Senate approves funding for Afghan troop increase
posted by Josiah Garber on June 11, 2010
in Politics, War & Peace
(Reuters) – The Senate approved funds Thursday to pay for President Barack Obama’s Afghanistan troop increase but rejected a demand that he submit a timetable to bring forces home.
The chamber’s top Democrats were split over an Afghan exit strategy, with some influential lawmakers backing the call for one, a division likely to raise hackles in the White House.
Their support could encourage other liberal Democrats who are pushing for a similar proposal in the House of Representatives, where many lawmakers are also under pressure before congressional elections in November.
The House is expected to take up its version of the war funds legislation next month.
Most of the $33 billion in war spending approved by the Senate is to finance the 30,000 troop “surge” in Afghanistan that Obama announced in December, although some of it covers expenses in Iraq.
An additional $4 billion is for the State Department to fund the “civilian surge,” bringing economic aid to Afghanistan and its neighbor, Pakistan. The new money is in addition to about $130 billion Congress already approved for Afghanistan and Iraq for this year — and over $300 billion since 2001 just for the war in Afghanistan.
What I Learned in Afghanistan – About the United States
posted by Josiah Garber on June 8, 2010
in Economics, Politics, War & Peace
by Dana Visalli
I was surprised on my recent trip to Afghanistan that I learned so much…about the United States. I was in Afghanistan for two weeks in March of this year, meeting with a large number of Afghans working in humanitarian endeavors – the principal of a girls’ school, the director of a school for street children, the Afghan Human Rights Commission, a group working on environmental issues. The one thing that all of these groups that we met with had in common was, they were penniless. They all survived on rather tenuous donations made by philanthropic foundations in Europe.
I had read that the United States had spent $300 billion dollars in Afghanistan since the invasion and occupation of that country ten years ago, so I naturally became curious where this tremendous quantity of money and resources had gone. Many Americans had said to me that we were in Afghanistan “to help Afghan women,” and yet we were told by the director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission, and we read in the recent UN report titled “Silence is Violence,” that the situation for women there was growing more violent and oppressive each year. So I decide to do some research.
95% of the $300 billion that the U.S. has spent on its Afghanistan operation since we invaded the country in 2001 has gone to our military operations there. Several reports indicate that it costs one million dollars to keep one American soldier in that country for one year. We will soon have 100,000 troops in Afghanistan, which will cost a neat $100 billion a year.
US soldiers in Afghanistan spend almost all of their time on one of our 300 bases in that country, so there is nothing they can do to help the Afghan people, whose physical infrastructure has been destroyed by the “30-year war” there, and who are themselves mostly jobless in a society in which there is almost no economy and no work.
Some effort is made to see that the remaining 5% of the $300 billion spent to date in Afghanistan does help Afghan society, but there is so much corruption and general lawlessness that the endeavor is largely futile. We were told by a female member of the Afghan parliament of one symbolic incident in which a container of medical equipment that was purchased in the US with US government funds for a clinic in Ghawr province, west of Kabul. It was shipped from the US, but by the time it arrived in Ghawr it was just an empty shell; all the equipment had been pilfered along the way.
Violence against women is increasing in Afghanistan at the present time, not decreasing. The Director of the Afghan Human Rights Commission told us of a recent case in which a ten-year-old girl was picked up by an Afghan Army commander in his military vehicle, taken to the nearby base and raped. He brought her back to her home semiconscious and bleeding, after conveying to her that if she told what had happened he would kill her entire family. The human rights commissioner ended the tale by saying to us the he could tell us “a thousand stories like this.” There has been a rapid rise in the number of self-immolations – women burning themselves to death – in Afghanistan in the past three years, to escape the violence that pervades many women’s lives – under the nine-year US occupation.
Pentagon Report: Still Not Enough Troops in Afghanistan
posted by Josiah Garber on June 7, 2010
in Economics, Politics, War & Peace
After Multiple Escalations, Will Enough Ever Be Enough?
by Jason Ditz of Antiwar.com
After 15 months in office President Obama has increased the number of troops in Afghanistan by an almost impossible amount, going from 30,000 (itself the product of an end-of-term escalation by President Bush) to 86,000… with the troop level pushing 100,000 by the end of the summer.
But in what is rapidly becoming the ultimate example of a mission that grows to exceed whatever resources it is given, the Pentagon’s latest report on Afghanistan is warning that they still don’t have enough troops to cover even half of the “key districts” in the nation, let alone the rest of the country.
U.S. Deaths Double in Afghanistan as Troups Pour In
posted by Josiah Garber on June 3, 2010
in Politics, War & Peace
U.S. deaths, wounded in Afghanistan outpace last year’s rate as reinforcements arrive
SEBASTIAN ABBOT
AP News
The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.
Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March.
U.S. officials have warned that casualties are likely to rise even further as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in the coming months.
“We must steel ourselves, no matter how successful we are on any given day, for harder days yet to come,” Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a briefing last month.
In total, 57 U.S. troops were killed here during the first two months of 2010 compared with 28 in January and February of last year, an increase of more than 100 percent, according to Pentagon figures compiled by The Associated Press. At least 20 American service members have been killed so far in March, an average of about 0.8 per day, compared to 13, or 0.4 per day, a year ago.
Britain, which has the second largest contingent, has lost at least 33 troops since Jan. 1, compared with 15 for the same period last year.
The steady rise in combat deaths has generated less public reaction in the United States than the spike in casualties last summer and fall, which undermined public support in the U.S. for the 8-year-old American-led mission here. Fighting traditionally tapers off in Afghanistan during winter months, only to peak in the summer.
After a summer marked by the highest monthly death rates of the war, President Barack Obama faced serious domestic opposition over his decision in December to increase troops in Afghanistan, with only about half the American people supporting the move. But support for his handling of the war has actually improved since then, despite the increased casualties.
The latest Associated Press-GfK poll at the beginning of March found that 57 percent of those surveyed approved his handling of the war in Afghanistan compared to 49 percent two months earlier. The poll surveyed 1,002 adults nationwide and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.2 percentage points.
Michael O’Hanlon, a foreign policy expert at the Brookings Institution, said the poll results could partly be a reaction to last month’s offensive against the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in Helmand province, which the Obama administration painted as the first test of its revamped counterinsurgency strategy.
Some 10,000 U.S., NATO and Afghan forces seized control of the farming community of about 80,000 people while suffering relatively few deaths. But the Taliban continue to plant bombs at night and intimidate the locals, and the hardest part of the operation is yet to come: building an effective local government that can win over the loyalty of the people.
“My main thesis … is that Americans can brace themselves for casualties in war if they consider the stakes high enough and the strategy being followed promising enough,” O’Hanlon said. “But such progress in public opinion is perishable, if not right away then over a period of months, if we don’t sustain the new momentum.”
A rise in the number of wounded — a figure that draws less attention than deaths — shows that the Taliban remain a formidable opponent.
The number of U.S. troops wounded in Afghanistan and three smaller theaters where there isn’t much battlefield activity rose from 85 in the first two months of 2009 to 381 this year, an increase of almost 350 percent. A total of 50 U.S. troops were wounded last March, an average of 1.6 per day. In comparison, 44 were injured during just the first six days of March this year, an average of 7.3 per day.
The increase in casualties was partly driven by the higher number of troops in Afghanistan in 2010. American troops rose from 32,000 at the beginning of last year to 68,000 at the end of the year, an increase of more than 110 percent.
“We’ve got a massive influx of troops, we have troops going into areas where they have not previously been and you have a reaction by an enemy to a new force presence,” said NATO spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale.
The troop numbers have continued to rise in 2010 in line with the recent surge. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that a third of the additional forces, or 10,000 troops, are already in Afghanistan. They plan to have all 30,000 troops in the country before the end of the year.
U.S. officials have said they plan to use many of the additional forces to reassert control in Kandahar province, where the insurgents have slowly taken territory over the past few years in an effort to boost their influence over Kandahar city, the largest metropolis in the south and the Taliban’s former capital.
Many analysts believe the Kandahar operation will be much more difficult than the recent Marjah offensive because of the greater dispersion of Taliban forces, the urban environment in Kandahar city and the complex political and tribal forces at work in the province.
The goal of both operations is to put enough pressure on the Taliban to force them to the negotiating table to work out a political settlement to end the war — a process the U.S. believes will only gain momentum once the militant group has lost traction on the battlefield.
“Until they transition to that mode, then we will have fighters ready to take shots at us and plant IEDs (improvised explosive devices),” said Lt. Col. Calvert Worth Jr., commanding officer of the 1st Battalion, 6th Marines Regiment in central Marjah.
__
Associated Press Writer David Stringer in London and Monika Mathur at the AP’s News Research Center in New York contributed to this report.
Source: AP News
NATO’s Afghan Civilian Killings More than Doubled in Early 2010
posted by Josiah Garber on June 2, 2010
in Politics, War & Peace
Is This the “Progress” President Obama Spoke Of?
by Jason Ditz
Yesterday much was made of the Red Cross report that showed that the number of civilians wounded by Taliban bombings had increased some 40% year over year. Today, the figure is much more stark, as NATO’s own figures revealed that the number of civilians killed by NATO in Afghanistan had well more than doubled year over year.
In the first three months of 2009, NATO killed 29 Afghan civilians according to their own, extremely conservative statistics. In the same period of this year, those numbers show at least 72 Afghan civilians killed by the international forces.
The numbers come as Gen. Stanley McChrystal promises yet more changes to the rules of engagement in the nation, designed to minimize civilian killings by the international forces. It should be noted, however, that Gen. McChrystal revised these rules several times in late 2009, only to see the civilian killings rise precipitously.
It also comes just a day after President Obama gave a high profile interview insisting “progress” was being made in the war, and that the Taliban’s momentum had been blunted. This could perhaps be defended in that the Taliban’s civilian toll rose only 40% while NATO’s civilian toll rose 148%, but this hardly seems to be the sort of progress that the president should be bragging about in international interviews.
Obama Will Bring Home Troops – AF
posted by Josiah Garber on April 1, 2010
in Fun, Politics, War & Peace
April Fools. If only it were true.
In reality he has expanded funding for the wars, expanded the defense budget, expanded the nuclear weapons program, expanded the war into Pakistan, and expanded the number of troops on the ground.
In addition he has said that we will have permanent troops in Iraq: merely relabeling them as ‘non-combat’ troops without changing their actual role.
In addition troop death rates in Afghanistan have doubled in the past 3 months. It’s time to bring the troops home and stop expanding our occupation of sovereign nations.
Obama to Seek $708 Billion for Wars in 2011
posted by Josiah Garber on January 26, 2010
in Economics, Politics, War & Peace
In a request that will likely put the call for $33 billion in “emergency” war funds for 2010 in a new light, President Obama is now planning to request at least a $708 billion military budget for fiscal year 2011. This record amount for America’s already enormous military even surpasses the Bush Administration’s largest annual expenditures for wars.
The revelation came as part of the Obama Administration’s “Quadrennial Defense Review,” (QDR) which laid out the size of its planned military budgets and military goals through 2015.
The QDR will reportedly plan for dramatic cuts in the cost of war past fiscal year 2011, under the assumption that the Iraq War and Afghan War won’t cost nearly so much by that point.
Yet it should be noted that the Obama Administration previously laid out a plan which anticipated those savings starting in 2011, and now that it is time to actually seek the 2011 war funds it has simply been pushed back another year.
The administration maintains that the Iraq pullout is “on pace” despite having removed only a handful of troops in 2009, while officials are already suggesting that the pledge to start an Afghan pullout in 2011 is probably not sincere.
Obama should have returned Nobel Peace Prize says Ron Paul
posted by Josiah Garber on December 10, 2009
in Politics, War & Peace
Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President. – by Ray McGovern
posted by Josiah Garber on March 30, 2009
in Politics
I was wrong. I had been saying that it would be naïve to take too seriously presidential candidate Barack Obama’s rhetoric regarding the need to escalate the war in Afghanistan. I kept thinking to myself that when he got briefed on the history of Afghanistan and the oft-proven ability of Afghan “militants” to drive out foreign invaders – from Alexander the Great to the Persians, the Mongolians, the Indians, the British, and the Russians – he would be sure to understand why they call mountainous Afghanistan the “graveyard of empires.”
And surely he would be fully briefed on the stupidity and deceit that left 58,000 U.S. troops – not to mention 2 to 3 million Vietnamese – dead in Vietnam. John Kennedy became president the year Obama was born. One cannot expect toddler-to-teenager Barack to remember much about the war in Vietnam, and it was probably too early for that searing, controversial experience to have found its way into the history texts as he was growing up.
continue reading the article here.
‘Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. In the Sixties he served as an infantry/intelligence officer and then became a CIA analyst for the next 27 years. He is on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).’
He was also my wife’s teacher in Washington DC.
Check out this video where he confronts Rumsfeld on his lies.