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