Archive for the ‘Afghanistan’ Category
July 29, 2010
John Nichols, The Nation, July 29, 2010
The Obama White House was quick to condemn the publication Sunday evening of more than 91,000 secret documents detailing the monumentally misguided and frequently failed attempt by the United States to occupy Afghanistan.
National Security Adviser James Jones took the lead in attacking WikiLeaks for making the details of the war available to the American people—who are, ultimately, supposed to define the direction of US foreign policy—by declaring: “The United States strongly condemns the disclosure of classified information by individuals and organizations which could put the lives of Americans and our partners at risk, and threaten our national security.”
Despite the fact that the “Afghanistan War Logs,” which are being published by the New York Times, the Guardian and Der Speigel, detail the mess in Afghanistan, and point to the bigger mess that will be made if the occupation is expanded as the Obama administration proposes, Jones offered a classic don’t-confuse-us-with-the-facts response. “These irresponsible leaks will not impact our ongoing commitment to deepen our partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan; to defeat our common enemies; and to support the aspirations of the Afghan and Pakistani people.”
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Tags:Dan Ellsberg, John Nichols, Obama administration, secret documents, war in Afghanistan, WikiLeaks under attack
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July 27, 2010
down to the last trillion in red ink
By Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE.com, July 26, 2010
The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”
What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.
Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.
And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.
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Tags:Afghanistan, Barack Obama, China, economy, Iran, Obama administration, Susan Rice, U.S. foreign policy, United States, Wikileaks
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July 16, 2010
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| White House / Pete Souza |
| President Barack Obama and Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai meet in an arrival ceremony at the Presidential Palace in Kabul on March 28. |
By Stanley Kutler, truthdig.com, July 13, 2010
The American Empire is alive and well—and as expansive as ever. We have established more than 700 military bases across the world, largely encircling the peripheries of Russia and China, which are now central to the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. The Cold War in the aftermath of World War II drove the expansion as we searched for security—and markets, to be sure.
Perhaps we now are the largest imperial power the world ever has known. Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan trivializes the once-massive naval and air facility at Cam Ranh Bay during the Vietnam War, and we have developed “permanent” mega-bases in Iraq. We engage in denial, and euphemisms abound. Stumping for the colonial takeover of the Philippines in 1901, Theodore Roosevelt, so fashionable today, insisted that “there is not an imperialist in the country. … Expansion? Yes. … Expansion has been the law of our national growth.” Chalmers Johnson reminds us of Democrat Woodrow Wilson’s liberal “idealist imperialism,” which would make the world safe for democracy. (See Johnson’s “The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic” and other works.) Deceit comes from the top.
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Tags:Afghanistan, empire, Hillary Clinton, Iraq, McChrystal, Obama, Pentagon, Theodore Roosevelt
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July 14, 2010
Eric Margolis, The Huffington Post, July 12, 2010
Goodbye, fire-breathing Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and your Special Forces “mafia,” who were supposed to crush Afghan resistance to western occupation.
McChrystal was fired after rude remarks he and his staff made about the White House were printed in the American magazine, Rolling Stone. President Barack Obama should have fired McChrystal when the loose-lipped general went public with demands that 40,000 more troops be sent to Afghanistan.
McChrystal was the second U.S. commander in a row in Afghanistan to be fired, an ominous sign that the war was going very badly. He will now likely enter the Republican ranks as a martyr and become a Fox TV critic of Barack Obama.
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Tags:Afghan resistance, Eric Margolis, Gen. Petraeus, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, President Barack Obama, United State, war in Afghanistan
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July 7, 2010
Marjorie Cohn, Consortiumnews.com, July 7, 2010
Editor’s Note: Official Washington (including the mainstream news media) is thrilled that Gen. David Petraeus is now commanding U.S. forces in Afghanistan. There’s also a consensus that Republican National Chairman Michael Steele put his foot in his mouth by criticizing “the war of Obama’s choosing.”
But the conventional wisdom may be wrong again, as Marjorie Cohn argues in this guest essay:
Last week, the House of Representatives voted 215-210 for $33 billion to fund Barack Obama’s troop increase in Afghanistan. But there was considerable opposition to giving the President a blank check.
One hundred sixty-two House members supported an amendment that would have tied the funding to a withdrawal timetable. One hundred members voted for another amendment that would have rejected the $33 billion for the 30,000 new troops already on their way to Afghanistan; that amendment would have required that the money be spent to redeploy our troops out of Afghanistan.
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Tags:Afgnaistan, Marjorie Cohn, McChrystal, war funding, war in Afghanistan
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July 7, 2010
Tedd Rall, Information Clearing House, July 7, 2010
NEW YORK – As I pack for my return trip to Afghanistan next month, many people are asking me: Why are we losing? What should we do there?
The short answer is simple: Afghan resistance forces live there. We don’t. Sooner or later, U.S. troops will depart. All the Afghan resistance has to do is wear us down and wait us out. As I have pointed out before, no nation has successfully invaded and occupied any other nation since the 19th century. All occupations ultimately fail.
For those who prefer their punditry longwinded, here’s a longer answer.
Even taking historical precedent into account, America’s post-9/11 occupation of Afghanistan–its longest war ever–has been notably disastrous. Wonder why? Everything you need to know was contained in this week’s war of words between the chairmen of the two major political parties.
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Tags:9/11 and Afghanistan, Afghan war, Obama and Afghan war, occupation of Afghanistan, United States
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July 1, 2010
Media Lense, July 1, 2010
The sacking of the head of NATO’s military command in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, caused a surge in coverage of the man described by political analyst James Petras as “Cheney’s chief assassin”.
In May 2009, Petras sampled from McChrystal’s CV. The general had played a central role in directing units involved in “extrajudicial assassinations, systematic torture, bombing of civilian communities and search and destroy missions”. He was “the very embodiment of the brutality and gore that accompanies military-driven empire building”. (http://www.alternet.org/story/140068/cheney’s_chief_assassin_is_now_obama’s_commander_in_afghanistan/?page=1)
Between September 2003 and August 2008, McChrystal commanded the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations (JSOC), tasked to set up death squads and paramilitary forces to terrorise communities and movements opposing the US and its allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. JSOC’s Major General William Mayville described the operation in Iraq: “JSOC was a killing machine.”
(http://www.counterpunch.org/grant06242010.html)
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Tags:Afghanistan, “Cheney’s chief assassin”, “direct action” forces, extrajudicial assassinations, General Stanley McChrystal
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June 30, 2010
By Joe Kishore, wsws.org, June 30, 2010
In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, General David Petraeus, Obama’s new commander in Afghanistan, said he would reconsider the rules of engagement as part of an intensification of the US assault on the Afghan people. He also made clear that American troops would remain in the country well beyond the July 2011 date set by the administration to begin a withdrawal.
Petraeus received fawning praise from Democratic and Republican senators alike. He was rapidly confirmed by the Armed Services Committee Tuesday afternoon and is expected to be confirmed by the full Senate on Wednesday.
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Tags:General David Petraeus, Joe Kishore, more violence in Afghanistan, Obama and Afghan war, US occupation of Afghanistan, war in Afghanistan
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June 29, 2010
by Tom Mellen
The CIA has defended its new $100 million (£66m) contract with a notorious mercenary outfit to protect US diplomats in Afghanistan.
In a rare television interview on Sunday, CIA director Leon Panetta confirmed that his agency had hired Xe Services – the company once known as Blackwater – to provide “protective security services” at US consulates in Herat and Mazar-i-Sharif.
Mr Panetta insisted that the US intelligence service did not have “much choice but to accept that contract” after Xe underbid other competitors “by about $26m.”
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Tags:Afghanistan, Blackwater/Xe, CIA Director Leon Panetta, war
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June 28, 2010
Insists His Focus Is on Winning the War
by Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, June 27, 2010
Speaking today in the wake of the G20 Summit, President Barack Obama criticized what he called “a lot of obsession” about ending the war in Afghanistan and withdrawing some 100,000 American troops from the nation.
Obama insisted that instead of considering if and how the war will ever come to some sort of end, his “focus right now is how do we make sure that what we’re doing there is successful, given the incredible sacrifices.”
The US initially invaded Afghanistan in late 2001. The number of troops in the nation has rising precipitously since President Obama took office in 2009, inheriting a war with 30,000 troops and turning it into a war with 100,000 troops.
Obama’s comments reflect those he made earlier this week, disavowing his pledge to begin withdrawing troops from Afghanistan in July of 2011. Now President Obama says that date is just the “beginning of a transition phase” and there is no particular timeline for leaving Afghanistan.
With the war increasingly unpopular, the president presented the 2011 drawdown date as a way to make his most recent escalation more palatable. With the surge troops now deployed, the date appears to have been discarded, and those still clamoring for some sort of end to the nearly decade-long war condemned for losing sight of some ill-defined victory.
Tags:Afghanistan, Jason Ditz, President Barack Obama and war in Afghanistan
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Peace and Justice Post 
Roberts: US Treasury Running on Fumes
July 27, 2010down to the last trillion in red ink
By Paul Craig Roberts, VDARE.com, July 26, 2010
The White House is screaming like a stuck pig. WikiLeaks’ release of the Afghan War Documents “puts the lives of our soldiers and our coalition partners at risk.”
What nonsense. Obama’s war puts the lives of American soldiers at risk, and the craven puppet state behavior of “our partners” in serving as US mercenaries is what puts their troops at risk.
Keep in mind that it was someone in the US military that leaked the documents to WikiLeaks. This means that there is a spark of rebellion within the Empire itself.
And rightly so. The leaked documents show that the US has committed numerous war crimes and that the US government and military have lied through their teeth in order to cover up the failure of their policies. These are the revelations that Washington wants to keep secret.
Continues >>
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Tags:Afghanistan, Barack Obama, China, economy, Iran, Obama administration, Susan Rice, U.S. foreign policy, United States, Wikileaks
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