Obama’s violating the first rule of holes in Afghanistan…

…which is, when you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

 

Escalation Scam: Troops in Afghanistan

 

Published on Thursday, July 9, 2009 by CommonDreams.org by Norman Solomon

The president has set a limit on the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. For now.

That’s how escalation works. Ceilings become floors. Gradually.

A few times since last fall, the Obama team has floated rising numbers for how many additional U.S. soldiers will be sent to Afghanistan. Now, deployment of 21,000 more is a done deal, with a new total cap of 68,000 U.S. troops in that country.

But “escalation” isn’t mere jargon. And it doesn’t just refer to what’s happening outside the United States.

“Escalation” is a word for a methodical process of acclimating people at home to the idea of more military intervention abroad — nothing too sudden, just a step-by-step process of turning even more war into media wallpaper — nothing too abrupt or jarring, while thousands more soldiers and billions more dollars funnel into what Martin Luther King Jr. called a “demonic suction tube,” complete with massive violence, mayhem, terror and killing on a grander scale than ever.

As war policies unfold, the news accounts and dominant media discourse rarely disrupt the trajectory of events. From high places, the authorized extent of candor is a matter of timing.

Lots of recent spin from Washington has promoted the assumption that President Obama wants to stick with the current limit on deployments to Afghanistan. Soon after pushing supplemental war funds through Congress, he’s hardly eager to proclaim that 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan may not be enough after all.

But no amount of spin can change the fact that the U.S. military situation in Afghanistan continues to deteriorate. It would be astonishing if plans for add-on deployments weren’t already far along at the Pentagon.

Meanwhile, the White House is reenacting a macabre ritual — a repetition compulsion of the warfare state — carefully timing and titrating each dose of public information to ease the process of escalation. The basic technique is far from new.

In the spring and early summer of 1965, President Lyndon Johnson decided to send 100,000 additional U.S. troops to Vietnam, more than doubling the number there. But at a July 28 news conference, he announced that he’d decided to send an additional 50,000 soldiers.

Why did President Johnson say 50,000 instead of 100,000? Because he was heeding the advice from something called a “Special National Security Estimate” — a secret document, issued days earlier about the already-approved new deployment, urging that “in order to mitigate somewhat the crisis atmosphere that would result from this major U.S. action . . . announcements about it be made piecemeal with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Forty-four years later, something similar is underway with deployments of U.S. troops to Afghanistan.

Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Tuesday that no limit has been set. Speaking to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he sounded an open-ended note: “There is not a ceiling on troop levels in Afghanistan.”

Mullen’s comment was scarcely reported in U.S. media outlets. It has become old news without ever being news in the first place.

The war planners in Washington are bound to proceed carefully on the home front. News of further escalation will come “piecemeal” — “with no more high-level emphasis than necessary.”

Norman Solomon, co-chair of the national Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign, is the author of many books including “War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death.” For more information, go to: www.normansolomon.com

 

McNamara’s Ghost in Afghanistan

By Tom Hayden

Robert McNamara died the other day as seven American soldiers were killed in Afghanistan.
 
It wasn’t the deaths on the same day that made me remember McNamara’s folly.
 
It was the sense that McNamara’s ghost is hovering over the new graveyard of America’s future.
 
McNamara’s team of Ivy Leaguers was dubbed “the best and the brightest” by the disillusioned war correspondent David Halberstam. They were deluded by their arrogance into believing computer-driven measures of success, like body counts. Though liberal and secular in temperment, they held a faith-based belief in victory. Fifty-eight thousand Americans died, along with countless Vietnamese, Laotians and Cambodians, because of these best and brightest. Not one of them went to jail. McNamara went to the World Bank.
 
Today another Ivy League president has placed his faith in Ivy League generals and an inbred crowd of three hundred national security advisers drawn from the same elite circles. They are the new best-and-brightest, and I believe history will show they are marching to folly in their “Long War.”
 
General Petraeus is an Ivy Leaguer. So is his surrogate spokesman in Washington, John Nagl at the think tank of the best-and-brightest, the Center for a New American Security. So is Gen. Stanley McChystal, the Special Operations spook presiding over Afghanistan and Pakistan. So are Petraeus’ Harvard collaborators on the new Marine and Army counterinsurgency manual. So is their top counterinsurgency guru, David Kilkullen, who writes of reviving the Vietnam Phoenix program of detention and targeted killings, not only in Afghanistan, but globally. [For dummies, Phoenix involved the detention, torture and killing of 25,000 alleged Vietcong civilians, and the rounding up millions of peasants into “strategic hamlets” to protect them from any Vietcong still in the jungle. The debacle was terminated in 1971, but Kilcullen, who wasn’t born then, keeps hope alive, saying the program was misunderstood. McNamara would have loved Kilcullen, a Ph.D who openly believes in “armed social science.”
 
I first heard of Robert McNamara as an undergraduate editor at the University of Michigan, when a dean of humanities told me that McNamara, a UM graduate and president of Ford Motors, was an exceptionally bright man with whom dialogue about war and peace was finally possible.
 
I was skeptical, however, of McNamara’s application of scientific management techniques to corporate, government and military policy. I couldn’t understand the mystique of intelligence, detached as it was from an understanding of a world in unpredictable transition.
 
From the perspective of McNamara’s funeral, we can take a reckoning. The Vietnam War was the greatest American folly of the twentieth-century. Applied to large universities, the same scientific management approaches provoked the Free Speech Movement. And of course, Ford is in ruins.
 
The brightest were clueless and, in Leonard Cohen’s verse,
 
When the very good have stopped their quest
The very worst are called the best.
 
For what earthly purpose did those seven Americans die in southern Afghanistan? Are there al Qaeda there? Not by anyone’s account. If they were fighting the Taliban as distinct from local people, the reasons are elusive. Apparently the Taliban of southern Afghanistan are part of a host organization that will welcome the return of al Qaeda whom, we are warned, will use their new caves to plot strikes against our homeland.
 
You can have the IQ of a plant to smell this stupidity.
 
The Pentagon predicts an 18-month war for southern Afghanistan before they can clear, build, hold and hand over the rubble to an Afghan army inferior to the Taliban.
 
The logical move now for the Taliban would be to draw the young Americans into a bloody quagmire in Kandahar and Helmand, then turn up elsewhere using hit-and-run attacks as they did this week against the gates of NATO or isolated American bases elsewhere.
 
In an example of further idiocy masked as intelligence, a Pentagon spokesman yesterday said the seven deaths were “what we expected.” [LAT, July 7] The Taliban and “other insurgents” had engaged in “less direct combat than was expected by the military”, Nagl of the CNAS told the press. [LAT, July 7]. They Taliban and these “other insurgents” used roadside bombs instead of throwing themselves in front of the American guns. This was a surprise. That’s what happens when you go into “Indian country”, said a Pentagon official.
 
In more dangerous Pakistan, meanwhile, the best-and-brightest are high-fiving themselves after pressuring the wary Pakistan army into invading the Swat Valley and preparing to assault South Waziristan. This operation has created more casualties than any time since Pakistan was founded and, according to the NY Times, American aid workers are being barred from refugee camps where pro-Taliban forces distribute food and medicine paid for by American taxpayers. In a recent incident obscured by the fog of war,  the Taliban last week apparently attacked a site connected with Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.
 
In Iraq meanwhile, the Pentagon and mainstream media are upset by the very Shi’a coalition put in power by the American military bragging about the US withdrawal and holding a national day of celebration. Only the brightest are blind to the American effort to disguise failure in Iraq with a decent interval, as orchestrated by Henry Kissinger in Vietnam.
 
None of this makes any Americans safer. If anything, more civilians will grow to hate us in both countries, some of those civilians will join the Taliban or al Qaeda, the Europeans will soon be abandoning the NATO military mission, Russia will be enjoying payback for what the Americans did to them in Afghanistan, and President Obama will be trapped like Gulliver in a Long War he cannot afford, can never win and dare not lose.
 
The best and brightest, by their own definition, are incapable of being wrong. McNamara couldn’t admit his mistake for decades and still remained at loss for words in the painful final moments of the film Fog of War.
 
The new best-and-brightest are like McNamara in this respect too: their arrogance makes a mistake inconceivable.
 
It took an anti-war movement to provoke Daniel Ellsberg, one of the original best-and-brightest, to finally break ranks and tell the truth. Another movement and another Ellsberg are needed now, before the mistake becomes a permanent one. “

TOM HAYDEN is the author of Ending the War in Iraq [2008], the Tom Hayden Reader[2008] and this year’s The Long Sixties.

What, Me Worry?

Peace Action Executive Director, Kevin Martin, asks:

If our thousands of nuclear weapons actually do serve to deter, then why should we be concerned about a nuclear North Korea or a nuclear Iran? If they do not serve to deter, then why retain them at all?

Read the full article here.

Kevin Martin, Executive Director, Reacts to Obama’s Russian Deals

As the nation’s largest peace organization, of course we commented on the announced agreements between Presidents Barack Obama and Dmitry Medvedev.   Kevin Martin, the group’s executive director, stated:

It’s good to see the U.S. and Russia making progress on nuclear arms reductions again, and the Obama’s Administration’s overall priority on rebuilding a positive relationship with Russia is extremely important. However, the announced reductions are fairly modest. The conventional wisdom is that these proposed cuts are the best that can be accomplished right now, but the two countries could go further and announce the initiation of negotiations to eliminate all nuclear weapons, which would be accomplished in stages over the next ten years or so.

Clearly, two ongoing sticking points are Star Wars, so-called “missile defense,” and NATO expansion.  Unless the U.S. moves toward Russia’s position on those issues, gaining the close cooperation the U.S. needs from Russia on nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation issues will be very difficult.

Instead of sending more troops and military supplies through Russia, the U.S. and international community should increase funding for Afghan-led humanitarian aid, development work, and landmine clean up while supporting regional diplomacy.  Peace Action calls for an immediate halt to air and Predator drone strikes that kill, injure and traumatize innocent civilians and drive people to the Taliban and Al-Qaeda.

Peace Action was founded over 50 years ago to abolish nuclear weapons and holds leadership roles in several coalitions working on disarmament issues and progressive foreign policy, including chairing a group of over 80 leaders working to change U.S. policy in the Afghanistan region.  Don’t forget to sign our petition here.

Building Relationships on the Hill

Jared Polis is a freshman congressman from the second district in Boulder Colorado. I was fortunate enough to have a meeting with his Educational Legislative Assistant, Spiros Protopsaltis, yesterday. After preparing for two days and contacting the Greek embassy for the correct pronunciation of his name, we were ready to go. Though this was not my first time lobbying, it would be my first time speaking for over a minute. Naturally, nerves were there.

A number of weeks ago I accompanied Paul Martin to a Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee meeting on the Hill. That day, Representative Steve Driehaus of Ohio and Representative Jared Polis of Colorado attended the meeting. They provided a background of themselves and after learning how involved in education Representative Polis was, I felt I had the perfect opportunity to spread the word of SPAN.

I waited my turn to speak with Representative Polis after the meeting was dismissed. After five minutes or so of conversing with other interested attendees, the floor was mine. We spoke about SPAN and our mission on counter recruitment. He appeared sufficiently interested but left the room quickly to attend another meeting. To my surprise, a letter arrived at the office a few days later expressing Representative Polis’ interest in SPAN. I wasted no time responding and the next day a meeting was set up with his right hand man on education.

Jonathan, our SPAN coordinator, and I made it to his office after being delayed on the metro’s red line and running through a torrential downpour. Besides the fact that I mispronounced Mr. Protopsaltis’ name, the meeting went well. Jonathan and I were focused on building a relationship with Representative Polis and his office more so than asking for signatures on bills. We discussed student privacy issues and received a lot of advice on next steps to take.

I am appreciative of the opportunity and experience I got from the meeting yesterday. It really is as easy as calling up the office of your representative to set up a meeting. They want to hear from you! Go to one of the following websites to set up a meeting either in your state at your Representative’s district office or in his/her office in Washington, DC. http://www.house.gov/house/MemberWWW_by_State.shtml

http://capwiz.com/fconl/directory/congdir.tt

Peace!

Mariah

Tom Hayden – Long War Needs a Long Peace Movement

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/long-war-needs-long-peace_b_224154.html

The simultaneous conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and beyond are all connected to the Pentagon strategy of “the Long War” projected to last fifty years in “the arc of crisis” that just happens to stretch across Muslim lands where there are oil reserves and plans for Western-dominated pipelines. The term “Long War” was introduced by Gen. John Abizaid in the 1990s and is the perspective of counterinsurgency experts around the Pentagon and think tanks led by the Center for New American Security.

The Long War will require a long peace movement, and a different one.

Many veterans of the movement against the Iraq War, impacted by the multiple wars, the financial and budget crises, and confused about the Obama era, are pondering the question of what to think and do. The following are brief notes outlining a possible strategy:

Counterinsurgency goes back to Malaysia and Algeria. It has never “worked”, except in Malaysia where conditions were unique.

Counterinsurgency is aimed at the home front, to keep American casualties low and, as Kagan writes, “off camera, so to speak.”

In Iraq, it’s hardly “victory” when the client government is bragging about the American withdrawal and the future is totally uncertain. The “surge” delivered as CNAS and Gen. Petraeus wished, by keeping the war out of the election [their words, not mine]. Now counterinsurgency can’t help them. They are pledged to withdrawal without having won the war, without having secured Western oil contracts, and without having reliable Iraqi client allies.

In Afghanistan, counterinsurgency is at cross-purposes with the drone attacks which kill the civilians who are supposed to be protected [which is why David Kilcullen writes against the continued use of Predators]. 21,000 more American troops mean more visible American casualties. The US is at fundamental odds with Karzhai, who represents the growing mainstream Afgan distrust of the US. American troops can never “protect” Afghanistan civilians from American troops! The contradictions between the US versus Europe, NATO versus the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, will increase and cannot be bridged.

In Pakistan, the US has succeeded in forcing Pakistan troops into fighting the domestic Taliban, partly because of the Taliban’s relative unpopularity. But in the process, 2-3 million refugees have been generated in the past few weeks alone, the greatest refugee crisis since Pakistan’s bloody origins. There will be more upheaval soon in South Waziristan. How on earth is this “protecting the civilian population”? Again it is the contradiction at the heart of counterinsurgency.

I would keep a focus on the need for an exit strategy, because the Pentagon and CNAS don’t believe in an exit strategy short of “victory”, which is most likely unachievable. Even the Center for American Progress [CAP] proposes a 10-12 year occupation, speaking only of Afghanistan. Add up and project the casualties and budget costs, and you have a trillion dollar war with several thousand American casualties. You will antagonize more Muslims and drive them into anti-US nationalism and extremism. You will be running a gulag of barbaric detention camps in these countries, multiplying the Guantanamo and Bagram crises. You will add to the collapsing dream of funding for health care, education and stimulus spending here at home. Obama will be burdened with wars and occupations during his entire presidency. We will not be safer.

My advice:
Read and study the Long War. It’s not paranoia, it’s a Pentagon strategy.

Understand that the Long War is against Muslim countries and over oil and pipelines. It spreads terrorism.

Understand the need to link with human rights, and anti-torture coalitions, especially the clergy.

Understand the need to link with groups focused on domestic budget priorities, especially labor and people of color.

Understand why Alternative Energy is a priority for the peace movement and a threat to the Long War’s premises.

Obtain and continually spread information on the real costs in American blood, taxes and civilian casualties.

Work around the clock on the media, convincing them to report a rationale critique with special emphasis on resisting the growing secrecy of these special operation strategies.

Spend the next six months preparing to expand the 132 House votes for an exit strategy into critical hearings and 230 votes by next spring as Congressional elections approach.

Don’t attack President personally. He is trapped between the Long War and his promise of an exit strategy, but attack the occupations and include the argument that the Long War might doom Obama’s domestic priorities and even his presidency.

Build a giant constituency base in Congressional districts. Employ field organizers by regions to run anti-war campaigns on a community-organizing model. Avoid Beltway faction fights by focusing on what the grass-roots needs.

The CNAS is the new “best and brightest” group, and we should remember what happened to them in Vietnam.

The Long War will fail because the US is overextended militarily and economically, and the world is more multi-polar than uni-polar. The world does not share the US Long War agenda. This overextension will cause worsening problems at home, become a threat to the open society, and lead to serious political challenges down the road. The choice is always empire versus democracy.

News from the “Forgotten War” in Iraq

The US is (mostly) pulling back from bases in Iraqi cities in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) signed last year by Iraq’s government and the Bush Administration. While this can be taken as a sign of progress, violent attacks have been increasing recently in Iraq. Two New York Times articles today offer somewhat conflicting depictions of the situation in Iraq, reinforcing the undeniable truth of the continuing misery for the people of Iraq, and that the peace movement was (and is) right in our assertion that the US should never have invaded in the first place. Oh when will they (we) ever learn?

-Kevin Martin, Executive Director

 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/world/middleeast/26iraq.html?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/world/middleeast/26maliki.html?th&emc=th

Working for nuclear abolition and non-proliferation

Who wouldn’t be interested in a campaign to stop the spread of nuclear weapons? Non-proliferation has always just seemed like a given to me. Still, I was never really informed about the various efforts to decrease or even eliminate nukes all together.

On Friday—my first day visiting the hill as a Peace Action intern—I had the opportunity to sit in on two meetings at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation: the Next Nuclear Weapons Working Group (NNWW) meeting and the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test Ban Treaty (CTBT) meeting. Though the acronyms and strategies tossed around were often over my head, the very fact that various political and advocacy groups had gathered to tackle these issues made me feel hopeful and at ease.

During President Obama’s April 5th speech in Prague, he advocated for a nuclear free world. However, it’s hard to be sure what the rhetoric of his speech implied.

“I’m not naive. This goal will not be reached quickly – perhaps not in my lifetime,” Obama said.

We hope that Obama wasn’t being skeptical, and that instead meant this comment as a display of his commitment to abolishing nuclear weapons, no matter the time frame.
The speech’s full text can be found here: http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-By-President-Barack-Obama-In-Prague-As-Delivered/

With Peace Action and our allies collaborating, I think there is a lot of potential in upcoming months for some progress on non-proliferation. Grassroots organizing in a slew of states–in order to ensure US ratification of the CTBT–is one step in the right direction. After Friday’s meetings, I am eager to learn more about how communities can organize in support of a nuclear free world!

Sign this petition to support the cause of non-proliferation and nuclear abolition to be presented to the United Nations in May 2010:
http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/t/288/petition.jsp?petition_KEY=1977

To learn more about Peace Action’s work on nuclear weapons policy, visit this site: http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/161/p/salsa/web/common/public/content.sjs?content_item_KEY=5729

Thanks for your help!
Alyssa

Cut the F-22 Outdated Fighter and get an Afghanistan exit strategy in a Few Days

We have a chance to win on two issues in the next few days:

1. Cut the funding for the outdated F-22 Jet, which both Pres. Obama and Def. Sec. gates want cut.
2. Get an exit strategy from the Obama Administration on Afghanistan

Amendments on H.R. 2647 will be taken by House Rules Committee until 7:30 PM tonight.  Then, the rule will be voted on in the Rules Committee tomorrow, Tuesday after 5:00 PM.  Even though there’s still some shifting about which bills will come up in what order this week, it appears that H.R. 2647, the FY 2010 National Defense Authorizations Act/NDAA, will come to the House floor on Wednesday, June 24th, immediately following the completion of the FY 2010 Homeland Security Appropriations Act.

Debate on the defense bill and amendments to the defense bill will likely continue into Wednesday night, with votes on those amendments being rolled over to Thursday, June 25th.   Any remaining debate and votes on the defense bill and amendments will be completed on Thursday, June 25th.  The annual White House picnic is “Hawaiian style” this year and on Thur. eve.  Members hope to have finished up the defense bill by that time (i.e. 6-ish), but if not, there will be a break in voting while debate on the bill and amendments continues, with votes rolled until later in the evening or the next morning.

Here’s some of the strategy that various coalitions are working on:

Focus on the F-22 should be Dem. leadership and our normal allies asking them to support any amendments that cut the F-22.

Focus on the Afghanistan Exit Strategy Amendment should be on those allies that are not current cosponsors of HR2404

The War Supplemental Vote in the House Soon

The U.S. House of Representatives is on the verge of voting on the final war supplemental!

They have passed the rule, but it doesn’t look like they have the votes yet to pass the supplemental.  Please inform your representative that you want to see an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His or her phone number may be found here or call the Congressional switchboard directly at 202-224-3121 and ask for your Representative’s office.

ALSO… 

Please ask your member’s office if they are cosponsors of Rep. Jim McGovern’s request for an exit strategy from Afghanistan (HR 2404). If they are not yet cosponsors, encourage your member to sign onto HR2404 and join Rep. McGovern and other members of Congress to end the war in Afghanistan.

Please post the outcome of you calls to this blog.

We are working with allies inside Congress and outside on getting “no” votes.