Americans hate the Afghan war more than ever
By John Amato Tuesday Aug 25, 2009 8:00amA new CNN poll shows us that the American people are still turned off the Afghan war. We'll that's not a surprise, but we have to keep talking about it so it's not lost in the great health care debate. I met Meteor Blades at the Netroots Nation party and we had a long talk about the war.
Here's some of what he said.
Make sure you read the whole article.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, said Sunday that the situation is not good in Afghanistan and that it must improve in the next 12 to 18 months or there will be congressional and popular pressure against the policy. But what would mark improvement? Fewer killings? Better delivery of services? A smaller poppy crop? Improved infrastructure? Even the Bush administration conceded rhetorically that there was no wholly military solution in Afghanistan. The Obama White House has taken that idea a good deal more seriously. "Civilian surge" and "it’s not about how many enemies we kill; it’s about how many civilians we protect" have now become the mantra.
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The Pentagon budget for Afghanistan this year is $65 billion. The USAID budget of civilian aid for winning hearts and minds in Afghanistan and Pakistan is $4.4 billion. The words deliver one message, the dollars another. It’s not that the administration doesn’t have worthwhile ideas about how to improve life for the average Afghan – electricity and clean water and a $12,000 school would make the typical rural village a far better place. It’s the implementation that isn’t happening. While 17,000 more troops have been making their way to Afghanistan, only 92 of the State Department’s promised 313 new civilians have been hired.Many of those civilians are doing terrific humanitarian work. But most of the billions they are supposed to be sinking into worthwhile projects are being sucked away by corruption long before it reaches the locales where it is supposed to be spent. This, accompanied with the slowness with which the civilian end of things has been delivered since the Bush administration, is cause for much understandable grumbling by the Afghan people...read on
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Hmmm?
Apparently Russ Feingold asked Obama to set a timetable. This will be interesting.
Feingold to Obama: Announce Withdrawal Timetable from Afghanistan
...written Feingold in on my ballot in November. He wouldn't have won, but I'd feel better about my vote. As it is, we're doing absolutely the same fucking thing McCain would have done if he had been elected.
Obama is on his way to one hit wonderdom. There will be a great many progressives looking hard at third party candidates. I know I will be.
You're just not seeing the bigger picture
[end snark]
What snark? That's the honest truth.
I would not seriously chide John in this manner.
to see Obama take ownership of the "war" in Afghanistan.
He's been one disappointment after another.
war as a way to show they were not wimps for opposing Bush on Iraq.
"Hey, it is not that I oppose mindlessly kicking Muslim butt, I just want to kick the butt that blew up the Trade Center."
if nutjobs think we we're wimps for opposing an illegal, phony Bush war? Besides, the WTC planners and money men are in Pakistan.
Afghanistan is a no-win disaster.
No win for US. Big win for the oil and gas interests. Even the Taliban can see that. The positioning is ongoing. The civilian deaths are irrelevant.
Pipeline!
.
Both!
... Of all the places to build a pipeline, Afghanistan makes little to no sense.
There are plenty of far simpler reasons for the extension of this silly "war on terror," which can't be dismissed as quickly as these tall tales about a pipeline and what not.
since when did "sense" matter? :)
the asian development bank, the insitution bankrolling and pushing the TAPI (Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India) pipeline, sure doesn't think the proposed pipeline is a tall tale.
http://www.rferl.org/content/What_Are_The_Pro...
built, then yes... it will be a tall tale.
point taken. the pipeline might never be built, especially with the competing plans for another pipeline (although the other pipeline doesn't seem to have financial backing [yet])
but, the fact that not one single segment of the pipeline has yet to be constructed (and might never be) does not take away from the possibility (or, some [like moi] would say, fact) that the proposed pipeline was a large factor in the afghanistan-misadventure.
... it points towards the intervention in Afghanistan being carried out with the expressed purpose of stopping the construction of such pipeline, not fomenting it.
Which is the opposite of what a lot of the people exposing this conspiracy seem to be claiming.
Plus I doubt India, for example, would be willing to depend on a pipeline which passes through Pakistan as one of their main energy inputs.
it is a strange development, no doubt. and this news is several years old, but it sounds like plans are still moving ahead.
India's foreign minister visited Washington last week and met with President Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other top officials to discuss a range of mutual interests, from countering China's strategic clout to promoting economic growth and resolving tensions between India and Pakistan. Unfortunately, the Bush administration's obsession with Iran threatens to block a major initiative that could advance many of those goals.
India and Pakistan are trying to overcome decades of mistrust by cooperating on a pipeline that would bring natural gas from Iran through Pakistan to India. It is the sort of economically necessary, environmentally friendly and security-enhancing initiative that the United States has long advocated. Yet the administration and Congress are so fixated on pressuring Iran that they would threaten sanctions against any foreign entity that participates in this win-win project between two bitter antagonists.
The 1,625-mile pipeline would originate in Iran's South Pars gas field and traverse southwest Pakistan to the Indian border, where India would then construct a line to bring the gas to energy-starved western India. The $4 billion pipeline would be the most economical way to get natural gas from the Persian Gulf to India. No American financing is needed to make it happen.
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/publications...
note: the 'pipeline of peace', IPI, is different from the TAPI pipeline... just to clarify
Tell India that.
...
the Halliburton company et al wanted to build a pipeline. They were negotiating with the Taliban, which would allow it to do so, if the Taliban could have some control over the deal.
Of course, big Dick wouldn't share, and that was a deal breaker. At the close of negotiations, the POS from the states threatened to have Afghanistan "bombed into the stone age." 9/11, a handy excuse. I'm sure they would have found another reason to do this, had we not experienced 9/11.
That's what I heard, anyway. It was to go from one of the other -istans (Uzbek?), through Afghan to the Black Sea (again I think) for shipping.
Very sensible, actually
;-)
A lot of the people proposing that idea, seem to have never open a world atlas and figure out where the black sea is respect to Afghanistan.
I wasn't checking anything, and since chemo I've got a memory like a sieve...
Just looking at a map, I'd say it was to ship oil from Uzbek or Turkmenistan to a pipeline in Pakistan, the to a port on the Indian ocean...
I'm googling pipeline Afghanistan Taliban 2001
http://www.why-war.com/news/2002/06/05/alqaed...
many of us HATE being the victims/being used for capitalist imperialism. there are many consequences one being we are more vulnerable now by some of our own doing.
To kill all the terrrorists? Great logic behind this war...
I guess by killing Afgan families they won't want to kill us anymore..
on the planes that attacked us.
Eric Margolis: Quittin' Time in Afghanistan
I think it is important to fight this war. Unfortunately it hasn't had the political opening like the sunni awakening in Iraq (which was the real reason behind the shift in the war).
However the majority of the population is young so right now they are experience a window of freedoms that haven't been around since afghanistan had a king in the 70's. The freedoms they see now could lead to a paradigm shift when they are older and we have left the region (assuming the worst case scenario and we weren't able to create a stable system).
..concern trolling?
Your "worst case" scenario is actually the "most likely" scenario. What many Afghanis are experiencing right now is the death of friends and relatives for no good reason.
Since you support this war are you going to sign up to fight in it? or are we just armchair cheerleading with our pom-poms?
ends with either Obama's bill being killed, or actual passage... this is gonna turn into the story of the year.
Watch, too, because you're about to see the biggest flip-flop of all time, as every conservative worthy of sending the daily talking points to will suddenly turn into the biggest anti-war, non-interventionist, peace-loving pacifist this country has ever seen...
Anything to get back a few seats in 2010...
The US is finding out what the Brits and Canadians realized years ago. Afghanistan can't be defeated, only temporarily pacified - and this only at great cost and with constant effort. This is not a war that can be won, only fought and refought to hold the same villages.
The idea that you can go in, rout the Taliban and then leave a peaceful, stable country behind is a total pipe dream.
The only way to "win" is a mass, multinational occupation lasting years, possibly decades. In other words, a permanent, planned stalemate - like Europe during the cold war.
There's simply no point to this war. The government power we replaced the Taliban with is just as bad, as evidenced by the new law passed over there recently that allows men to starve their wives to death if they don't fulfill their husband's sexual needs.
We can't expect to take out one branch of fundamental whackjob and suddenly expect the next set of whackjobs to be any better.
So we're spending $70 billion dollars each year in Afghanistan, meaning we'll spend $700 billion dollars over "10 years." Now where have I heard that $700 billion dollar figure recently? I wonder what that could pay for? (**cough**healthcare**cough**)
I must admit, when Obama promised to remove all combat troops from Iraq in 16 months (8 more to go), I didn't expect that he would just be moving them into Afghanistan. I think our military could use a break about now. Seems the height of hubris to think that we could accomplish what Alexander the Great, the British, and the Rooskies could not, but I'm no constitutional scholar.
I'm not so sure. The Russians might have prevailed in Afghanistan if the mujahudin wasn't getting millions of dollars in weaponry from the US and Saudi Arabia. Especially those Stinger missiles that could take down those Russian Hind helicopters.
What total bullshit. "It's how many we protect." BULLSHIT! What constitutes "winning" is whether the Christian terrorists at UNOCAL manage to complete and maintain their Northern oil and gas pipe lines. The number of innocent people these Christian terrorists kill or don't kill while trying to complete their pipe lines is irrelevant.
President Obama is just another baby killer.
When the international currency becomes the Yuan or Euro I'll bet we won't get away with being the War Country anymore.
It'll just be war for hire instead of war for our own pockets. We'll market ourselves as the armed security guards of the world, ready to ship out to whatever country has the coin to pay for our guns, bombs and soldiers. After all, it's the American Way - free market and all of that, doncha no.
unserious hippies.
conservatives and liberals alike, all support this invasion for some reason. Whether Osama BinHidin' was ever in Afghanistan or not, when does invading and killing thousands justified?
This was, is and always will be, a police matter, not military matter. Bottom line---nobody in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Iraq had anything to do with 911. Hell, most of the supposed hijackers were from all over the world, with most living in the US at any rate. So if these invasions were to be justified by the existance of some boogeyman Al Qaeda, when is the US military going to massively invade it's own nation?? Makes about as much sense. But then again it's much more fun making bombing runs and calling them all terrorists. Wedding? Funeral? Oh no, it was a top level terrist meeting, and we got the leader again.
The Sunni Awakening was bought and paid for and lasts only as long as our money keeps flowing. The latest Iraqi bombings are Sunni and the present "peace" loses Iraqi's and American soldiers in waves. We have a semi-privatized war costing us billions a month. It is profitable for contractors who often pay no taxes creating a money flow out of the country and war gives rapid promotion to officers.
why don't people just listen to me? Nothing has made me more disgusted to here people who claim progressiveness as their philosophy, calling Iraq horrible bad eeeeeville, then conceding Afghanistan as a righteous or as I heard Al Franken say it once a "GOOD" war.
We had capital after 9/11. Capital you cannot manufacture. We had the good will of nearly the entire world, their support. And I remember distinctly thinking (since I was getting chemo and radiation at the time, lots of time to ponder) that I would give anything if this country could maintain that feeling. And it was thrown away by a few guys who made gazillions off the deal.
Fuck. What the fuck does it fucking take for fuck sake? I mean muthafukka PLEASE!
9/11 was a criminal act, not an act of war by the govt of Afghanistan. I don't care if Hitler was hiding in those caves, you do NOT just go bomb the fuck out of whoever you damn well please.
Look how it ends up. Hundreds of thousands dead, and no end in sight.
Right on, girl! Well said.
It is unbelievable to me that we are still in Afghanistan. I could sort of see it with the Bushies, because frankly, they were insane. But I would expect Obama, who has some knowledge of politics and history, to have yanked our forces out of there the second he took office. What the hell is he thinking? No army in the history of the WORLD has ever made any headway there. It's not possible. So why the hell are we still bashing our collective head against that particular wall? What is it about that place that gives war-mongers such a damn hard-on?
President Obama, bring the troops home NOW. Do the right thing.
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