What do all these things have in common: Cash-for-clunkers, IMF funding, pandemic flu preparations, and anti-narcotic aid to Mexico? They’re all considered “supplemental war funding” that the Senate approved in a late-night session July 18^th.

Excuse me, Mr. President, but I thought I heard you promise not to use supplemental war funding bills any more. Apparently, according to PoliFact, I misheard (thank Bush for only funding Iraq and Afghanistan through September, 2009, instead of the whole year). But still, I’d really like to know how those programs are related to the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Oh, that’s right. They’re not. Full Story »

The recent announcement of General David McKiernan’s permanent transfer to Fort Palooka is the latest punch line in our Bananastan farce. Defense secretary Robert Gates claims that McKiernan’s relief as commander in Afghanistan merely reflected a need for “fresh thinking,” but even the war mongrels on the rabid right can see it was a stratagem to make McKiernan the fall guy for all the collateral damage caused by the air strikes that President Obama authorized.

Ironically, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal, McKiernan’s replacement, has a proven record of executing just the kinds of strikes McKiernan got fired for. On top of that, Obama still intends to send the 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan that McKiernan requested for no apparent reason. (When Obama asked him how he’d use the extra troops, McKiernan made the sound of sandbags forming a levee.) Full Story »

Remember when we all thought Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al Malachi was just another Ahmed Pyle fresh off the bus from Palookadad? Now look at him: he’s a Machiavelli-class political operative, the head of a propped up state who just told his masters to drive it up their exit ramps by demanding that they honor the Status of Forces Agreement whether they like it or not.

Keep in mind, though, that in 1980 Saddam Hussein sentenced Maliki to death. Now Saddam Hussein has been sentenced to death and executed, and Maliki has his job. How about them apples? Maliki is so powerful today, in fact, that he may be the only political figure who can help Barack Obama—the head of state of the most powerful nation in history—out of the crack he’s wiggled himself into. Full Story »

Some time ago, an idea to save Afghanistan floated on a few editorial cycles.  Afghanistan grows some of the world’s best pomegranates, coincidentally the “nature’s miracle” of the moment.  If we could just get Afghans to grow pomegranates instead of poppies, they would become wealthy by exporting fruit to the “developed” world.  Peace would follow economic stability and democracy would follow peace…or something like that.  There are countless plans to “get Afghanistan right”, but they all follow the basic path of the Great Pomegranate Plan.

They all stumble into similar failings too.  It’s hard to get delicate fruit out of a country without significant transport infrastructure.  Not many health-food companies will be overly keen to set up processing facilities in the region.  The plan will only remain successful so long as the pomegranate is not usurped as the king of live forever foods and customers in the developed world can afford to splurge on wildly expensive health food.  Oh, and the fact that huge tracts of mature pomegranate orchards were cut down and replaced with poppies over the course of the good war.

We’re not getting Afghanistan right, and nothing in the latest plans suggest that we will get it right any time soon.  Are we even sure what it is we hope to accomplish or even why we’re trying to accomplish it?

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Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire

The propaganda war on the American public appears to have entered a new phase.

In a March 30 post at his Foreign Policy blog, Thomas E. Ricks wrote, “I thought some of the surge-era deals in Iraq would unravel but I didn’t think that would begin happening this quickly. It’s only March 2009, and already Awakening fighters are fighting U.S. soldiers in the streets of Baghdad.” Ricks cited a number of recent confrontations between members of the Sunni Awakening movement and Nuri al Maliki’s government and got all giddy about how he “wouldn’t be surprised to see Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militia re-emerge.”

At the end of his blog, Ricks asks “Question of the day: What should I say the next time someone tells me the surge ‘worked’?”

Ricks will almost certainly say the same thing he’s been saying to Chris Matthews and David Gregory and Washington Post readers and everyone else who’s wasted bandwidth on him since his latest book came out: “General Odierno…would like to see 35,000 American troops [in Iraq] in 2015.” That is, after all, neocon message number one these days: Status of Force agreement and campaign promises be damned; the generals say we need to stay in Iraq so that’s what we need to do. And Ricks, along with the rest of the so-called liberal media, is falling all over himself to help the neocons echo it. Full Story »

If you’re not cheating you’re not trying.

–Anonymous U.S. military officer

As a naval aviator pal of mine once remarked, cadets in our military academies spend the summer before their freshman year learning an arcane honor code and spend the next four years learning how to violate it without getting caught. So is it any wonder our general officer corps is populated by Orwell-class doublethinkers who speak doubletalk like it’s their first language?

During the run up to the Iraq invasion, then Army chief of staff Eric Shinseki was the only four-star who had the strength of character to take a public stance against Donald Rumsfeld’s plan to conquer Iraq with a small force, relying on crackpot warfare theories like network-centric operations and shock and awe to make up for insufficient troop strength. Shinseki’s principled stand bought him a one-way ticket to Fort Palooka. Rumsfeld, not satisfied that any of the active duty generals would toe the line sufficiently, brought his old cow tipping buddy Peter Schoomaker out of retirement to replace Shinseki. Rummy had sent an unmistakable message: it was his way or the exit ramp. The remaining generals either fell into lockstep or kept their own counsel, and we got four years of dead-enders in their last throes. Full Story »

Young Mr. Bush and his handlers managed to squander more than two centuries of American progress. Two interminable armed conflicts and the economic collapse they produced left President Obama with the worst combination of foreign and domestic policy disasters in our country’s history. He faces a conundrum; he needs to take care of the economic problems first, but they won’t fully heal until he straightens out the tangled web of war Bush created in the Middle East. Unfortunately, he made very bad decisions when he chose his foreign policy cabinet secretaries. Full Story »

If you know neither your enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. –Sun Tzu

Sun Tzu maintained that proper planning secures victory before the battle begins. Carl von Clausewitz insisted that war must focus on the political aim. How is it, then, that we are about to put more troops into a war we know is unwinnable and have no coherent objective for them to pursue?

President Obama announced on Feb. 17 that he will send 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan. That’s just over half of the 30,000 troop escalation that’s been discussed in recent months. Gen. David McKiernan, top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, says he needs another 10,000 troops on top on the 17,000 Obama has promised on top of the 32,000 already in Afghanistan. McKiernan says the pending escalation won’t be a “temporary force uplift.” He thinks we need to keep 60,000 troops in Afghanistan for the next three to four years. “We’ve got to put them in the right places,” he says; but he doesn’t appear to know where those places are.

As foreign policy analyst Gareth Porter tells us, Obama was ready to support the full 30,000 troop escalation, endorsed by Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Mike Mullen and Central Command head Gen. David Petraeus. Full Story »

In December 2008, Joe Klein of Time magazine called the war in Afghanistan an “aimless absurdity.” Our new president is onboard with committing 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, despite the fact that the Pentagon isn’t certain what to tell the additional troops to do there or even what kind of troops it wants to send. According to the Washington Post, “the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like ’surge’ of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.”

So why are they executing an Iraq-like “surge” of forces? Full Story »

We got through Christmas without having NORAD accidently blow Santa out of the sky, but don’t let your guard down yet. While visions of sugarplums danced in our heads, the Pentagon flew another escalation strategy under the radar. On the eve of Christmas Eve, Dexter Filkins of the New York Times reported “Taking a page from the successful experiment in Iraq, American commanders and Afghan leaders are preparing to arm local militias to help in the fight against a resurgent Taliban.”

Merry Christmas, fellow citizens. Odds are now almost certain that your country will be in a state of war throughout your lifetimes, and possibly throughout your children’s lifetimes as well. Full Story »

According to Tom Coghlan, we’re all being played for suckers by those wily Afghans.  NATO contracts out supply to several “European headquartered” but otherwise unnamed companies; security for the convoys that deliver the supplies is the responsibility of the companies that prefer not to be named.  These companies take the path of least resistance…and quite possibly the only realistic path: they buy protection. Full Story »

It’s official - I’m already sick of hearing about this “historic election.” It’s better than hearing about “historical” elections as Ken Jennings has complained, I suppose - at least “historic” refers to something “famous or important in history” or “having great and lasting importance” instead of something that has the character of history. Reagan’s election in 1980, FDR’s election in 1932, Lincoln’s election in 1860, Jefferson’s election in 1800 - those are all “historical” elections. Let’s give Obama at least to the end of his term before calling his election “historical,” OK? But I digress.

As I was saying, I’m already tired of hearing about how Obama’s election was historic. Not because it’s not true, but rather because it’s already overdone. I lost count of the number of times I heard the phrase “historic election” even before President-elect Obama took the stage in Chicago election night, never mind all the times I’ve heard it on the radio and read it on nearly every webpage, blog, and news site I’ve visited since election night.

There’s another reason I’m sick of the phrase, too. It’s not enough. Full Story »

Abdul Waheed Wafa and Mark McDonald report at the New York Times:

An airstrike by United States-led forces killed 40 civilians and wounded 28 others after it hit a wedding party in Kandahar Province in southern Afghanistan, Afghan officials said Wednesday. The casualties included women and children, the officials said. Full Story »

Link of the Week (as opposed to the Weakest Link):

In an American Prospect article, “Business as Usury,” Thomas Geoghegan writes: “Had we protected the poor and the weak, the problems of our mighty banks might not be so great. Why don’t we have a ‘National Usury Act’? Why, in the party of William Jennings Bryan, is there no one demanding an interest cap on our Visa cards and our MasterCards?. . . We may be the first society since the Code of Hammurabi to be operating with no law against usury at all.” Can the last sentence possibly be true? Full Story »

Final thoughts on three months in Afghanistan

by Connor O’Steen

I’m sitting on the roof of a hotel in Istanbul, looking at the Hagia Sophia and thinking about my flight tomorrow (and the following day): Istanbul-Heathrow-Seattle-Chicago, at which point I drag myself to the University of Chicago on the Blue Line at 5:30 on the morning of the 23rd. Self-pity aside, I’m also thinking about an appropriate way to wrap up the summer.

Maybe this is the best place to go over some of my impressions about a few of Afghanistan’s problems. I can’t possibly claim these ideas as solely mine; Marnie (PARSA’s director) was tremendously patient going over what she’s learned from working there, and a lot of what I say here is something I’ve picked up from her. Full Story »

At the rate we’re going, we won’t apprehend Osama Bin Laden until he’s an octogenarian. We’ll drag this broken old man, dialysis wires trailing behind him, out of his cozy bungalow near Peshawar.

Haven’t we seen this before? Oh yeah. Remember how we used to drag Nazi war criminals out of the dens of their houses in towns like Ypsilanti, where they were working at jobs like church custodian. Even though it’s imperative that criminals of the magnitude of Nazis and bin Laden be caught, capturing an individual of advanced age who’s been harmless for decades doesn’t make for a lot of p.r. bang for the buck. Full Story »

What Afghanistan could be; fragile though it is

by Connor O’Steen

On the road to Kunduz, as we came out of the mountains and onto the flat plateau that characterizes so much of northern Afghanistan, I was struck with a thought. If I hadn’t known where I was, this could’ve been almost any part of rural America. The farmland and the trees, the terraced hills, the smooth paved road…we could’ve been driving through Iowa or Nebraska. As we entered Kunduz that feeling of strangeness persisted. There was a clean full smell of water and agriculture, there was a breeze but the air wasn’t full of dust. Removed from the road and shaded by trees, boys in full uniform played soccer in the evening sun. Full Story »

From afar, Afghan boys find Predator drones exciting. In “Right at the Edge,” his essential article in the September 7 New York Times magazine about Afghanistan, Dexter Filkins writes:

“The young fighters were chattering excitedly about a missile that had recently destroyed one of their ammunition dumps. An American missile, the kids said. ‘It was a plane without a pilot,’ one of the boys explained through an interpreter. His eyes darted back and forth among his fellows. ‘We saw a flash. And then the building exploded.’” Full Story »

Sarah Palin told ABC’s Charles Gibson yesterday that she favors admitting Georgia and the Ukraine, both on Russia’s borders, to NATO. When Gibson asked her if she would go to war with Russia to defend Georgia, she said, “”Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you’re going to be expected to be called upon and help.”

Right you are, Ms. Palin, but help doesn’t always mean military help, else the NATO countries would have chosen up sides and embroiled themselves in war when Greece and Turkey went at it over Cyprus. You are technically correct, though, because the defense clause of the treaty reads: Full Story »

The object of the political war is not to shrink the state or shut it down; it is to capture the thing and run it for your constituents’ benefit.

— from “The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule” by Thomas Frank; p. 39; emphasis added.

When our economy is hurting, the last thing we should do is raise taxes as Barack Obama plans to do and has done. The American people cannot afford a Barack Obama presidency.

— statement from Republican presidential candidate John McCain after the Labor Department reported that the national unemployment rate rose to a five-year high of 6.1 percent last month as American companies cut about 84,000 jobs; Sept. 5.

Today’s jobs report is a reminder of what’s at stake in this election — John McCain showed last night that he is intent on continuing the economic policies that just this year have caused the American economy to lose 605,000 jobs.

— statement from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama following the jobs report release; Sept. 5.
Full Story »