality of the very notion of a "war on terrorism," remain hopeful that there will be a government commitment to withdrawing combat troops by 2011. We also hope that some reconstruction of what the US government military as helped to destroy, directly and indirectly over the last 30 years, will actually be implemented.
In his book Revolution at the Gates, Philosopher Slavoj Zizek suggests that this war on terrorism in Afghanistan seems the height of hubris, misguided at that, and an economic drain on US resources. Still, as Zizek asks, why Afghanistan?
"The ridicule of America attacking Afghanistan cannot fail to strike us: if the greatest power in the world destroys one of the world's poorest countries, in which peasants barely survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of impotent acting out? In many ways, Afghanistan is an ideal target: a country that is already reduced to rubble, with no infrastructure, repeatedly destroyed by war for the last two decades...we cannot avoid the surmise that the choice of Afghanistan will also be determined by economic considerations: is it not best procedure to act out one's anger at a country for which no one cares, and where there is nothing to destroy" ( p. 234).
But there are economic reasons to propel this tragic US-led assult that shore up some of the underpinnings of the US empire. It is good for the inflated US military to be able to use its "assets" somewhere in the world. It is profitable for US weapons' producers. It is profitable for US contractors. It is useful for US Afghan allies who endorse the military focus on the Taliban and who benefit from US aid and lack of attention otherwise to how they govern. It helps to distract attention away from the corrupt regimes in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and elsewhere in the Middle East and in Central Asia.
Bob
----------------------------------
Al Jazeera reports:
Major Afghan offensive 'under way'
McChrystal said efforts to gradually retake control of Kandahar will "ramp up" in coming weeks [Reuters]
The US has said a new offensive to drive the Taliban from the southern Afghanistan city of Kandahar is under way and will steadily "ramp up" in the months ahead.The military and political efforts against the Taliban around Kandahar, Afghanistan's second largest city, are the next step in the US-led strategy to end a war now in its ninth year.
General Stanley McChrystal, the commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan, said the offensive had begun with initial military and political efforts, including operations to secure key roads and districts."Kandahar is already being shaped," McChrystal said on Thursday, adding that efforts will "ramp up" in the coming weeks and months ahead, lasting "a significant time".
A major offensive in Kandahar, once a Taliban stronghold, would follow the current military operation in neighbouring Helmand province,which appears to have largely pushed back the Taliban and given the government a chance to take control.'Reversing momentum'"What you are going to see in the months ahead, without giving too much detail, is a number of activities to shape the political relationships in and around Kandahar," he said.
McChrystal said there would also be a "series of activities" to boost security, like more partnering with Afghan police inside Kandahar city and boosting troop levels in the surrounding areas.
"If you control the environs around Kandahar, you go a long way to controlling Kandahar," he said.
To win over Afghans, US must listen
McChrystal has not given a timeline for the operation but said last week in Kabul that troops would be at full force for Kandahar operations by the early summer.
Kandahar is the next target in major military operations to eradicate the Taliban from areas they have controlled, in many cases in tandem with drug cartels, over the years since their regime was overthrown in 2001.
Operation Moshtarak- "together" in Dari and Pashto - is the first major test of the strategy of Barack Obama, the US president, to take on the Taliban and end the eight-year conflict with one of the biggest offensives since the 2001 US-led invasion.It is designed to clear Taliban fighters from the Marjah region of the southern province and hold it so that the civilian administration can establish itself.
The strategy comprises military, political and civilian approaches in four stages dubbed "shape, take, hold and build" and aims to ensure that once eradicated, the Taliban threat does not re-emerge.
Al Jazeera's Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Kabul, the Afghan capital, said: "These are the very early stages of the Kandahar offensive.
"We are at the 'shape' phase of the operation, however, there are military offensives being carried out around the city of Kandahar to facilitate a larger offensive in the coming weeks."The campaign in Kandahar is seen as a crucial test of Obama's strategy to reverse Taliban momentum after more than eight years of war.
Initial stages of the strategy aimed at speeding up the war's end began in Kandahar province around November, a Western official told the AFP news agency, on condition of anonymity.
"The emphasis increased last November, and most of it is invisible because it is aimed at understanding the situation on the ground, the political landscape and the human terrain," he said.
"We all understand how important and iconic Kandahar is for the Taliban - it was their first foothold."Taliban stronghold
Zalmai Ayobi, a spokesman for Kandahar governor Turyalai Wisa, said consultations had begun with tribal elders and community leaders as the long-term goal was to "expand good governance to all districts and villages".
Kandahar city, is Afghanistan's second largest city after Kabul and the birthplace of the Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan from 1996 until their overthrow in the 2001 US-led invasion.
Suicide attacks are frequently carried out in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold [Reuters]
The Taliban claimed responsibility for a multiple suicide bomb attack on the city last Saturday that killed 35 people,saying it was intended to sabotage the planned offensive.
Bruno Kasdorf, chief of staff at the International Security and Assistance Force (Isaf) said there would "definitely" be an operation in the northern province of Kunduz, where most of Germany's 4,300 troops in Afghanistan are based.
He declined to give details but Lieutenant Colonel Michael Kaemmerer, an Isaf spokesman, said it would be similar in "type not the scale" to Moshtarak.
The number of foreign troops under US and Nato command is set to rise to 150,000 by August, with most of the new deployment heading to the south.
The 15,000 US, Nato and Afghan troops currently deployed to Helmand's Marjah and Nad Ali areas for Operation Moshtarak will remain in the province for other offensives there, the spokesman said.
Newly arrived troops would be sent to Kandahar, he said, adding that foreign troops would remain in both provinces to ensure security was maintained and the Taliban did not re-emerge.
But in the battle to win the support of local people, perceptions that Kandahar's leaders are corrupt could be an obstacle to long-term success, military officials have said.
Ahmed Wali Karzai, the elected leader of Kandahar's provincial council, has long denied allegations that he has ties to the three-billion-dollar-a-year illicit drug trade.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
Thursday, March 18, 2010
Afghan war criminals give themselves blanket immunity
On the basis of the information that we have become familiar with, there are four points worth reiterating: (1) the Taliban are not a unitary force, (2) the core insurgent groups among the Taliban are not the only enemy of the Afghan people, (3) there are many non-Taliban warlords who are also enemies of the Afghan people, who the US military considers their allies, and who occupy important local positions of power, and (4) there are warlords, who are alleged to be war criminals, who hold positions in the national parliament and President Karzai's cabinet.
I'd like to focus on the 4th point, and quote Malalai Joya from chapter 9 of her book, A Woman Among Warlords.
"As I walked inside the recently rebuilt halls of Parliament, I saw mostly the same old faces from Afghanistan's sorrowful past. Many warlords had once again strong-armed the process and forced their way into Parliament. Even though, it was supposedly illegal for militia leaders or combatants to run for office, a Human Rights Watch report exposed their allies. Many of these people either stole their places in Parliament at gunpoint or bought their seats with U.S. dollars - which they had in abundance because leaders of the Northern Alliance were paid with cash by the CIA for the support of the U.S. war" (p. 124).
With this context from Joya, I'll identify what I see as four key points in a recent article by Jason Leopold, "Afghanistan Enacts Law Giving War Criminals Blanket Immunity."
The article appeared in Truthout.org on March 16, 2010. The URL for the article is: http://www.truthout.org/afghanistan-enacts-law-giving-blanket-immunity-war-criminals57746
The first of the points that I draw from Leopold's article is that the Afghan Parliament, "made up largely of former warlords" who have been "accused by Afghans and human rights groups of war crimes," have voted for a law "that provides blanket immunity and pardons for members of the Afghanistan armed factions of war crimes and human rights abuses prior to Dec. 2001."
Second, Leopold refers to The Transitional Justice Coordination Group (TJCG), "made up of a coalition of 24 civil society organizations, [that has] called upon the Karzai government" to suspend the law and eventually abolish it.
Three, according to Leopold, there is a provision in the amnesty law that "allows victims of atrocities to file individual claims against alleged perpetrators." Leopold reports that TJCG said this "places an unfair burden upon victims, who have already suffered so much and would put themselves at rick of reprisals given the impunity of Aghanistan today." He adds: "This provision is particiularly impractical so far as it concerns women and the many victims of sexual violence, who already face barriers to obtaining justice."
Four, and most relevant for the present post, Leopold writes that there are "War Criminals in Karzai's Cabinet, including "high-level officials who were accused of war crimes." For example, "both of Karzai's vice presidents are former leaders of armed groups whose factions squabbled for control of Kabul in the 1990s, when thousands of civilians wee killed and hundreds of thousands fled from their homes." Another example: "...Karzai approved the re-appointment in Jan. of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dotsum, an ex-militia chief, to a high-level military position which had been harshly criticized by civil rights groups."
The implications? The US appears to be fighting a war focused on what it calls the Taliban, while much of the rest of the country is ruled by warlords who have also perpetrated atrocities on the Afghan people and who now use present circumstances to consolidate their power. Along the way, the Afghan people remain among the poorest in the world and the U.S. government and military spend tens of billions of dollars on an adventure that appears to have no clear strategy for bringing security to the Afghan people - and no end point.
I'd like to focus on the 4th point, and quote Malalai Joya from chapter 9 of her book, A Woman Among Warlords.
"As I walked inside the recently rebuilt halls of Parliament, I saw mostly the same old faces from Afghanistan's sorrowful past. Many warlords had once again strong-armed the process and forced their way into Parliament. Even though, it was supposedly illegal for militia leaders or combatants to run for office, a Human Rights Watch report exposed their allies. Many of these people either stole their places in Parliament at gunpoint or bought their seats with U.S. dollars - which they had in abundance because leaders of the Northern Alliance were paid with cash by the CIA for the support of the U.S. war" (p. 124).
With this context from Joya, I'll identify what I see as four key points in a recent article by Jason Leopold, "Afghanistan Enacts Law Giving War Criminals Blanket Immunity."
The article appeared in Truthout.org on March 16, 2010. The URL for the article is: http://www.truthout.org/afghanistan-enacts-law-giving-blanket-immunity-war-criminals57746
The first of the points that I draw from Leopold's article is that the Afghan Parliament, "made up largely of former warlords" who have been "accused by Afghans and human rights groups of war crimes," have voted for a law "that provides blanket immunity and pardons for members of the Afghanistan armed factions of war crimes and human rights abuses prior to Dec. 2001."
Second, Leopold refers to The Transitional Justice Coordination Group (TJCG), "made up of a coalition of 24 civil society organizations, [that has] called upon the Karzai government" to suspend the law and eventually abolish it.
Three, according to Leopold, there is a provision in the amnesty law that "allows victims of atrocities to file individual claims against alleged perpetrators." Leopold reports that TJCG said this "places an unfair burden upon victims, who have already suffered so much and would put themselves at rick of reprisals given the impunity of Aghanistan today." He adds: "This provision is particiularly impractical so far as it concerns women and the many victims of sexual violence, who already face barriers to obtaining justice."
Four, and most relevant for the present post, Leopold writes that there are "War Criminals in Karzai's Cabinet, including "high-level officials who were accused of war crimes." For example, "both of Karzai's vice presidents are former leaders of armed groups whose factions squabbled for control of Kabul in the 1990s, when thousands of civilians wee killed and hundreds of thousands fled from their homes." Another example: "...Karzai approved the re-appointment in Jan. of Gen. Abdul Rashid Dotsum, an ex-militia chief, to a high-level military position which had been harshly criticized by civil rights groups."
The implications? The US appears to be fighting a war focused on what it calls the Taliban, while much of the rest of the country is ruled by warlords who have also perpetrated atrocities on the Afghan people and who now use present circumstances to consolidate their power. Along the way, the Afghan people remain among the poorest in the world and the U.S. government and military spend tens of billions of dollars on an adventure that appears to have no clear strategy for bringing security to the Afghan people - and no end point.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
US-led assault on Marja produces civilan casualties and refugees
The following post is from the Peace Action West blog - http://blog/peaceactionwest.org/2010/03/04/the-marja-offensives-impact-on-civilians
The Marja offensive’s impact on civilians
March 4, 2010
tags: Afghanistan, civilian casualties, marja, war
by Chen Lin
A prominent narrative relating to the offensive in Marja has been the military’s emphasis on reducing civilian casualties. For example, the Brookings Institution notes that unlike past operations, the recent US offensive into Marja was announced in advance to Afghanis in order to reduce civilian casualties:
This battle is fascinating for the fact that it was announced repeatedly in advance by NATO commanders. The unusual tactic deprived us of tactical surprise, but General Stanley McChrystal and others clearly felt it even more important to minimize civilian casualties by trying to convince resistance fighters to vacate the area in advance. Even if those insurgents who flee remain free to fight another day, our key premise is that they will not be successful in galvanizing widespread support in Helmand province or elsewhere if we can establish positive momentum first—on the battlefield, and then in improving the lives of Afghan citizens.
The strategy adopted by General McChrysal also serves a broader PR purpose, bolstering US efforts to “win hearts and minds” in Afghanistan, and, indeed, the US. But this approach can only work if it is actually effective in reducing the humanitarian cost of the battle. In reality, civilians always pay dearly for war. That is, as we’ve argued, one of the most fundamental strategic failings of war. As an interview with Radio Free Europe reveals, many civilians remain in the city because they did not escape in time.
“The civilians are trapped because although they had planned to leave after the fighting started in cars or anything they could find, all the roads are mined now and they cannot leave their homes,” said Rahman. “Their food supplies are running out and they face thirst and hunger. People are slaughtering and eating up their cattle. All the shops are closed even as most people stayed behind. Less than 10 percent of the residents left. We have information that civilians have also suffered deaths and injuries and they cannot bury their dead or help their wounded.”
Moreover, as we covered earlier, some 20 civilians have already been killed in the battle. Worse, more are dying because the battle has greatly restricted their access to hospitals:
Most of the wounded civilians recuperating at the whitewashed Italian-run hospital said their injuries were caused by “the foreign soldiers” — a claim that does not bode well for international and Afghan forces who are trying to get residents to renounce the Taliban and embrace the Afghan government.
Bernard Metraux, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Helmand province, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that as many as 40,000 people trapped by fighting in and around Marjah have little to no access to medical care.
The emphasis on the direct casualties of the battle masks a humanitarian crisis of equal magnitude occurring outside of city limits – the plight of the internally displaced. The LATimes reported last Tuesday that since the beginning of the offensive, some 4,000 families have escaped the town. While most currently have access to proper food and shelter, their inability to return home has begun to jeopardize their livelihoods, and there is no guarantee their resources will last:
For agricultural families, the great majority of the town’s residents, each passing day is a countdown to ruin. Worry beads click late into the night as farmers envision their crops dying, livestock scattered or starving, irrigation ditches choked with debris.
Still, many believe their decision to flee may have saved their lives. NATO says 16 civilians have been killed in the offensive, but the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission on Wednesday put the civilian death toll at 28, of whom 13 were children. At least 70 others have been hurt, the group said.
Although most of the displaced have access to food and at least rudimentary shelter, the privations are beginning to grate. Kinship dictates that a family must take in fleeing relatives without question. But many people in rural Helmand already live at the subsistence level, so host families and their guests alike face growing hardship.
The problems began in the planning stages of the Marja operation. For all the attention paid to making civilians aware of the impending battle, the advance efforts fell short of ensuring that fleeing civilians had places to stay with secure access to necessary resources.
NATO and Afghan leaders said they hatched the assault in close co-operation so the military phase can be immediately followed by the establishment of civil administration and services.
But Norine MacDonald, the president of the International Council for Security and Development, which has an office in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, said planners had paid little regard to civilian well-being.
”The forward planning we heard so much about did not include ensuring that the local population would be able to leave and live elsewhere in decent conditions, with access to food and medical care,” she said.
More than 2800 families – averaging about five members each – had been displaced before and during the fighting, said Abdul Rahman Hutaki, the head of the Human Rights and Environment Organisation, an independent Afghan group.
NATO commanders say it could be another three weeks before the area is under control as fighting between militants and the 15,000-strong force of US marines, NATO and Afghan troops is proving ”difficult”.
The US and NATO decision to reach out to the civilian population prior to the offensive in Marja is commendable, but efforts like this will likely continue to fall short in the face of a messy war. In Marja as in so many other places in Afghanistan, a military solution has only made existing problems worse.
The Marja offensive’s impact on civilians
March 4, 2010
tags: Afghanistan, civilian casualties, marja, war
by Chen Lin
A prominent narrative relating to the offensive in Marja has been the military’s emphasis on reducing civilian casualties. For example, the Brookings Institution notes that unlike past operations, the recent US offensive into Marja was announced in advance to Afghanis in order to reduce civilian casualties:
This battle is fascinating for the fact that it was announced repeatedly in advance by NATO commanders. The unusual tactic deprived us of tactical surprise, but General Stanley McChrystal and others clearly felt it even more important to minimize civilian casualties by trying to convince resistance fighters to vacate the area in advance. Even if those insurgents who flee remain free to fight another day, our key premise is that they will not be successful in galvanizing widespread support in Helmand province or elsewhere if we can establish positive momentum first—on the battlefield, and then in improving the lives of Afghan citizens.
The strategy adopted by General McChrysal also serves a broader PR purpose, bolstering US efforts to “win hearts and minds” in Afghanistan, and, indeed, the US. But this approach can only work if it is actually effective in reducing the humanitarian cost of the battle. In reality, civilians always pay dearly for war. That is, as we’ve argued, one of the most fundamental strategic failings of war. As an interview with Radio Free Europe reveals, many civilians remain in the city because they did not escape in time.
“The civilians are trapped because although they had planned to leave after the fighting started in cars or anything they could find, all the roads are mined now and they cannot leave their homes,” said Rahman. “Their food supplies are running out and they face thirst and hunger. People are slaughtering and eating up their cattle. All the shops are closed even as most people stayed behind. Less than 10 percent of the residents left. We have information that civilians have also suffered deaths and injuries and they cannot bury their dead or help their wounded.”
Moreover, as we covered earlier, some 20 civilians have already been killed in the battle. Worse, more are dying because the battle has greatly restricted their access to hospitals:
Most of the wounded civilians recuperating at the whitewashed Italian-run hospital said their injuries were caused by “the foreign soldiers” — a claim that does not bode well for international and Afghan forces who are trying to get residents to renounce the Taliban and embrace the Afghan government.
Bernard Metraux, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross in Helmand province, told The Associated Press on Wednesday that as many as 40,000 people trapped by fighting in and around Marjah have little to no access to medical care.
The emphasis on the direct casualties of the battle masks a humanitarian crisis of equal magnitude occurring outside of city limits – the plight of the internally displaced. The LATimes reported last Tuesday that since the beginning of the offensive, some 4,000 families have escaped the town. While most currently have access to proper food and shelter, their inability to return home has begun to jeopardize their livelihoods, and there is no guarantee their resources will last:
For agricultural families, the great majority of the town’s residents, each passing day is a countdown to ruin. Worry beads click late into the night as farmers envision their crops dying, livestock scattered or starving, irrigation ditches choked with debris.
Still, many believe their decision to flee may have saved their lives. NATO says 16 civilians have been killed in the offensive, but the Afghanistan Human Rights Commission on Wednesday put the civilian death toll at 28, of whom 13 were children. At least 70 others have been hurt, the group said.
Although most of the displaced have access to food and at least rudimentary shelter, the privations are beginning to grate. Kinship dictates that a family must take in fleeing relatives without question. But many people in rural Helmand already live at the subsistence level, so host families and their guests alike face growing hardship.
The problems began in the planning stages of the Marja operation. For all the attention paid to making civilians aware of the impending battle, the advance efforts fell short of ensuring that fleeing civilians had places to stay with secure access to necessary resources.
NATO and Afghan leaders said they hatched the assault in close co-operation so the military phase can be immediately followed by the establishment of civil administration and services.
But Norine MacDonald, the president of the International Council for Security and Development, which has an office in the provincial capital Lashkar Gah, said planners had paid little regard to civilian well-being.
”The forward planning we heard so much about did not include ensuring that the local population would be able to leave and live elsewhere in decent conditions, with access to food and medical care,” she said.
More than 2800 families – averaging about five members each – had been displaced before and during the fighting, said Abdul Rahman Hutaki, the head of the Human Rights and Environment Organisation, an independent Afghan group.
NATO commanders say it could be another three weeks before the area is under control as fighting between militants and the 15,000-strong force of US marines, NATO and Afghan troops is proving ”difficult”.
The US and NATO decision to reach out to the civilian population prior to the offensive in Marja is commendable, but efforts like this will likely continue to fall short in the face of a messy war. In Marja as in so many other places in Afghanistan, a military solution has only made existing problems worse.
Misinformation on Marja battle to mislead US public
Gareth Porter, an investigative historian and journalist specializing in US national security policy, uncovers information on the US-led offensive on Marja, in Afghanistan's Helmand Province. The offensive included 7,500 US, NATO, and Afghan troops. In an article titled "Fiction of Marja as a City Was US Information War," Porter makes three major points.
First, "the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by the news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war." In the highly publicized run-up to the battle, US officials described Marja as "a city of 80,000 people." Porter reports that "Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agicultural area covering much of the Helmand River Valley, which covers "125 square miles." The focus of the attack was a location in Marja "where farmers gathered for markets" and included "a mosque and a few shops."
Second, Porter asks, "how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 get started?" "The idea," he reports, "was passed on to the news media by the US Marines in southern Helmand," and then picked up by the Associated Press and other news media. The story that was more or less repeated was that there were as many as a 1,000 insurgents in the town and that there would be deadly "house to house urban street fighting."
Third, why then was the fiction of an urban Marja perpetrated. Porter's answer can be gleaned from from the last two sentences in the article:
"The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress US public opinion with the effectiveness of the US military in Afghanistan" - and how Afghan soldiers are becoming ready to engage the enemy and do their part in the fighting that lies ahead.
"The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message."'
One implication of Porter's reporting is that the US command in Afghanistan - and at the Pentagon - is groping for a military strategy that can convince American elected officials and the American public that pouring more resources into the Afghanistan occupation will eventually be successful or cost-effective. They seem to be making it up as they go. What a snow job.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/03/08/fiction-of-marjah-as-city.
First, "the picture of Marja presented by military officials and obediently reported by the news media is one of the clearest and most dramatic pieces of misinformation of the entire war." In the highly publicized run-up to the battle, US officials described Marja as "a city of 80,000 people." Porter reports that "Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers' homes or a large agicultural area covering much of the Helmand River Valley, which covers "125 square miles." The focus of the attack was a location in Marja "where farmers gathered for markets" and included "a mosque and a few shops."
Second, Porter asks, "how did the fiction that Marja is a city of 80,000 get started?" "The idea," he reports, "was passed on to the news media by the US Marines in southern Helmand," and then picked up by the Associated Press and other news media. The story that was more or less repeated was that there were as many as a 1,000 insurgents in the town and that there would be deadly "house to house urban street fighting."
Third, why then was the fiction of an urban Marja perpetrated. Porter's answer can be gleaned from from the last two sentences in the article:
"The Washington Post reported Feb. 22 that the decision to launch the offensive against Marja was intended largely to impress US public opinion with the effectiveness of the US military in Afghanistan" - and how Afghan soldiers are becoming ready to engage the enemy and do their part in the fighting that lies ahead.
"The false impression that Marja was a significant city was an essential part of that message."'
One implication of Porter's reporting is that the US command in Afghanistan - and at the Pentagon - is groping for a military strategy that can convince American elected officials and the American public that pouring more resources into the Afghanistan occupation will eventually be successful or cost-effective. They seem to be making it up as they go. What a snow job.
http://original.antiwar.com/porter/2010/03/08/fiction-of-marjah-as-city.
Kucinich resolution fails, while occupation grows
The House resolution proposed by Representative Dennis Kucinich, House Concurrent Res. 248, generated impassioned speeches by its supporters, but failed in the vote by a lopsided 65-356. The aim of the resolution was to end the US military occupation in Afghanistan by the end of 2010. The majority of both Democrats and Republicans rejected the resolution on the grounds that there was an already a consensus on the decision to increase troop levels in Afghanistan, which they supported.
In the meantime, official estimates of the US troop level in Afghanistan indicate that there will be approximately 100,000 troops in the country by this summer. The expense for each of the additional soldiers is reported to be $1 million per year.
The number of contractors and their employees will also soar, along with expected tens of thousands of troops from allied countries. Figures from the DOD indicate there were already 104,100 contractors/employees by December 2009. Contractors provide a variety of services, including food, transportation, construction, and security. Large contractors like KBR, DynCorp, Halliburton, and Xe (formerly Blackwater) get the lion's share of the DOD money spent on these services.
The failure of the Kucinich resolution and the continued expansion of the occupation offer little solace for opponents of the war.
http://news.antiwar.com.2010/03/10/house-votes-against-ending-afghan-waar
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/how-many-private-contractors-are-there-afghanistan-military-gives-us-numbers
In the meantime, official estimates of the US troop level in Afghanistan indicate that there will be approximately 100,000 troops in the country by this summer. The expense for each of the additional soldiers is reported to be $1 million per year.
The number of contractors and their employees will also soar, along with expected tens of thousands of troops from allied countries. Figures from the DOD indicate there were already 104,100 contractors/employees by December 2009. Contractors provide a variety of services, including food, transportation, construction, and security. Large contractors like KBR, DynCorp, Halliburton, and Xe (formerly Blackwater) get the lion's share of the DOD money spent on these services.
The failure of the Kucinich resolution and the continued expansion of the occupation offer little solace for opponents of the war.
http://news.antiwar.com.2010/03/10/house-votes-against-ending-afghan-waar
http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/latest-news/how-many-private-contractors-are-there-afghanistan-military-gives-us-numbers
Friday, March 5, 2010
Kucinich resolution forces debate on whether to continue Afghan war
Published on Friday, March 5, 2010 by CommonDreams.org
Kucinich Forces Congress to Debate Afghanistan
by Robert Naiman
On Thursday, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced H. Con Res. 248 [1], a privileged resolution with 16 original cosponsors that will require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the war in Afghanistan. Debate on the resolution is expected early next week.
Original cosponsors of the Kucinich resolution include John Conyers, Ron Paul, José Serrano, Bob Filner, Lynn Woolsey, Walter Jones, Danny Davis, Barbara Lee, Michael Capuano, Raúl Grijalva, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Johnson, Yvette Clarke, Eric Massa, Alan Grayson, and Chellie Pingree.
The Pentagon doesn't want Congress to debate Afghanistan. The Pentagon wants Congress to fork over $33 billion more [2] to pay for the current military escalation, no questions asked, no restrictions imposed for a withdrawal timetable or an exit strategy.
Ideally, from the point of view of the Pentagon, Congress would fork over that money right away, before the coming Kandahar offensive that the $33 billion is supposed to pay for, because you can expect a lot of bad news out of Afghanistan in the form of deaths of American soldiers [3] and Afghan civilians [4] once the Kandahar offensive starts, and it would sure be awkward if all that bad news reached Washington while the $33 billion was hanging fire.
So it's a great thing that Rep. Kucinich and his 16 allies are forcing Congress to debate the issue, and it would be even better if more Members of Congress would be urged by their constituents [5] to support Kucinich's resolution. That would be a signal to the House leadership that continuation of the open-ended war and occupation is controversial in the House, and the House leadership should not try to ram through $33 billion more for the war on a fast-track without ample opportunity for debate and amendment.
Every day the Afghanistan war continues is another day on which the United States Government plays Russian Roulette with the lives of American soldiers [3] and Afghan civilians [6].
The British Government has more urgency [7] than the U.S. government about ending the war - and is more supportive than the U.S. of a political solution to end the conflict - because in Britain there is greater public outcry [7].
If there were greater public and Congressional outcry in the U.S., we could be more like Britain, and get our government on board the train to a political solution, instead of prolonging the war indefinitely.
The first step towards bringing our troops home is for Members of Congress to hear from their constituents [5].
Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [8]
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/05-3
Kucinich Forces Congress to Debate Afghanistan
by Robert Naiman
On Thursday, Ohio Representative Dennis Kucinich introduced H. Con Res. 248 [1], a privileged resolution with 16 original cosponsors that will require the House of Representatives to debate whether to continue the war in Afghanistan. Debate on the resolution is expected early next week.
Original cosponsors of the Kucinich resolution include John Conyers, Ron Paul, José Serrano, Bob Filner, Lynn Woolsey, Walter Jones, Danny Davis, Barbara Lee, Michael Capuano, Raúl Grijalva, Tammy Baldwin, Tim Johnson, Yvette Clarke, Eric Massa, Alan Grayson, and Chellie Pingree.
The Pentagon doesn't want Congress to debate Afghanistan. The Pentagon wants Congress to fork over $33 billion more [2] to pay for the current military escalation, no questions asked, no restrictions imposed for a withdrawal timetable or an exit strategy.
Ideally, from the point of view of the Pentagon, Congress would fork over that money right away, before the coming Kandahar offensive that the $33 billion is supposed to pay for, because you can expect a lot of bad news out of Afghanistan in the form of deaths of American soldiers [3] and Afghan civilians [4] once the Kandahar offensive starts, and it would sure be awkward if all that bad news reached Washington while the $33 billion was hanging fire.
So it's a great thing that Rep. Kucinich and his 16 allies are forcing Congress to debate the issue, and it would be even better if more Members of Congress would be urged by their constituents [5] to support Kucinich's resolution. That would be a signal to the House leadership that continuation of the open-ended war and occupation is controversial in the House, and the House leadership should not try to ram through $33 billion more for the war on a fast-track without ample opportunity for debate and amendment.
Every day the Afghanistan war continues is another day on which the United States Government plays Russian Roulette with the lives of American soldiers [3] and Afghan civilians [6].
The British Government has more urgency [7] than the U.S. government about ending the war - and is more supportive than the U.S. of a political solution to end the conflict - because in Britain there is greater public outcry [7].
If there were greater public and Congressional outcry in the U.S., we could be more like Britain, and get our government on board the train to a political solution, instead of prolonging the war indefinitely.
The first step towards bringing our troops home is for Members of Congress to hear from their constituents [5].
Robert Naiman is Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy [8]
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/03/05-3
Monday, March 1, 2010
Congressman Dennis Kucinich offers a resolution to consider ending Afghan war
Kucinich: Afghanistan “Awash with U.S. cash and U.S. blood”
Washington, Feb 26 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the ongoing war in Afghanistan:
“The Washington Post reports that nearly one billion dollars per year in cash, suspected to include U.S. aid, opium receipts or both, is moving from Afghanistan to Dubai, where friends and family of Afghanistan’s President Karzai have multimillion dollar villas.
“Dubai real estate deals and a number of crooked enterprises connected to the Karzai family have created crony capitalism in a country awash with U.S. cash and U.S. blood.
“Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have died. And for what? Hundreds of billions spent. And for what? To make Afghanistan safe for crooks, drug dealers and crony capitalism?
“Next Thursday, I will bring a privileged resolution to this House so that Congress can claim our constitutional right to end this war and to bring our troops home. Please support the resolution.”
Kucinich will introduce the resolution on Thursday, March 4, 2010. It is expected that the resolution will be taken up for consideration on the following Wednesday, March 10, 2010 and that the debate will be subject to a rule providing for three hours of debate.
Washington, Feb 26 - Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement about the ongoing war in Afghanistan:
“The Washington Post reports that nearly one billion dollars per year in cash, suspected to include U.S. aid, opium receipts or both, is moving from Afghanistan to Dubai, where friends and family of Afghanistan’s President Karzai have multimillion dollar villas.
“Dubai real estate deals and a number of crooked enterprises connected to the Karzai family have created crony capitalism in a country awash with U.S. cash and U.S. blood.
“Nearly 1000 U.S. soldiers have died. And for what? Hundreds of billions spent. And for what? To make Afghanistan safe for crooks, drug dealers and crony capitalism?
“Next Thursday, I will bring a privileged resolution to this House so that Congress can claim our constitutional right to end this war and to bring our troops home. Please support the resolution.”
Kucinich will introduce the resolution on Thursday, March 4, 2010. It is expected that the resolution will be taken up for consideration on the following Wednesday, March 10, 2010 and that the debate will be subject to a rule providing for three hours of debate.
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