Sanders Calls for National Dialogue on Afghanistan Exit Strategy
By John Nichols at The Nation
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders has joined Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold is declaring that the United States needs to start thinking about how to extract its military from Afghanistan.
While almost 100 members of the House (including many conservative Republicans) have signed on to Massachusetts Congressman Jim McGovern’s call for the development of an Afghanistan exit strategy, Feingold has been a relatively lonely Senate advocate for a rethink of the eight-year-old occupation.
At the annual “Fighting Bob Fest” gathering in Baraboo, Wisconsin, however, Sanders drew loud and sustained applause from the crowd of 8,000 when he said, “We need to take a very, very hard look at our war in Afghanistan. We need to be clear in our goals and we need a real discussion about an exit strategy to bring our troops home.”
Sanders made his statement at the largest annual gathering of grassroots activists in the Midwest, where there was no question of the crowd’s enthusiasm for the “Health Care Not Warfare” message that was promoted at the festival by activists with Progressive Democrats of America.
Prior to coming to Wisconsin for the event, Sanders explained his views on the need to rethink Afghanistan in a video produced as part of the Brave New Films “Senator Sanders Unfiltered” project. Responding to a question from British singer Billy Bragg, Sanders said:
My major concern about the war in Afghanistan, and why I voted against the recent defense authorization bill is tat we seem to be getting sucked into a quagmire without the kind of debate, without the kind of discussion that this country desperately needs and that the people of our country are entitled. What we know now is that the number of troops that the general are requesting is going up and up. We know that we… have already poured several hundred billion dollars into Afghanistan; that number is going to go up. But we don’t know what the goals of our efforts in Afghanistan are or what kind of exit strategy we have.I worry that Afghanistan will be another Vietnam. I worry that Afghanistan will be another Iraq. We’ve been there eight years already, and how many more years are we supposed to be there? How many more American troops are supposed to die? How many more American troops are supposed to die? How many more tens and tens of billions of dollars are we supposed to be spending at a time when we have a record-breaking deficit? I find it amusing that some of my more conservative friends are saying, ‘Well, we can’t afford to spend more money on health care in this country. We can’t afford to spend more money on education or environmental protection. But, yes, we can afford to pump tens and tens of billions more into the war in Afghanistan.
Sanders says: “We need a real national discussion of an exit strategy, a real national discussion about what our goals are. We haven’t had that and the American people should be demanding it.”
Sanders is doing his part to open the discussion. And the muscular reaction to his statements made it clear that the American people are making the demand.
Afghanistan Election Fraud and the High Price of Empire
By John Nichols at The Nation
It is amusing, if remarkable, that there are still some players in Washington who try to maintain the fantasy that Afghan President Hamid Karzai governs with anything akin to legitimacy.
Karzai, an alleged oil industry fixer awarded control of his country by occupying powers, has always served with strings attached.
And the Afghan people have been quite aware of that fact.
It is true that, at different points over the past eight years, Karzai has enjoyed measures of popular support, thanks to alliances with warlords and drug dealers, the inflaming of ethnic rivalries and an awareness that he was the one distributing all those billions of dollars from the United States.
But, aside from a slick sense of dress, Karzai has never had much going for him in the political department.
So he has, out of instinct and by necessity, relied on fraud to “win” the elections that have kept the Afghan president and his minions in power.
That was not much of a problem during the Bush-Cheney years. The men who assumed control of the United States after losing the 2000 popular vote by more than 500,000 and then shutting down the recount of votes in the contested state of Florida were not going to gripe about the mangling of democratic processes in distant Afghanistan.
But the fantasy is getting harder to maintain now that Bush has retired and Cheney has repositioned himself as the planet’s primary defender of torture.
So we get the “news” — not from the satirical Onion but from the nation’s newspaper of record — that US officials are trying to prevent Karzai from declaring “victory” in the exercise in fraud that naive commentators still insist on referring to as an election.
The Times was as delicate as possible in reporting the predicament:
WASHINGTON — On Monday, as the vote-counting in Afghanistan was nearing an end, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was briefed by the American ambassador in Kabul, Karl W. Eikenberry. The same day, the ambassador delivered a blunt message to the front-runner, President Hamid Karzai: “Don’t declare victory.”The slim majority tentatively awarded Mr. Karzai in Afghanistan’s fraud-scarred election has put the Obama administration in an awkward spot: trying to balance its professed determination to investigate mounting allegations of corruption and vote-rigging while not utterly alienating the man who seems likely to remain the country’s leader for another five years.
Another way of putting it might be to say that US officials are finding it increasingly difficult to construct a rationale for allowing the man they put in charge of Afghanistan to remain in charge of Afghanistan.
This is not a new problem.
Colonial powers have faced these challenges throughout history.
It is one of the wages of empire.
And’s that’s the problem with the US presence in Afghanistan.
Opposition does Obama good
By Bill Maxwell at St. Petersburg Times
We now are hearing that President Barack Obama’s honeymoon with voters is over, that his poll numbers are falling, that the soaring rhetoric of the campaign no longer makes the Democratic faithful swoon so easily.
If this is a real trend and not temporary disgruntlement, it is a good thing.
For too long, Democrats, especially progressives, have been reluctant to openly criticize Obama, the nation’s first black president. They want him to succeed, and they believe that serious public criticism from inside the party would hurt their man and egg on angry Republicans hell-bent on not being reasonable.
Progressives do not seem to realize that support for Obama does not mean that they must ignore truths about his policies. The public interest is undermined when truths about policies are ignored.
If, however, a recent article in the New York Times about the American antiwar movement’s plans for a campaign against the administration’s policies on Afghanistan is a bellwether of what is to come from progressives on a range of other issues, we are witnessing the emergence of earnest criticism (not the braying of conservative talk show hosts) that has been sorely missing since Obama’s election.
From the beginning, I have thought that Obama — to his detriment — has been riding a wave of euphoria that inoculates him and his policies from the hard analysis of his supporters and others, many on the other side of the aisle, who genuinely disagree. This is a dangerous phenomenon in every way.
LET’S TALK ABOUT: “Trigger Pullers” in Afghanistan
By Robert Pasciullo at Gather
I just read that some U.S. officials are considering sending 14,000 troops to replace support troops who are assigned non-combatant duties according to a Pentagon official who always spoke behind the security curtain of anonymity that “It makes sense to get rid of the clerks and replace them with trigger pullers.” First of all, I find despicable the term “trigger puller” applied to the brave men and women serving in Afghanistan as if they were mindless robots. Secondly, I believe the “war” in Afghanistan is unwinnable.
While I continue to support President Obama, I am dismayed that he is considering ratcheting up the military forces in Afghanistan. Recent polls – Washington Post/ABC News Poll, indicate that the American public is opposed to dispatching additional troops to Afghanistan. Fifty-one per cent of the respondents said the war is no longer worth fighting and the human and economic costs are too great to continue. In the U.S. Senate, Russ Feingold has spoken out against further escalation. In the House, James P. McGovern of Massachusetts authored a bill calling for an exit strategy co-sponsored by 100 House members – Democrats and Republicans alike. Robert Greenwald, initiator of the “Rethink Afghanistan” project, pointed out that Afghan civilians, especially women, are “… ill served” by the occupation and that “there is no victory to be won in Afghanistan.” Vice President Joe Biden has joined the growing chorus, warning the administration of the dangers of escalating the troop force in Afghanistan. George F. Will, the erstwhile conservative pundit, wrote in his column Tuesday, Sept. 2, that the United States should substantially reduce its presence in the country.
More troops to Afghanistan more terror to US: Don’t do it Congress
By Deborah Dupre’ at Examiner
The war in Afghanistan is increasing likelihood that American civilians will be killed in a future terrorist attack (R. Greenwall, Rethink Afghanistan, Security, Part 6, 2009, provided below) so Americans are signing Tom Hayden’s petition for Congress to not fund sending more troops there.
Hayden’s Afghanistan: A petition to Take Action Against the War, (text below) calls on Congress to vote “No” to sending more troops to Afghanistan.
Hayden, an American social and political activist and politician, is most famous for his involvement in the animal rights, and the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 1960s. He is the former husband of actress Jane Fonda and the father of actor Troy Garity.
“The war in Afghanistan is increasing the likelihood that American civilians will be killed in a future terrorist attack. Part 6 of Rethink Afghanistan, Security, brings you three former high-ranking CIA agents to explain why. There is no “victory” to be won in Afghanistan. It is the most important video about U.S. Security today,” according to Robert Greenwall’s research as documented below.
Myth v. Fact: Afghanistan
By Malou Innocent at Huffington Post
While “Change” has been Barack Obama’s mantra, as of late he has been channeling his predecessor.
“Afghanistan,” according to Obama, “is a war of necessity… [And] If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.”
President George W. Bush was adept at keeping the American public in an elevated state of panic. That tactic may be useful for advancing controversial policies. But if policymakers continue to downplay the drawbacks of our current course of action, America risks intensifying the region’s powerful jihadist insurgency and entangling itself deeper into a tribal-based society it barely understands.
Americans must be told the truth about the war in Afghanistan. To understand the disadvantages of pursuing present policies, we must unpack the myths that war proponents use to justify staying the course.
Myth #1: Both al Qaeda and the Taliban Are Our Mortal Enemies
Given the magnitude of the atrocities unleashed on September 11th, removing both al Qaeda and the Taliban regime that sheltered the terrorist organization was appropriate. But eight years later, is waging a war against the Taliban a pressing national security interest? Not really.
The Taliban, the Haqqani network, and other guerilla-jihadi movements indigenous to this region have no shadowy global mission. In fact, what we are witnessing is a local and regional ethnic Pasthun population — divided arbitrarily by a porous 1,500-mile border — fighting against what they perceive to be a hostile occupation of their region. Prolonging our mission risks uniting these groups and making U.S. troops the primary target of their wrath.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, even if the Taliban were to reassert themselves amid a scaled down U.S. presence, it is not clear that the Taliban would again host al Qaeda. In The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda and the Road to 9/11, Lawrence Wright, staff writer for New Yorker magazine, found that before 9/11 the Taliban was divided over whether to shelter Osama bin Laden. The terrorist financier wanted to attack Saudi Arabia’s royal family, which, according to Wright, would have defied a pledge Taliban leader Mullah Omar made to Prince Turki al-Faisal, chief of Saudi intelligence (1977-2001), to keep bin Laden under control. The Taliban’s reluctance to host al Qaeda’s leader means it is not a foregone conclusion that the same group would provide shelter to the same organization whose protection led to their overthrow.
As the war in Afghanistan rages on, President Obama should be skeptical of suggestions that the defeat of al Qaeda depends upon a massive troop presence. Globally, the United States has degraded al Qaeda’s ability to pull off another 9/11 by employing operations that look a lot like police work. Most of the greatest successes scored against al Qaeda, such as the snatch-and-grab operations that netted Khalid Sheik Mohammed and Ramzi bin al Shibh, have not relied on large numbers of U.S. troops. Intelligence sharing and close cooperation with foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies have done more to round up suspected terrorists than blunt military force.
Nationwide peace campaign plans
Call to Rethink Afghanistan and ‘War on Terror’
A coalition of major U.S. non-government organizations will be campaigning for peace nationwide in October, including teach-ins, demonstrations and new, award-winning film screenings.
The peace project follows a recess during which hope for change under the Obama administration has gradually dwindled due to no change in U.S. foreign policy including the “long war.”
The antiwar silence has been “crashingly deafening” says Cindy Sheehan on her pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard to protest her son’s death and all other innocent people killed over a falsified cause for war. (John Walsh, The Silence of the Antiwar Movement is Deafening: Cindy Sheehan’s Lonely Pilgrimage to Martha’s Vineyard, Counterpunch, August 26, 2009) Sheehan’s protest coincided with President Obama’s vacation in the resort area.
CodePink founder, Medea Benjamin said, “We’re coming out of a low period. But as progressives feel more comfortable protesting against the Obama administration and challenging Democrats as well as Republicans in Congress, then we’ll be back on track.” James Dao, New York Times, American Antiwar Movement Plans an Autumn Campaign Against Policies on Afghanistan, August 30, 2009)
Veterans for Peace, Code Pink, Military Families Speak Out, Votevets.org, Win Without War and U.S. Labor Against the War, a network of nearly 190 union affiliates, are among national organizations planning peaceful awareness raising about US foreign policy.
A demonstration for peace is scheduled in Washington D.C. next month.
United for Peace and other group are planning smaller, local opportunities to create peace through in other places around the country. Teach-ins with Veterans and families, ‘ad hoc memorials featuring the boots of deceased soldiers and Marines” and films are being scheduled according to the NY Times.
American Antiwar Movement Plans an Autumn Campaign Against Policies on Afghanistan
By James Dao at New York Times
A restive antiwar movement, largely dormant since the election of Barack Obama, is preparing a nationwide campaign this fall to challenge the administration’s policies on Afghanistan.
Anticipating a Pentagon request for more troops there, antiwar leaders have engaged in a flurry of meetings to discuss a month of demonstrations, lobbying, teach-ins and memorials in October to publicize the casualty count, raise concerns about the cost of the war and pressure Congress to demand an exit strategy.
But they face a starkly changed political climate from just a year ago, when President George W. Bush provided a lightning rod for protests. The health care battle is consuming the resources of labor unions and other core Democratic groups. American troops are leaving Iraq, defusing antiwar sentiments in some quarters. The recession has hurt fund-raising for peace groups and forced them to slash budgets. And, perhaps most significant, many liberals continue to support Mr. Obama, or at least are hesitant about openly criticizing him.
“People do not want to take on the administration,” said Jon Soltz, chairman of VoteVets.org. “Generating the kind of money that would be required to challenge the president’s policies just isn’t going to happen.”
Tom Andrews, national director for an antiwar coalition, Win Without War, said most liberals “want this guy to succeed.” But he said the antiwar movement would try to convince liberals that a prolonged war would undermine Mr. Obama’s domestic agenda. Afghanistan, he said, “could be a devastating albatross around the president’s neck.”
Three Former Top CIA Agents Say War In Afghanistan Making World More Dangerous (VIDEO)
By Marcus Baram at Huffington Post
In a powerful new documentary, “Security” from the Rethink Afghanistan project, three former high-ranking CIA agents explain why the war in Afghanistan is making the world more dangerous, rather than safer, for Americans.
Robert Baer, former CIA field operative in the Middle East and the author of “See No Evil,” says: “The notion that we are are in Afghanistan to make our country safer is complete bullshit.”
And Graham Fuller, former CIA station chief in Kabul, emphasizes: “Both wars have made the world much more dangerous for Americans and for any American presence overseas.”