If Matthew Hoh could tell you one thing to help you understand the U.S.'s predicament in Afghanistan, he'd tell you:
The presence of our ground combat troops is not doing anything to defeat al-Qaida.
Think about that for a moment. We are paying roughly $1 million per troop, per year in Afghanistan. That's roughly twice the per-troop cost in Iraq. We've suffered well more than 800 deaths in Afghanistan. And yet here is the former top civilian official in Afghanistan's Zabul province, a former Marine who served in Anbar province in Iraq, telling us that the presence of our ground forces does nothing to defeat the organization that's supposedly the target of our operations in that country.
So, if we're not going about the business of defeating al-Qaida in Afghanistan, what are we doing?
We're involved in a civil war in Afghanistan. We're only taking one side in that civil war. And, our presence there is only encouraging the civil war to go on.
Back in the 1960s, Time and Life had many subscribers. These magazines dropped plenty of photos about the reality of war onto tens of millions of coffee tables across the country, every damn week.
And, Walter Cronkite made sure that Mr. and Mrs. America had a close-up view on tv during the dinner hour.
The last time I was on Laura Flanders's GRIT tv I argued that the American public opposed the occupation of Afghanistan, but another guest -- some Washington, D.C., "progressive" -- argued that this had no relevance, since the American public didn't know anything about Afghanistan.
When the RAND Corporation held a forum on Afghanistan recently on Capitol Hill, Zbigniew Brzezinski claimed that it was uncontroversial that US troops had to stay in Afghanistan. I pointed him to polls of Americans, and he replied that Americans get fatigued and don't know any better.
When I spoke to a philosophy department at a university this month, a number of the professors objected to my advocacy of majority-rule on the grounds that experts often know best.
Let's set aside for a moment the ludicrous propaganda that maintains that the reason we occupy other people's countries is to impose democracy on them. Let's assume we're imposing the rule of elite experts. Even so, even on those terms, here are some possible responses to this line of thinking.
News reports indicate that you plan to send between 34,000 and 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.
We urge you to reconsider this decision.
Expanding the war in Afghanistan will make Americans less safe, not more so.
Less than 100 members of Al Qaeda remain in Afghanistan. The Karzai government we once supported is controlled by warlords and is riddled with corruption. Pakistan's stability will be gravely imperiled by an expansion of the war. Hundreds if not thousands of troops will be killed, along with countless civilians. Anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world will be inflamed by civilian bloodshed, facilitating recruitment by terrorist organizations.
The war will cost billions of dollars when we can least afford it, and will stymie your domestic agenda.
The cost of sustaining a military force in Afghanistan is $1 million per soldier per year - that's close to $100 billion dollars annually with the troop increase. With the economy in shambles, the deficits generated by these enormous costs will compromise your domestic legislative agenda both fiscally and politically.
The United States has no vital interest in Afghanistan. If you choose to further escalate troop levels in Afghanistan, you will be making the biggest mistake of your presidency.
Please reject General McChrystal's troop requests and begin the process of exiting U.S. forces from Afghanistan.
President Obama job approval rating has been static for the past three months. Since mid-August, net job approval for President Obama has hovered in a tight, 5-8% net approval range. This range is very similar to the amount by which he won the 2008 election (7.27%), strongly suggesting that the national political environment has simply returned to its pre-election coalitions. President Obama's supporters are now the same group of people who voted for him last year, while his opponents are those who voted for someone else.
Since he is now relying on his pre-election coalition to maintain his overall support, any decision to further escalate American troop presence in Afghanistan is dangerous for President Obama. This is not only because a narrow majority opposes troop escalation in Afghanistan, but because the majority of Americans who oppose the troop escalation are members of President Obama's coalition (aka, mainly self-identified Democrats).
By a 2-1 margin, self-identified approve of President Obama's handling of Afghanistan, even though twice as many Democrats favor decreasing troop levels there as favor increasing troop levels.
Already, a 27% disapproval for President Obama among Democrats for his handling of Afghanistan is far above his overall job disapproval among Democrats, which only stands at 12.3%. If an additional 15% of national Democrats were to start disapproving of President Obama's overall performance, then his overall job approval rating would slide to around a net negative of 4-5%. Such a negative approval rating would seriously endanger the rest of his legislative agenda, from health care to climate change to financial regulations.
President Obama is not going to win back any significant number of Republicans, who overwhelmingly disapprove of his handling of Afghanistan despite approving of his policies there. It is also unlikely that he will win back a significant number of Independents until the economy shows real improvement. Right now, he is functioning primarily on a base of Democratic support, which an escalation in Afghanistan has the potential to damage.
President Obama is probably not taking these political considerations into account when determining troop levels in Afghanistan, but given the impact that an escalation could have on human lives in other areas--specifically health care and climate change--it would not be a terrible idea if he did.
President Obama will increase the American military presence in Afghanistan yet again:
Tonight, after months of conferences with top advisors, President Obama has settled on a new strategy for Afghanistan. CBS News correspondent David Martin reports that the president will send a lot more troops and plans to keep a large force there, long term.
The president still has more meetings scheduled on Afghanistan, but informed sources tell CBS News he intends to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal most, if not all, the additional troops he is asking for.
McChrystal wanted 40,000 and the president has tentatively decided to send four combat brigades plus thousands more support troops.
This is going to bring the total number of United States troops deployed to Afghanistan over 100,000 by the start of 2011:
The first combat troops would not arrive until early next year and it would be the end of 2010 before they were all there. That makes this Afghanistan surge very different from the Iraq surge, in which 30,000 troops descended on Baghdad and the surrounding area in just five months.(...)
The buildup would be expected to last about four years, until McChrystal completes his plan for doubling the size of the Afghan army and police force.
With 68,000 Americans already there, the Afghan surge would mean there would be 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan by the end of the president's first term.
This matches up pretty well with the corresponding withdrawal from Iraq. Between now and next August, about 70,000 troops will leave Iraq (from 120,000 to 50,000), but add about 30,000 in Afghanistan. Given that 34,000 troops were sent to Afghanistan earlier this year, this means there will not be a significant decrease in overall American troop deployment in Iraq and Afghanistan until near the end of 2011.
Even though America will have zero troops in Iraq by the end of 2011, current plans are to keep troop levels in Afghanistan high until the end of 2013 (assuming the four-year build-up counts 2009). As such, Obama will run for re-election with about 60% of the number of troops deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan (100,000) as Bush typically did (about 160,000, apart from the original 2003 invasion and the subsequent 2007 escalation).
Update: The Obama administration is denying that they have decided on a long-term troop increase in Afghanistan of this level. I guess we still have to wait and see, but I bet it actually happens.
Troop levels and insurgency strategies have dominated the discussion about Afghanistan, but there may be an important ulterior motive for those in favor of a ramped up military effort.
For more on pruning back executive power see Pruning Shears.
We've been waiting for Obama to make his decision on what to do with troops going into Afghanistan to attack Al Qaida (who aren't in Afghanistan any more) after the rerun of the election which was proven to be fraudulent and allowed Karzai to win.
Whew.
I'm really sick of our playing games in the world. With Karzai's brother accused of being a top Heroin Chief, with General McChrystal calling for more troops (while being criticized for his dealings with the Pat Tillman controversy), with a Civil War going on amid the Afghans that WE CANNOT CORRECT (just ask the Russians)... we are perceived as Occupiers and we should get out.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma and Firedoglake
Hat tip to Henry Porter and the other diarists who posted on the videos and photos yesterday of the repatriation of service members slain in Afghanistan.
Henry wrote of how enraged he is that war criminals of the previous administration are walking free, of the pain he felt when he encountered a young disabled veteran, and that he finds "a measure of comfort in the hope that unlike his predecessor, this president has the courage, the character , the compassion and the judgment to make his decisions based on the best possible information and advice available to him."
It is not often that we are able to see photos depicting the cost of war to our troops and their families. Few people encounter our disabled veterans. The face of war is rarely seen.
During the war in Vietnam, Walter Cronkite made sure that Mr. and Mrs. America saw plenty of the reality, during the dinner hour.
Sensitivity to the wishes of our soldiers and their families must prevail over other considerations.
And, there are some soldiers and families who have been willing to share images of their sacrifice with us.
According to the source, Abdullah will likely announce this weekend that he will boycott the runoff presidential election slated for November 7, a runoff that had been scheduled after intense diplomatic arm twisting by the United States. [emphasis mine]
One hopes a CNN reporter simply failed to choose his/her words carefully and meant instead "drop out of" the race, because if Abdullah is going so far as to boycott the race, Afghanistan could become a much more dangerous place than it is already. Recall that earlier this year, Abdullah supporters were promising protests "with Kalashnakovs" if he simply lost in a fair vote, and, as if to prove their point, reports indicated a frightening flow of weapons toward Abdullah's political base. Now we're potentially talking about him urging people not to participate and declaring the entire runoff process illegitimate.
A former Marine Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq, Hoh had also served in uniform at the Pentagon, and as a civilian in Iraq and at the State Department. By July, he was the senior U.S. civilian in Zabul province, a Taliban hotbed.
But last month, in a move that has sent ripples all the way to the White House, Hoh, 36, became the first U.S. official known to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he had come to believe simply fueled the insurgency.
"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," he wrote Sept. 10 in a four-page letter to the department's head of personnel. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."
Kerry proceeds from a nonsensical definition of success:
I define success as the ability to empower and transfer responsibility to Afghans as rapidly as possible and achieve a sufficient level of stability to ensure that we can leave behind an Afghanistan that is not controlled by Al Qaeda or the Taliban.
Having the "ability" to do something is not success. Saying you're going to do something "as rapidly as possible" tells you nothing about how quickly you will do it. What, you think there's a plausible future where the president tells the American people that he screwed around a bit instead of getting Afghanistan done as "rapidly as possible?" Sloppy definitions make poor policy, and that's what we get from the rest of the speech. For example, take this goofy piece of self-contradiction:
Second, we simply don't have enough troops or resources to launch a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency campaign. But importantly, nor do we need to.
We all see the appeal of a limited counterterrorism mission- and no doubt it is part of the endgame. But I don't think we're there yet. A narrow mission that cedes half the country to the Taliban could lead to civil war and put Pakistan at risk.
What a mess. We don't have enough troop "for a broad, nationwide counterinsurgency," but we can't cede "half the country to the Taliban" without risking civil war. Following his warning about the dangers of ceding "half the country," Kerry calls for "narrowly focused" counterinsurgency operations in less than 40 percent of the country.
Why is it that every time we elect "peace" candidates we defund the peace movement, stop calling for an end to wars, and limit our demands exclusively to opposing war escalations?
In 2006 we voted into Congress the candidates who looked most likely to end the war in Iraq. We congratulated ourselves on a job well done. Then we mildly urged them not to escalate the war they'd been elected to end, and they escalated it anyway.
Cross-posted at Daily Kos, Docudharma, MyDD, and FDL.
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In today's WaPo, Ike Skelton, Chair of the House Armed Forces Committee, teamed up with everyone's favorite former Democrat, Joe Lieberman, on an op-ed for more war in Afghanistan called Don't Settle for Stalemate in Afghanistan.
The president was right to call the war in Afghanistan "a war of necessity." Now it is time to treat it as such and commit the decisive force that will allow Gen. McChrystal to break the Taliban's momentum as quickly as possible.
And
Here at home, we must stabilize public support by convincing an increasingly skeptical American people that the Afghan war is in fact winnable.
. .
It comes as no surprise that Ike and Joe are in favor of treating our Armed Forces to more $#!t sandwiches and crap burgers in Afghanistan. Ike and Joe have been talking it up for quite a while.
According to the latest CBS poll on Afghanistan (PDF, page 3), whether or not you a voter approves of President Obama's handling of Afghanistan has as much to do with partisan self-identification as with President Obama's actual policies in the country.
By a 2-1 margin, self-identified approve of President Obama's handling of Afghanistan, even though twice as many Democrats favor decreasing troop levels there as favor increasing troop levels.
President Obama has a net approval rating of negative 38% among self-identified Republicans in Afghanistan, However, three and a half times as many Republicans think troop levels in Afghanistan should be increased rather than decreased.
This partisan discrepancy can probably be explained by Afghanistan being low on the list of national priorities right now. In the same CBS poll, only 3% of Americans cited Afghanistan as the top national priority. As such, many Americans are relying on their partisan preference to determine their approval or disapproval of President Obama on Afghanistan, rather than their personal views on how many troops we should have in that country. When an issue is not high on your list of national priorities, it is a safe bet that a given voter less likely even be aware of a difference with his or her party leadership, and more likely to let a difference s/he does notice slide.
There are possible readings of these numbers which are a lot less generous to the electorate, but I won't go there in this article. As tempting as a "stupid electorate" conclusion is from numbers like these, in my experience it is best to withhold such conclusions until there are no other possibilities.
This is what it sounds like when someone talks to you about a foreign country, not just with some experience of the outside world, but--even more importantly--also without having feed on brainwashing terms for 20 or 30 years.
Non-interventionism is not isolationism. Quite the opposite: those who think that invasion is the answer to everything are utterly isolated in their abstract fantasy land, totally removed from the human and historical reality they talk about with such hollow, pompous authority.
Knowingly or cluelessly, Chicago Tribune's 'blame scary black males' image from its free rag yesterday.
The problems facing the police in Chicago and our military in Afghanistan are similar. Of course, the result of police failure in Chicago is unacceptable, our children beating hell out of and shooting each other. In Afghanistan, of course, we can just leave, which is what we should do.
The starting point in both Afghanistan and the south side is the hostility or at least the absence of goodwill toward the occupying forces. And goodwill (and the 'snitching' and neighborhood watching it generates) is essential to peace; the only alternative way to make peace is economically/politically impossible, flooding the conflict zone with five or six times as many troops/cops as are there now.
The first step toward remedying the goodwill deficit is for the occupying forces to have goodwill toward the local peoples. Which is not easy. Middle class cop bosses and America's careerist generals, and the cop and occupying army cultures, are not natural sources of goodwill toward local impoverished populations.
Let's look at the generals. They carry out a policy of occupation whose purpose is incoherent (has something to do with Al Queda, which ain't in Afghanistan), and whose means explicitly, hell triumphantly, sacrifices many civilian lives in order to make sure the occupier soldiers suffer minimal casualties. Ain't no goodwill in that. Now, can a real purpose be created or re-articulated into something that is worthwhile for Afghans? Nope. We actually tried 'helping Afghanistan become a nice country' and that plays badly with U.S. voters. Can the warfare means be modified so that many fewer Afghan civilians die in exchange for a few more Americans deaths? Realistically, no chance in hell of that.
1. The planning of 9-11 was done in hotels and apartments in Germany and Spain, and flight schools in the United States. Even Paul Pillar, former CIA deputy chief for counter-terrorism will tell you that an al Qaeda base in Afghanistan would not significantly increase threats to the United States.
ISAF commander Gen. Stanley McChrystal set out a clear marker for what he considers "success" in Afghanistan:
American success in Afghanistan should be measured by "the number of Afghans shielded from violence," not the number of enemy fighters killed, he said.
Unfortunately, according to updated totals from the United Nations Assistance Mission for Afghanistan, Operation Khanjar, launched on July 2, was followed by a severe spike in civilian casualties. The vast majority of these casualties were caused by IEDs and suicide bombings attributed to anti-Kabul-government elements. But, with the spike coinciding so closely with the launch of the ISAF push into Helmand, it's clear that NATO choices continue to feed into a dynamic that has become toxic for civilians.
