Afghanistan

By Dave Lindorff

One impact of this deepening recession which is largely hidden because it is spread out and distributed across the land is a wave of budget crises swamping nearly every state government and every municipal government in the country.

State governments, according to the Center for Budget Priorities, are facing a $77-billion revenue shortfall for the 2009 fiscal year. Municipal governments are probably facing a total revenue shortfall of even more than that—perhaps closer to $100 billion. New York City, for example, is reportedly facing a budget shortfall of $1.5 billion over the next two years and Philadelphia, the nation’s fifth largest city, a shortfall of $1 billion over the next five years.

By Steve Weissman, t r u t h o u t

The best military advice I know supposedly comes from a subordinate of Napoleon at a time that the French emperor was facing difficulties with his ill-fated military occupation of Egypt. "One can do anything with bayonets, Sire, except sit on them." If only Gen. Jim Jones, the new National Security adviser, had the wisdom to give President-elect Barack Obama the same advice about the already planned escalation of forces in Afghanistan. But don't count on it. From all available evidence, the good general has already urged Obama to dig the United States even deeper into a far-off land that Alexander the Great, the British raj and 150,000 Soviets troops all came to know as "the graveyard of empires." Read the rest.

By Candace Rondeaux, Washington Post

KABUL, Nov. 26 -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai has sharply criticized the United States and NATO, demanding a timeline for the withdrawal of foreign forces.

Karzai's comments came late Tuesday in a speech to a U.N. Security Council delegation visiting Kabul, the capital, this week. He accused the international community of failing "to fight the Taliban properly" since the U.S.-led war in the country began in 2001.

"This war has gone on for seven years. The Afghans don't understand anymore how come a little force like the Taliban can continue to exist, can continue to flourish, can continue to launch attacks with 40 countries in Afghanistan, with entire NATO force in Afghanistan, with the entire international community behind them," Karzai said. "Still we are not able to defeat the Taliban."

Bush on His Legacy: I 'Liberated' Iraqis
President Says He Wants to Be Remembered for Liberating Iraqis and HIV/AIDS Work in Africa
By Jennifer Parker | ABCNews.com

In a personal and wide-ranging interview conducted by his sister about his legacy, his faith and the influence of his father, President George W. Bush said he hopes to be remembered as a liberator of the Iraqi people.

"I'd like to be a president [known] as somebody who liberated 50 million people and helped achieve peace," Bush told his sister, Dorothy Bush Koch, in a conversation recorded for the oral-history organization StoryCorps for the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.

By Dave Lindorff

I was listening to Robert Reich, once the left end of the spectrum in the Clinton cabinet, talking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer a few days ago, and Reich, who has in the past sometimes made sense, was talking about how Americans’ incomes had fallen over the last eight years of the Bush/Cheney administration and that it was necessary to get their incomes back on an upward trend, so that they could “start shopping again.”

Now I understand Reich was trying to make the case that the bailout so far has been focused on the banks and the insurance industry, and that none of this will help unless ordinary people start getting some relief, but still, there’s something completely twisted and out of whack when the best we can come up with is that we need to get Americans back into the malls.

In fact, that is a good part of what’s wrong with the US economy: Fully 75 percent of GDP in America is consumer spending.

Canada reiterates plan to withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011 | ChinaView.cn

Canada will proceed with its plan to end military mission in Afghanistan in 2011, even if United States President-elect Barack Obama appeals to it to stay, Defense Minister Peter MacKay reiterated Friday.

MacKay made the remarks when defense ministers from eight NATO countries with troops stationed in southern Afghanistan gathered in eastern Canada to talk about ways to better manage the mission.

Ministers of the United States, Britain, Holland, Australia, Estonia, Denmark and Romania were meeting at a training base in the village of Cornwallis in the Atlantic province of Nova Scotia.

MacKay complained that some NATO countries are not pulling their weight in Afghanistan, leaving the eight countries "carrying a disproportionate share of the load".

Why Bush Can't Allow Habeas Corpus -- And Why We Need to Leave Afghanistan
Posted by Time for Change | Democratic Underground/General Discussion

The whole rationale for our war in Afghanistan probably would be exposed to the world as the farce that it is if the Bush administration allowed its "War on Terror" prisoners to use the writ of habeas corpus to challenge their detentions. That appears to be a major reason, if not the major reason, why the Bush administration has for several years fought tooth and nail to deny its prisoners the habeas corpus rights that are guaranteed under our Constitution. And it is also probably a major reason why whenever our courts have over-ruled the Bush administration in specific cases, Bush has released the respective prisoners rather than allow them a fair and open trial.

Gates and the Urge to Surge
By Ray McGovern | ConsortiumNews.com | November 23, 2008

"Gen. David...McKiernan employed unusual candor in describing Afghanistan as 'a far more complex environment than I ever found in Iraq.' The country's mountainous terrain, rural population, poverty, illiteracy, 400 major tribal networks, and history of civil war make it a unique challenge, he said."

It may become a biennial ritual. Every two years, if the commander-in-chief (or the commander-in-chief-elect) says he wants to throw more troops into an unwinnable war for no clear reason other than his political advantage, panderer-in-chief Robert Gates will shout "Outstanding!"

Never mind what the commanders in the field are saying — much less the troops who do the dying.

U.S. eyes "surge" of over 20,000 for Afghanistan
By David Morgan | Reuters.com | Submitted by Michael Munk | www.MichaelMunk.com

The Pentagon is considering a plan to send more than 20,000 troops to Afghanistan over the next 12 to 18 months to help safeguard elections and quell rising Taliban violence, officials said on Friday.

U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates said he and top commanders had discussed sending five brigades to Afghanistan, including four brigades of combat ground forces as well as an aviation brigade, which a defence official said would consist mainly of support troops. An Army combat brigade has about 3,500 soldiers.

Gates said much of the infusion could take place before Afghanistan holds elections by next autumn.

By Dave Lindorff

The ongoing and deepening global economic crisis, to which Barack Obama owes his presidential election victory, is no small thing, to be sure. It also presents us on the left with a lot of openings to press for progressive change.

The USG Open Source Center translates an article from the Persian Afghan press alleging that French troops were at one point close to capturing Usamah Bin Ladin in Afghanistan, but that American forces stopped them from doing so. It says that a forthcoming French documentary containing interviews with the French soldiers provides proof for the allegation. The argument is that the Bush administration needed Bin Ladin to be at large in order to justify its military expansionism. READ THE REST.

To End All War: Restoring America as a Champion of Peace and Law
By Mary Ellen O'Connell | Jurist

The First World War ended November 11, 1918. It was to be the end of the war to end all wars. But war did not end, and this country, the champion of the new peace order that followed World War I, is currently involved in the unlawful use of force in four countries. On this 90th anniversary of the end of World War I, America’s new president-elect will do the right thing by recommitting this country — if not to end all war - to end all unlawful war.

Pakistani officials told General David Petraeus on his recent visit to Pakistan to stop the lethal U.S. raids on their country. America has been carrying out attacks on Pakistani soil without Pakistan’s consent. The raids violate Pakistan’s sovereignty; they are a serious violation of Pakistan’s rights under international law, which no state interested in remaining independent can tolerate.

Potentially great news.

Canada won't extend Afghan commitment, minister says
By Frank McGurty | Yahoo!News.com | Submitted by Michael Munk | www.MichaelMunk.com

Canadian Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon said on Sunday that a stepped-up emphasis by U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on fighting terrorism in Afghanistan won't change Canada's plans to pull its military out of that country in 2011.

Obama seeks new approach in Afghanistan: report
By Joanne Allen | Yahoo!News.com

President-elect Barack Obama plans to try a more regional approach to the war in Afghanistan including possible talks with Iran, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday, citing national security advisers to Obama.

The president-elect also intends to move ahead with a planned deployment of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan and refocus on the hunt for al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, the newspaper reported.

By Dave Lindorff

Now that the street dancing is over, and President-elect Barack Obama is measuring the drapes for the new Oval Office (let’s hope he loses the mounted Saddam Hussein matching pistol set and that he has the direct hard-wired link between the Vice President’s Office and the Pentagon severed), it’s time to start focusing on how to make this new president live up to his mantra of “Change We Can Believe In.”

Well over 65 million people voted Obama in on the belief that he meant what he said with that largely empty slogan. They are going to be hugely disappointed if he doesn’t deliver.

British commander in Afghanistan quits | WireDispatch.com

A commander of Britain's elite special forces in Afghanistan has resigned, a defence source said on Saturday, declining to give further details.

Major Sebastian Morley, a reservist commander with the Special Air Service (SAS), blamed a chronic lack of investment in equipment for the deaths of some of his soldiers, according to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.

He described the failure to equip his troops with heavy armoured vehicles as "cavalier at best, criminal at worst", the paper reported.

The Ministry of Defence and the government have faced repeated criticism from senior officers and politicians over equipment shortages in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Last month, a coroner said defence chiefs should "hang their heads in shame" over the lack of proper equipment and training that contributed to the death of a British soldier during a rescue in an Afghan minefield.

Tomgram: Anand Gopal, Who Rules Afghanistan? | Tomdispatch.com

In a 1998 interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, spoke proudly of how, in July 1979, he had "signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul" and so helped draw a Russian interventionary force into Afghanistan. "On the day that the Soviets officially crossed the border," Brzezinski added, "I wrote to President Carter, saying, in essence: 'We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam War.'" And so they did -- with the help of the CIA, Saudi money, the Pakistani intelligence services, and an influx of Arab jihadis, including Osama bin Laden. In fact, their Afghan War would prove far more disastrous for the Soviet Union than defeat in Vietnam had been for the United States. By the time the Soviets withdrew their last troops in February 1989, the economy of the Cold War's weaker superpower was tottering on the brink. Less than three years later, the Soviet Union itself was no more, even as Washington, at first unbelieving, then celebratory, declared eternal victory.

Commentary: Leaning tower of babble
By Arnaud De Borchgrave | UPI.com

U.S. election television coverage in 2008 has become deafening noise, a gigantic tower of babble with scores of "experts" who separate the wheat from the chaff and then chatter about the chaff. Bored numb, viewers have tuned out in droves. The rest of the world barely exists. Yet what the principal economic and financial players around the world are saying to each other and their staffs is critical to understanding the stakes in the Bretton Woods redux summit President Bush will chair Nov. 15 in Washington.

Analysis: Afghanistan's untapped energy riches
By John C.K. Daly | UPI.com

While Afghanistan now intermittently crops up during the presidential debates, it is largely the forgotten war, which next month will be seven years old with little resolution in sight. Inside the Beltway chickenhawks never proposed that Afghanistan's energy resources could somehow pay for the war, but the fact remains that since 2001 little money has been directed to Afghanistan's energy sector to help the country become self-sufficient, much less an exporter. Nearly eight years after coalition forces overthrew the Taliban, Afghanistan remains one of the world's poorest and least developed countries, where two-thirds of the population live on less than $2 a day.

By Gareth Porter, IPS

WASHINGTON, Oct 20 (IPS) - The present U.S. policy in Afghanistan of using airstrikes to target local Taliban leaders was rejected by the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan in early 2004 as certain to turn the broader population against the U.S. presence.

Lt. Gen. David Barno, the three-star general who commanded the Combined Forces Command-Afghanistan, the overall U.S. and coalition command for Afghanistan from October 2003 to mid-2005, recalled in an interview that he had ordered that such airstrikes be halted in Afghanistan in early 2004. He said he the decision did not prohibit airstrikes for close support of U.S. troops in contact with the Taliban.