Afghanistan

House Passes Emergency Spending Bill to Continue Funding Afghanistan Occupation

Jason Leopold — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 05:28:10 -0700

Originally published at Truthout.org

A treasure trove of classified documents released Sunday by Wikileaks, which sheds new light on the catastrophic failure of the nine-year war in Afghanistan, did not derail congressional efforts Tuesday to pass a $33 billion emergency supplemental bill to continue funding the occupation.

The House passed the spending package by a vote of 308-114. The bill will now be sent to President Obama for his signature. The money will be used to fund the troop surge in Afghanistan, which is part of the revised war strategy Obama announced in a speech at West Point last December.

The combined cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has surpassed $1 trillion and have claimed the lives of 5,620 US soldiers and hundreds of thousands of civilans.

Wars and Congress: Now What?

davidswanson — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 17:44:02 -0700

By David Swanson

On Tuesday evening, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a bill already passed by the Senate that funds a $33 billion, 30,000-troop escalation in Afghanistan. The vote was 308 to 114. What could the good news possibly be?

The first good news is that, while we had no more than 35 congress members who would vote against war funding a year ago, or perhaps 55 when it was an easy vote with no pressure, we've now got 114. That's serious progress. That's a far more dramatic increase than we've seen in the number of congress members willing to vote for a non-binding unspecified timetable for a withdrawal. That number rose from 138 last year to 162 on July 1st (although the legislation was somewhat stronger this year). In other words, willingness to express mild interest in ending the war has reached a plateau. Willingness to take serious action to end the war is rapidly catching up. Of course, both have to top 218 before we win.

The really good news is that we finally have an essential ingredient in any recipe for legislative change: a record of which legislators are with us, and which against us.

The WikiLeaks Afghanistan Document Release Meaning And Ramifications

Edger — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 08:26:07 -0700

On Sunday Julian Assange through his whisteblower site WikiLeaks released what has been described as more than 90,000 secret internal US military documentary records of US military actions in Afghanistan over the past six years, sparking anger and early attempts at political 'damage control' from the US government. In reality the WikiLeaks release may be the biggest leak yet of documented war crimes in US history since the 1971 Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.

The Obama White House's immediate response came through US national security adviser James Jones.

"The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organisations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk and threaten our national security," ABC News reported that Jones said in a statement, apparently not recognizing that neither he nor the White House is the United States, and that in reality the United States public is who Jones would prefer to keep from knowing what's happening in Afghanistan.

A Reading List to Put the WikiLeaks ‘War Logs’ in Context

ProPublica — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 14:24:32 -0700

from Nicholas Kusnetz and Karen Weise
ProPublica (view source)

This morning, The New York Times, England’s The Guardian and Germany’s Der Spiegel published reports on what’s been termed the “War Logs”—nearly 92,000 documents about the war in Afghanistan made public by WikiLeaks. To put the leaked documents in context, we pulled together some of the best, past reporting on the main themes in the reports.

Pakistan’s influence on Afghanistan The documents suggest that Pakistan’s intelligence service has been aiding the Taliban and the Afghan insurgency. (See some of the documents here.) At the heart of this debate is the question Dexter Filkins posed in his Pulitzer-Prize winning coverage in late 2007: “Whose side is Pakistan really on?”

'Surge' Smoke Follows Petraeus To Afpak

Pepe Escobar — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 07:00:00 -0700

Originally published at Asia Times

Confirmed and reconfirmed by United States President Barack Obama, the US Senate and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and duly hailed as the new armored Messiah by US mainstream media, "tightly disciplined" political fox and former US Central Command chief General David Petraeus is about to land in Kabul. He will either hit the road to his 2012 Republican presidential nomination, or witness another disaster in a US$7 billion a month (and counting) quagmire.

The myth of Petraeus' "successful surge" in Iraq could not but linger on. The Pentagon never managed not to profit by selling a public relations operation to a gullible American public. Petraeus actually "won" the war in Iraq by disgorging Samsonites full of cash to selected strands of the Sunni resistance who were fiercely fighting the US occupation, while at the same time shielding the American military inside remote bases.

The Petraeus Syndrome - Why Are We in Afghanistan?

Tom Engelhardt — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 06:39:41 -0700

Originally published at TomDispatch.com
As Petraeus Takes Over, Could Success Be Worse Than Failure?

July 12, 2011, Washington, D.C. -- In triumphant testimony before a joint committee of Congress in which he was greeted on both sides of the aisle as a conquering hero, Gen. David Petraeus announced the withdrawal this month of the first 1,000 American troops from Afghanistan. “This is the beginning of the pledge the president made to the American people to draw down the surge troops sent in since 2009,” he said, adding, “and yet let me emphasize, as I did when I took this job, that our commitment to the Afghan government and people is an enduring one.”

The Crematorium of Empires

davidswanson — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 07:00:00 -0700

By David Swanson

On Wednesday U.S. senators from both political parties asked the president's representative to Afghanistan Richard Holbrooke what in the world the goal could be for the ongoing war. He had no answer.

Senator Russ Feingold pointed out that our ambassador, Karl Eikenberry, opposed the escalation (at least until he agreed to oppose his own views). Holbrooke had no response.

Senator John Kerry noted that Taliban assassinations in Kandahar began when the United States announced a coming assault there. How then could the assault stop the killings? Holbrooke had no explanation.

Tomgram: William Astore, Operation Enduring War

Tom Engelhardt — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 09:07:04 -0700

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Some words have a way of enduring. Take “endure.” As the Bush administration headed into Iraq in the spring of 2003, the Pentagon already had plans on the drawing board to build at least four gigantic American bases in that country and garrison them for the long haul. But when questioned on the subject, administration officials and spokespeople were eager to avoid linking the word “permanent” to those as-yet-unbuilt bases and so, for a while, referred to them instead as “enduring camps,” a phrase that had a certain charm and none of the ominous overtones of “permanent base.” In the end, of course, more than four massive bases were built and garrisoned. Given the slow American drawdown in that country, their fate remains unknown -- and typically undiscussed in the U.S. -- but as of this moment, they still “endure” and, huge as they are, they couldn’t look more permanent.

According to an agreement signed at the end of George W. Bush’s second term, all American “combat troops” are to be withdrawn from Iraq by this August, hence the U.S. military is planning to relabel any post-August “combat operations” as “stability operations.” Think of that as linguistic “endurance.” In the same spirit, all U.S. troops are supposed to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011, but as Tim Arango of the New York Times noted recently, “[F]ew believe that America’s military involvement in Iraq will end then. The conventional wisdom among military officers, diplomats, and Iraqi officials is that after a new government is formed, talks will begin about a longer-term American troop presence. 'I like to say that in Iraq, the only thing Americans know for certain, is that we know nothing for certain,' said Brett H. McGurk, a former National Security Council official in Iraq and current fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. 'The exception is what’s coming once there’s a new government: they will ask to amend the Security Agreement and extend the 2011 date. We should take that request seriously.'”

Tonight They Try to Escalate the War

davidswanson — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:03:42 -0700

Tonight the House of Representatives will try to vote over $30 Billion to escalate the war in Afganistan. Here's how it's expected to go down (thanks to Peace Action for some of this):

First they'll vote on unemployment insurance as a stand-alone bill.

Then, following some unrelated votes, they'll debate and vote on the Rule for the Supplemental. Rules are procedural votes that caucuses of congress members serious about blocking something can vote against. Progressives don't tend to be serious, but there's a first time for everything, and we should ask them to vote No on the Rule. A small group of Blue Dogs and Progressives is urging this.

Then they'll debate and vote on amendments to the supplemental. These are expected to include two good amendments to the war spending, which risk however providing members who vote Yes on the money the excuse that they also voted Yes on good amendments.

Presumably the amendments will also include an amendment for spending on useful things like disaster relief and schools. Perhaps the war escalation spending will also be voted on as an amendment -- it's not clear.

Then the "last votes" will come in the evening. Presumably these will include a vote on the complete package of the Supplemental.

America Detached from War

Tom Engelhardt — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:45:27 -0700

Originally published at TomDispatch.com

Bush’s Pilotless Dream, Smoking Drones, and Other Strange Tales from the Crypt

Admittedly, before George W. Bush had his fever dream, the U.S. had already put its first unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or drone surveillance planes in the skies over Kosovo in the late 1990s. By November 2001, it had armed them with missiles and was flying them over Afghanistan.

In November 2002, a Predator drone would loose a Hellfire missile on a car in Yemen, a country with which we weren’t at war. Six suspected al-Qaeda members, including a suspect in the bombing of the destroyer the USS Cole would be turned into twisted metal and ash -- the first “targeted killings” of the American robotic era.

Just two months earlier, in September 2002, as the Bush administration was “introducing” its campaign to sell an invasion of Iraq to Congress and the American people, CIA Director George Tenet and Vice President Dick Cheney “trooped up to Capitol Hill” to brief four top Senate and House leaders on a hair-raising threat to the country. A “smoking gun” had been uncovered.

According to “new intelligence,” Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had in his possession unmanned aerial vehicles advanced enough to be armed with biological and chemical weaponry. Worse yet, these were capable -- so the CIA director and vice president claimed -- of spraying those weapons of mass destruction over cities on the east coast of the United States. It was just the sort of evil plan you might have expected from a man regularly compared to Adolf Hitler in our media, and the news evidently made an impression in Congress.

Democratic Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, for example, said that he voted for the administration's resolution authorizing force in Iraq because "I was told not only that [Saddam had weapons of mass destruction] and that he had the means to deliver them through unmanned aerial vehicles, but that he had the capability of transporting those UAVs outside of Iraq and threatening the homeland here in America, specifically by putting them on ships off the eastern seaboard."