No Chance Obama’s War

in Afghanistan Will Succeed

By Sherwood Ross
L.A. Progressive

Dec. 26, 2009 - "There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his December 1 speech (at West Point) will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan," writes Thomas Johnson in the current Foreign Policy magazine. And for emphasis, he adds the word "None."

"The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles,"
Johnson goes on to write, noting, "The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing."

Author Johnson is no armchair admiral. He is a professor of national security affairs at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, a man who has conducted his own on-site investigation in Afghanistan.

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Photo: Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), Antiwar Voice in Congress

What will Congressional

Democrats do now?

By Tom Hayden

Dec. 8, 2009 - Congressional Democrats held a closed caucus Dec. 8 to consider their stance on Afghanistan, Pakistan, and what to do about the president’s 30,000 more troops, whose deployment will begin without a Congressional decision or funding. 

The majority Democrats are uncomfortable in being caught between their constituents’ peace sentiments and the president’s deployment of 100,000 American troops.
It’s going to get more uncomfortable.

 
Progressives should be vociferous in opposing the slithering [as opposed to dithering] by which the official deadline for beginning withdrawal keeps being shoved back by several years, if ever, solely under political pressure.
This stretching out of Obama’s withdrawal timetable eliminates the primary feature of the President’s plan that is attractive to most voters, especially Democrats.

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Progressives also must force discussion of the secret CIA war being authorized in Pakistan, where the center of gravity is shifting. See Jane Mayer’s "The Predator War" in The New Yorker.

The CIA’s secret offensive in Pakistan is likely to produce blowback on a historic scale. It’s no secret to the people of Pakistan, who oppose it in recent polls by 67-19 percent. It’s proven an embarrassment to American diplomacy since even Hillary Clinton is barred from acknowledging it’s going on. The reason for all the secrecy is not to protect American troops, but rather to avoid embarrassing Pakistan’s army and government from admitting the violation of their sovereignty - and, perhaps above all, to prevent anti-war sentiment from increasing here at home.

Progressives should nail the costs of Afghanistan should on every Congressional door, if foreheads are impossible. At the present rate of killing, American deaths under Obama will be another 1,100 by the end of 2011, bringing the overall total to nearly 2,000. At the present budgetary cost, the war started by Bush will become a trillion-dollar war under Obama.
Never doubt the ability of the government and media to hide these figures from the distracted public. Apparently the dollar costs were not realized by the president himself until October 25, when his budget office sent a memo at his request. According to the New York Times, our president "seemed in sticker shock [at the news], watching his domestic agenda vanishing in front of him. ‘This is a 10-year trillion-dollar effort and does not match up with our interests’", the president said, before setting the wheels in motion anyway.

Every peace advocate should post the costs of this war from their desktop to the highest billboard. Just go to the National Priorities website.

As for the Congress, every peace advocate should say loudly and clearly that two-thirds of their Democratic and independent constituents are unhappy with these wars, and that unhappiness will become a growing danger to many incumbents in 2010 and 2012. Reject the idea of a war surtax except as a rhetorical gesture. Push for Rep. Barbara Lee’s bill which will prohibit funding for the additional troops. It won’t pass, but is the vehicle for serious hearings and amendments - like forcing a vote on a tougher withdrawal plan. And push for Rep. Jim McGovern’s exit strategy resolution. How can anyone oppose the Pentagon reporting to Congress on an exit strategy, which is all the measure does. Just watch - the hawks will go wild at the thought of plan to exit from a stalemate rather than shedding American blood until the last Taliban surrenders.

Meanwhile, keep studying this Long War because it may be around for a while. A very intelligent analysis of what Obama is trying to do - a gradual strategic repeat from an unsustainable future - comes from a pro-war advocate, Peter Beinart, in the current Time.

Step by step, in the formula of Richard Flacks, is the way of social movements that succeed.
And by the way, order, view, and distribute the Rethink Afghanistan package from Brave New Films as a holiday gesture to your friends.

Tom Hayden
The Peace and Justice Resource Center 

Article originally appeared on tomhayden.com (http://tomhayden.com/).

See website for complete article licensing information.

Obama’s Indecent Interval

Despite the U.S. president’s pleas to the contrary,

the war in Afghanistan looks more like Vietnam than ever.

BY THOMAS H. JOHNSON, M. CHRIS MASON | DECEMBER 10, 2009

As German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer once said, truth is ridiculed, then denied, and then “accepted as having been obvious to everyone from the beginning.”

So let’s start with the obvious: There isn’t the slightest possibility that the course laid out by Barack Obama in his Dec. 1 speech will halt or even slow the downward spiral toward defeat in Afghanistan. None. The U.S. president and his advisors labored for three months and brought forth old wine in bigger bottles. The speech contained not one single new idea or approach, nor offered any hint of new thinking about a conflict that everyone now agrees the United States is losing. Instead, the administration deliberated for 94 days to deliver essentially “more men, more money, try harder.” It sounded ominously similar to Mikhail Gorbachev’s “bloody wound” speech that led to a similar-sized, temporary Soviet troop surge in Afghanistan in 1986.

But the Soviet experience in Afghanistan isn’t what everyone is comparing Obama’s current predicament to; it’s Vietnam. The president knows it, and part of his speech was a rebuttal of those comparisons. It was a valiant effort, but to no avail. Afghanistan is Vietnam all over again.
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Obama Announces Afghanistan Escalation

By Tom Hayden

December 1, 2009

It’s time to strip the Obama sticker off my car.

Obama’s escalation in Afghanistan is the last in a string of disappointments. His flip-flopping acceptance of the military coup in Honduras has squandered the trust of Latin America. His Wall Street bailout leaves the poor, the unemployed, minorities, and college students on their own. And now comes the Afghanistan-Pakistan decision to escalate the stalemate, which risks his domestic agenda, his Democratic base, and possibly even his presidency.

The expediency of his decision was transparent. Satisfy the generals by sending 30,000 more troops. Satisfy the public and peace movement with a timeline for beginning withdrawals of those same troops, with no timeline for completing a withdrawal.

Obama’s timeline for the proposed Afghan military surge mirrors exactly the 18-month Petraeus timeline for the surge in Iraq.

We’ll see. To be clear: I’ll support Obama down the road against Sarah Palin, Lou Dobbs or any of the pitchfork carriers for the pre-Obama era. But no bumper sticker until the withdrawal strategy is fully carried out.

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Washington’s Wars

and Occupations:

Month in Review #55

By Max Elbaum

War Times/Tiempo de Guerras

Nov. 30, 2009 - No one can predict the specifics. But Washington’s current course in the Middle East is all but certain to produce one or more disastrous explosions of violence in the coming years.  And way too much blood is going to be uselessly shed even before the next big bang crisis arrives.

For obvious reasons, Afghanistan is the front-page candidate right now for the next explosion. But conditions are also ripe or ripening for a throw-everything-up-in-the-air crisis in the Israel-Palestine conflict; in Pakistan; in the Iran vs. the West/Israel stand-off; and - despite the assumption that "this one is over" - in Iraq.

As peace activists we need to look this painful reality right in the face. And then strategize and act accordingly. That’s the only way to make an effective contribution to minimizing the day-to-day horrors ahead. Likewise, only if we find ways to amass far more clout than we have now can we get in position to make a major difference when future crises expose the futility of "the military option" and create new possibilities for forcing a change in the imperial course.

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Will We Stay

50 Years in

Afghanistan?

Commentary by Tom Hayden: An Influential Pentagon Strategist

Advocates A Multi-Decade Counterinsurgency Campaign

By Tom Hayden

The Nation

Let us say, hypothetically, that American forces kill or capture Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama to declare victory and bring our troops home. Would he? Not according to the Pentagon’s plan for a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Horn of Africa, the Philippines and beyond. Military intellectuals envision a prolonged cold war against Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way. It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines. The Pentagon identifies them as hostile terrain where Al Qaeda and its affiliates are hidden.

Among the top experts responsible for this fifty-year war plan, concocted in 2005 in windowless offices in the Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former Australian soldier, an anthropologist, former top adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and current aide to Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Kilcullen is a media favorite, the subject of a long New Yorker profile by George Packer, glowing columns by David Ignatius in the Washington Post and weighty late-night conversations with Charlie Rose.

Kilcullen’s recent book, The Accidental Guerrilla, presents the case for a Long War of fifty or even 100 years’ duration, with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08), Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten-year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees as the center of the terrorist threat) and even Europe (where, he says, human rights laws create legislative "safe havens" for urban Muslim undergrounds).

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Six Discussion
Points for UFPJ
2008 Assembly

By Carl Davidson
Keep On Keepin’ On

1. The antiwar movement has won a major victory with the defeat of McCain by Obama; antiwar forces were among the first to launch Obama’s campaign, and now it’s time to consolidate gains. Now it’s time to press the Obama White House early in 2009 for an end to the war and to block wider wars with a broad ‘Yes, We Can!’ mobilization from below.

2. Start by reaching out primarily to the millions of Obama volunteers and Obama voters, especially the younger generation, but also the pro-Obama women, labor organizers, and communities of color.  If you want change from below, this is where the engine is. Let go of any forces who want to hold this back and keep us locked in far narrower circles.

3. Organization building trumps movement-building. Build or create mass democratic grassroots groups bringing together the best local activists from the Obama campaign and other allies. Build or create new coalitions with local partners in labor, campus and community groups.

4. Start local UFPJ-allied blogs to have a public face, and link it to others. Use social networking to enhance face-to-face meetups. Join the new wave of meetups coming out of the Obama movement.

5. Develop, with our allies, a local or area-wide program of deep structural reform and immediate needs for your area, and take it upward and outward through the elected officials and government bodies, all the way to the top. Link this effort to the economy.
Green Jobs over War Jobs, New Schools, Not More Prisons, HealthCare Not Warfare, Peace and Prosperity, Not War, Greed and Crisis.  Green Infrastructure, not Pentagon Waste; Buyout, not Bailout. Show how any decent gains require an end to the war and cutting the defense budget. Here is where will find new partners linking all the key issues connected to the war.

6. Break decisively with the ultraleft mindset, in order to deepen and broaden left-progressive unity.  In order to end the war and achieve other gains, we have to make political alliances with forces among the broad masses, and elected officials, who are to OUR POLITICAL RIGHT. That’s what is seriously demanded of us, not any attempts to drag us leftwards.

John McCain
betting big
on Iraq

By Bob Drogin

Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

March 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — As America’s war in Iraq enters its sixth year, Sen. John McCain is hoping that his long effort to send thousands more U.S. troops — a “surge” that has helped lower casualties — will propel him into the White House.

But McCain’s record on Iraq is decidedly mixed. If the Arizona Republican proved prescient in his calls for a military buildup, many of his other predictions and prescriptions turned out wrong. (more…)

Nothing New

in Obama’s

Iraq Speech

By Tom Hayden
For Huffington Post

Sen. Barack Obama marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War with a speech that will disappoint the peace movement while burnishing his hawkish credentials with the national security establishment and media.

He failed to point out that Hillary Clinton’s plan may keep US troops fighting in Iraq for five to eight more years.

He failed to dissociate from the grim counterinsurgency war envisioned by Gen. Petraeus.

He failed to connect the war with the economic devastation and energy quandaries facing the United States.

Instead, he simply repeated his plan to remove all US combat divisions in 16 months. But he will “leave enough troops in Iraq to guard our embassy and diplomats, and a counter-terrorism force to strike al Qaeda if it forms a base that the Iraqis cannot destroy.” He will dispatch two of those withdrawn American combat brigades to Afghanistan, “to leverage greater assistance – with fewer restrictions – from our NATO allies.” And he will unilaterally attack Pakistan’s border region if there is “actionable intelligence” about high-level al Qaeda leadership there, a policy deeply unpopular among Pakistanis. (more…)