President Obama will give his first State of the Union address on Wednesday night at 9 p.m. Eastern. Brave New Foundation's Rethink Afghanistan campaign wants to make sure this isn't just a time to sit and watch, but a time to get together with our friends and push back against the expanding Afghanistan war.
By a variety of measures, U.S. military policies in the Afghanistan war are failing.
You probably haven't heard much about this, in part because of the justified media focus on Haiti, but a confluence of very bad indicators point to failure even by the military's avowed yardsticks. The civilian casualty rate in Afghanistan rose significantly in 2009. War-related violence is at its peak since 2001. The armed resistance to the Kabul government is spreading rapidly and can now "sustain itself indefinitely" according to the top military intelligence officer in the region. Efforts to build the Afghan National Army are flailing, as are pro-government efforts to rebuild infrastructure. In short, despite the happy talk from General Stanley McChrystal and Admiral James Stavridis, a great many signs indicate that the U.S.-led pro-government coalition is headed for failure.
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.
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.
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.
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.
American success in Afghanistan should be measured by “the number of Afghans shielded from violence,” not the number of enemy fighters killed, he said.
McChrystal is now running around demanding more troops for Afghanistan so he can increase "the number of Afghans shielded from violence."
Yeah, about that:
Check, please.
Warning: The following video contains graphic images.
The U.S. is pinwheeling its arms on the edge of a very deep abyss in Afghanistan. In a Nixon-like display of corruption and paranoia, Hamid Karzai and his cronies, who would likely have won a legitimate election, engaged in such widespread vote fraud that Afghanistan likely faces either renewed civil conflict or a constitutional death spiral. These factors render General Stanley McChrystal's strategic assessment, which refers to its own "most important component" as "a strong partnership with the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) that will build the capacity needed to provide Afghanistan with a stable future," myopic in the extreme. In this context, a review that includes such useless prescriptions as "Promote a more capable, accountable, and effective government in Afghanistan that serves the Afghan people," shows how far into fantasy land U.S. "strategic thinking" has strayed.
Simply put, the political is killing us in Afghanistan. The self-inflicted wounds in the political arena we've bestowed upon ourselves since 2002 may be irreversible and terminal. One thing is certain: if the president can't break out out of the imaginary Afghanistan his advisers are creating for him, we are dead, and we won't be the only ones.
When the people of an occupied country want foreign troops out while the people of the occupying country want their troops to come home, and the troops remain, something is wrong. Both the American people and the Afghan people want a troop decrease in Afghanistan. Yet this weekend, the President is reviewing a strategic assessment prepared by General Stanley McChrystal widely portrayed as a prelude to a request for an escalation. Should the president approve such a request, he'd be saying, in effect, that to protect democracy in America and to build it in Afghanistan, we must trample it.
Welcome to Derreck Crowe, who will be blogging for us on Afghanistan--Chris
When the history of the Afghanistan war is written, the week of August 16-22 may be remembered as the week the counterinsurgency trap closed on the United States.
For most of the following, I'll discuss counterinsurgency on its own terms to show how U.S. decision-makers have walked themselves into a trap that should cause us to reconsider our involvement in Afghanistan even if we grant their bad strategic assumption that COIN was the proper paradigm from which to plan an end to al-Qaida.
Counterinsurgency, as defined by the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, is a fancy word for jumping into a foreign civil conflict on the side of a purported legitimate government in a fight against other factions. The prize is the consent of the governed/occupied.
At its core, COIN is a struggle for the population's support. The protection, welfare, and support of the people are vital to success...Both insurgents and counterinsurgents are fighting for the support of the populace...Popular support allows counterinsurgents to develop the intelligence necessary to identify and defeat insurgents.
Demonstrations of the legitimacy of the government backed by counterinsurgents are essential to this strategy. The COIN manual goes so far as to call a legitimate host nation government the "north star." The corollary of this requirement is that the counterinsurgent must work as hard as possible to create the perception of legitimacy for their allies. Elections become enormously important for this purpose. A healthy, widespread voter turnout in an election relatively free of fraud can purchase legitimacy for the government. Massive fraud and spotty turnout, especially among populations from which insurgents draw recruits, can rob the government of a significant portion of the legitimacy it has. If a foreigncounterinsurgent planned to stay in-country for a wider purpose than simply keeping a government intact-- to fight al Qaida, for instance--the counterinsurgent can be strongly tempted to try to spin questionable election results as legitimate to validate their presence in the country.
Worse, if a foreign power undertakes counterinsurgency in an "enemy of my enemy is my friend" manner, they risk not only failure of the strategy but culpability in the actions of an illegitimate government--which increases the chances of terrorism.
The United States has made both of these mistakes in Afghanistan.
U.S. airstrikes slaughtered 95 Afghan children in the Farah province last week, leaving a total of 140 civilians dead. And yet as Tom Hayden pointed out in The Nation this week, our Democrat-dominated Congress seems unwilling to criticize the Obama administration as it rushes to approve $94.2 billion in supplemental wartime funding. The Congressional Progressive Caucus, which has been holding hearings over the past few weeks with U.S., Afghan, and Pakistani military advisers, assessed that the supplemental only "exacerbates" failed strategies by allocating $84 billion to military escalation, leaving $10 billion for foreign aid.
At a time when we're facing soaring unemployment and an economic crisis, it's incredible to me that Congress is so quick to simply go along with Obama on this one, particularly when the run up to the war in Iraq is so fresh in our minds and when we've seen this pattern before from Democratic Presidents. And there are many who share this incredulity.
Here's something everyone in Congress needs to see as they consider President Obama's $83.4 billion supplemental war funding bill. National Priorities Project (NPP) just released The Cost of War in Afghanistan, a report examining the exorbitant human and economic costs of this rapidly expanding war, which estimates the war has currently cost taxpayers over $172 billion. When you factor in the projected costs of long-term military occupation, interest, and veterans' benefits, we're talking about a war that will cost close to $1 trillion. "All told," the report concludes, "this is more than the size of the recent bailout of Wall Street and rivals the historic economic stimulus bill just passed by Congress."
NPP is tracking the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq using an individual cost of war counter, calculating the state-level numbers and trade-offs of supplemental war spending. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for instance, taxpayers will have to pay $2.9 billion of the proposed $83.4 billion tab. Want to know what $2.9 billion could do instead of fund more war? NPP claims it could provide:
725,689 People with Health Care for One Year OR
3,533,713 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR
29,863 Affordable Housing Units OR
460,546 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR
46,575 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
The list goes on and on. The fact is not nearly enough members of Congress are seriously considering the cost and impact of more troops, both in the U.S. and Afghanistan. According to NPP Executive Director Jo Comerford, "The purpose of this resource is to help people across the United States reflect on the current Afghanistan war and its proposed expansion."
What happened today in Washington was, as Senator Russ Feingold called it, "historic." Thirty-eight years nearly to the day when a young John Kerry shocked the nation with his fiery anti-Vietnam war testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Rick Reyes, a former US Marine Corporal, delivered an equally puissant testimony in which he expressed his disenchantment with the war in Afghanistan. How appropriate Kerry should be sitting directly across from Reyes as Committee Chairman, listening attentively as Congress heard one of the first major voices of dissent on this war.
The son of Mexican immigrants who joined the Marines to escape a violent gang life in Los Angeles, Reyes served as an infantry rifleman in Afghanistan and Iraq. He upheld his duty to serve our country honorably, and immediately after 9/11, he was deployed to Afghanistan "with the conviction of fighting for justice and the American way." All of that changed when Reyes realized US military forces faced the impossible task of fighting militant Taliban members who blended in with the local Afghan population, routinely resulting in the injuries or deaths of innocent civilians.
For those of you who had to cut checks and wait in long lines at the Post Office yesterday, here's a stat to darken your already gloomy week. According to the National Priorities Project (NPP), 37.3 cents of every tax dollar went toward military spending last year. NPP has a site set up where you can actually see the breakdown of where your tax dollars went in 2008, based on your city and county info. For instance, in Philly where I live, the median income family paid $1,958 in federal income taxes last year. Of that, $576 went to military spending and another $155 went to military interest on debt, while education received a paltry $59 and environment, energy and science combined got just $55. Why are these numbers so skewed?
Thankfully, the Obama administration has called for substantial investment in woefully underfunded areas like education, healthcare reform, and renewable energy. And investing in renewable energy will translate into more jobs, even though the NPP notes that 30 percent of military spending currently goes toward securing fossil fuels. Here's the thing though, if our country is simultaneously escalating the war in Afghanistan, calling for a long-term military commitment, how can they possibly deliver on their economic agenda?
"Can more be done to create more of a coalition so that the U.S. isn't burdened with bearing the cost in lives and treasure alone?"
"Since over half of the citizens of Afghanistan are female, shouldn't we ask them what kind of help they want from us, if any?"
"What would happen if we pulled out military troops and replaced them with agricultural experts, economic development experts, Peace Corps volunteers, medical corps, and specialists to help in development of strong governmental structures and other "helpers" to help Afghans obtain an improved quality of life?"
"Why don't we try diplomatic negotiation with all involved parties, including The Taliban FIRST?"
These are some of the questions we all should be asking right now about the war in Afghanistan. They are a sampling from over 460 viewer-submitted questions Brave New Foundation received for their upcoming series of three debates between Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress and The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel. Clearly, people are starting to see that regardless of whether you oppose the war in Afghanistan, substantive debates from experts on both sides of the issues would benefit everyone. That's why Korb, who favors more troops and resources, will go head-to-head with vanden Heuvel, who calls for regional diplomacy and military withdrawal. They will debate whether military escalation is the best method to combat terrorism, and the effect more troops will have on an already unstable Pakistan; Korb and vanden Heuvel will agree upon a third topic chosen from the hundreds of submitted questions like the ones above.
Though this war continues to intensify, we still don't know the answers to some of the most basic questions, which is why the ultimate goal of Rethink Afghanistan and debates like these is an educational one. Raising public awareness and fostering discussion will prompt Congress to hold substantive oversight hearings that bring in experts to explain policy and offer answers.
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