war – dowackado

“This is pure ‘lord of the flies’ stuff”

By timmukyPosted on January 14, 2010Posted in aerial warfare, afghanistan, bombing, iraq, militarism, obama, politics, warTagged afghanistan, CIA, congress, corruption, cost of war, counterinsurgency, drone attacks, obama, supplemental funding, war1 Comment

Facts are getting in the way of the idea that Afghan corruption is hindering America’s noble efforts to rob, kill and destroy save that poor, benighted country.

According to the AP:

The U.S. agency overseeing the multibillion dollar Afghanistan reconstruction effort is investigating 38 criminal cases ranging from contract fraud to theft – most involving non-Afghans, officials said Tuesday…Just 10 of the criminal cases under the microscope involve Afghans only, while the rest involve U.S. and other foreigners, according to Raymond DiNunzio, the agency’s assistant inspector general for inspections.

And in not unrelated news, the President is asking Congress for another “$33 billion to fight unpopular wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, on top of a record request for $708 billion for the Defense Department next year.”

And this is yet another must-read piece from Tomdispatch about “a tale of a new-style battlefield that the American public knows remarkably little about, and that bears little relationship to the Afghan War as we imagine it or as our leaders generally discuss it.”

We don’t even have a language to describe it accurately. Think of it as a battlefield filled with muscled-up, militarized intelligence operatives, hired-gun contractors doing military duty, and privatized “native” guard forces. Add in robot assassins in the air 24/7 and kick-down-the-door-style night-time “intelligence” raids, “surges” you didn’t know were happening, strings of military bases you had no idea were out there, and secretive international collaborations you were unaware the U.S. was involved in. In Afghanistan, the American military is only part of the story. There’s also a polyglot “army” representing the U.S. that wears no uniforms and fights shape-shifting enemies to the death in a murderous war of multiple assassinations and civilian slaughter, all enveloped in a blanket of secrecy.

… Today, in Afghanistan, a militarized mix of CIA operatives and ex-military mercenaries as well as native recruits and robot aircraft is fighting a war “in the shadows” (as they used to say in the Cold War era). This is no longer “intelligence” as anyone imagines it, nor is it “military” as military was once defined, not when U.S. operations have gone mercenary and native in such a big way. This is pure “lord of the flies” stuff — beyond oversight, beyond any law, including the laws of war. And worse yet, from all available evidence, despite claims that the drone war is knocking off mid-level enemies, it seems remarkably ineffective. All it may be doing is spreading the war farther and digging it in deeper.

Talk about “counterinsurgency” as much as you want, but this is another kind of battlefield, and “protecting the people” plays no part in it. And of course, this is only what can be gleaned from afar about a semi-secret war that is being poorly reported. Who knows what it costs when you include the U.S. hired guns, the Afghan contractors, the bases, the drones, and the rest of the personnel and infrastructure? Nor do we know what else, or who else, is involved, and what else is being done. Clearly, however, all those billions of “intelligence” dollars are going into the blackest of black holes.

more about “Exporting Corruption: 3/4 of Afghan C…“, posted with vodpod

“You never explain why they want to do us harm”

By timmukyPosted on January 10, 2010Posted in obama, politics, terrorism, warTagged helen thomas, john brennan, obama, terrorism, warNo Comments

Glenn Greenwald rightly thinks this exchange reduces the brokenness of our system to its essence. It shows Helen Thomas repeatedly asking a very simple question, and the various ways White House terror expert John Brennan refuses to address it.

(I especially love the journalist seated to her left. His supercilious stare over her shoulder, his fidgeting, his frowns. Finally, he just cuts her off and starts talking over her.)

Poor Helen. She looks like an exhausted wraith. I don’t imagine there was ever a time when White House press secretaries actually answered questions, but the mendacity took a turn for the worse not long after the dawn of the 21st century. I can only imagine this deranged, stylized theater of many words and no substance must be something saddening to her.

So back to the question of why. Writes Greenwald:

The evidence of what motivates Terrorism when directed at the U.S. is so overwhelming and undeniable that it takes an extreme propagandist to pretend it doesn’t exist. What is Brennan so afraid of? It’s true that religious fanaticism is a part of their collective motivation, but why can’t he just say what’s so obviously true: “they claim that the U.S. is interfering in, occupying and bringing violence to their part of the world, they cite things like civilian deaths and our support for Israel and Guantanamo and torture, and claim that their terrorism is in retaliation”?

Can you spot the difference between Brennan’s attitude and the previous administration’s contention that “they hate us for our freedoms”? I can’t either.

Quite simply, don’t count on anyone with any clout in the national power structure ever addressing this question. As long as there is an insatiable, irrational, and evil entity out there, the military can’t be mobilized enough. The defense budget can’t be high enough. There is no battleground too distant. If this enemy had real grievances and demands, then maybe we could do something to improve the situation. Like pull our troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq and stop our murderous Predator attacks in Pakistan, Somalia, and now Yemen. Might even save us a little money. A trillion here, a trillion there. Pretty soon, you’re talking real money.

But that ain’t gonna happen. They’re Islamist crazies who will stop at nothing short of world domination. And the bombs must keep dropping, the supplemental budgets must be rammed through, the money, in short, must keep flowing.

All these wars: some questions

By timmukyPosted on January 5, 2010Posted in afghanistan, bombing, iraq, militarism, terrorism, warTagged budget, mcchyrstal, obama, pentagon, war, West Point speechNo Comments

old war bond ad — How quaint! We once had to pay for wars

Who among us has the time, or indeed the inclination, to pore over the myriad (and I think deliberately obtuse) reports in the major media outlets about our five, count ’em, FIVE fronts in the glorious global war on terror? Tom Englehardt does, thank God! In The Year of the Assassin, Englehart and Nick Turse ponder ten pretty fricking important questions about the coming year for America and its multiple battle fronts, so bizarrely disconnected from daily life in the homeland.

We, of course, think of ourselves as something like the peaceable kingdom. After all, the shock of September 11, 2001 was that “war” came to “the homeland,” a mighty blow delivered against the very symbols of our economic, military, and — had Flight 93 not gone down in a field in Pennsylvania — political power.

Since that day, however, war has been a stranger in our land. With the rarest of exceptions, like Army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan’s massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, this country has remained a world without war or any kind of mobilization for war. No other major terrorist attacks, not even victory gardens, scrap-metal collecting, or rationing. And certainly no war tax to pay for our post-9/11 trillion-dollar “expeditionary forces” sent into battle abroad….

Although our country delivers war regularly to distant lands in the name of our “safety,” we don’t really consider ourselves at war (despite the endless talk of “supporting our troops”), and the money that has simply poured into Pentagon coffers, and then into weaponry and conflicts is, with rare exceptions, never linked to economic distress in this country. And yet, if we are no nation of warriors, from the point of view of the rest of the world we are certainly the planet’s foremost war-makers. If money talks, then war may be what we care most about as a society and fund above all else, with the least possible discussion or debate.

The article really deserves to be read in full, but I’ll just offer an excerpt from the first question, “1. How busted will the largest defense budget in history be in 2010?”:

If you want to put a finger to the winds of war in 2010, keep your eye on something else not included in that budget: the Obama administration’s upcoming supplemental funding request for the Afghan surge. In his West Point speech announcing his surge decision, the president spoke of sending 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan in 2010 at a cost of $30 billion. In news reports, that figure quickly morphed into “$30-$40 billion,” none of it in the just-passed Pentagon budget. To fund his widening war, sometime in the first months of the New Year, the president will have to submit a supplemental budget to Congress — something the Bush administration did repeatedly to pay for George W.’s wars, and something this president, while still a candidate, swore he wouldn’t do. Nonetheless, it will happen. So keep your eye on that $30 billion figure. Even that distinctly low-ball number is going to cause discomfort and opposition in the president’s party — and yet there’s no way it will fully fund this year’s striking escalation of the war. The question is: How high will it go or, if the president doesn’t dare ask this Congress for more all at once, how will the extra funds be found? Keep your eye out, then, for hints of future supplemental budgets, because fighting the Afghan War (forget Iraq) over the next decade could prove a near trillion-dollar prospect.

Ethics, tactics, drones, counterterrorism (“which is just terrorism put in uniform and given an anodyne name”). We should all be up to speed on each of these subjects, and there should be a ferocious debate in our media and Congress. Fat chance. Last week, a truly horrible story surfaced and was pretty much ignored by our major news outlets. “The occupied government of Afghanistan and the United Nations have both concluded that U.S.-led troops recently dragged eight sleeping children out of their beds, handcuffed some of them, and shot them all dead.”

Really, you’d think there would be more of a fuss…..

$57,077.60 a minute

By timmukyPosted on December 18, 2009Posted in afghanistan, economy, militarism, warTagged cost of war, mcchrystal, national priorities project, obama, spending, surge, vietnam, warNo Comments

afghan strategy chart — An extremely reassuring chart

On Tomdispatch, Jo Comerford of the National Priorities Project lays out the costs of the Afghan “surge” and it comes to, oh, $57,077.60 a MINUTE!

Some of the more jaw-dropping facts:

[A]dd up the yearly salary of a Marine from Camp Lejeune with four years of service, throw in his or her housing allowance, additional pay for dependents, and bonus pay for hazardous duty, imminent danger, and family separation, and you’ll still be many thousands of dollars short of that single minute’s sum.

…. we might have chosen to direct the $30 billion in surge expenditures toward raising the average individual monthly Food Stamp allotment by $70 for the next year; that’s roughly an additional trip to the grocery store, every month, for 36 million people. Alternatively, we could have dedicated that $30 billion to job creation. According to a recent report issued by the Political Economy Research Institute, that sum could generate a whopping 537,810 construction jobs, 541,080 positions in healthcare, fund 742,740 teachers or employ 831,390 mass transit workers.

…. [I]f you received a silver dollar every second, it would take you 960 years to haul in that $30 billion. Not that anyone could hold so much money. Together, the coins would weigh nearly 120,000 tons, or more than the poundage of 21,000 Asian elephants, an aircraft carrier, or the Washington Monument. Converted to dollar bills and laid end-to-end, $30 billion would reach 2.9 million miles or 120 times around the Earth.

And the numbers being bandied about are, big surprise here, lowball estimates. What we are looking at is a trillion dollar price tag for the war. Singular. Not a trillion for both Iraq and Afghanistan. Just Afghanistan.

Comerford concludes:

At just under one-third of the 2010 U.S. federal budget, $1 trillion essentially defies per-hour-per-soldier calculations. It dwarfs all other nations’ military spending, let alone their spending on war. It makes a mockery of food stamps and schools. To make sense of this cost, we need to leave civilian life behind entirely and turn to another war. We have to reach back to the Vietnam War, which in today’s dollars cost $709.9 billion — or $300 billion less than the total cost of the two wars we’re still fighting, with no end in sight, or even $300 billion less than the long war we may yet fight in Afghanistan.

But if you’re like me, one look at that chart and you know it’s gonna be worth it!

another phrase from hell: “collateral damage estimate”

By timmukyPosted on December 14, 2009Posted in aerial warfare, afghanistan, bombing, warTagged afghanistan, bombing, bush, high-value targeting, obama, rumsfeld, victims, warNo Comments

afghanistan_545575a — 29 more of these and we're talking major paperwork

Megan Carpentier notices that reports on U.S. and NATO air strikes in Afghanistan consistently claim the strikes kill exactly 30 people every time!

Well, why? Because 30 is “the magic number.” From a July L.A. Times article:

In a grisly calculus known as the “collateral damage estimate,” U.S. military commanders and lawyers often work together in advance of a military strike, using very specific, Pentagon-imposed protocols to determine whether the good that will come of it outweighs the cost.

We don’t know much about how it works, but in 2007, Marc Garlasco, the Pentagon’s former chief of high-value targeting, offered a glimpse when he told Salon magazine that in 2003, “the magic number was 30.” That meant that if an attack was anticipated to kill more than 30 civilians, it needed the explicit approval of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld or President George W. Bush. If the expected civilian death toll was less than 30, the strike could be OKd by the legal and military commanders on the ground.

And pause for a minute to let that soak in. LEGAL commanders on the ground. Whose job involves calibrating the number of innocent lives that can be snuffed out without raising any eyebrows back home….. And pause for another minute to realize we can no longer pin this on Rumsfeld and Bush.

“Obama’s Anti-MacArthur moment”

By timmukyPosted on December 4, 2009Posted in afghanistan, iraq, militarism, politics, Uncategorized, warTagged afghanistan, iraq, macarthur, mcchrystal, obama, politics, war, west pointNo Comments

Truman-fires-mcarthur-49_02 — Truman sacks MacArthur

Tom Englehardt has a spot-on analysis of what went down last Tuesday night. Obama’s West Point speech announcing the Afghanistan escalation was a Big Moment in America’s recent history, and one that shows just how desperate straits we’re in. Who among us thought that when the Democrats swept into power in the 2006 midterms, presaging their control of everything in the 2008 election, that the Dems would not only NOT end Bush’s wars and Constitutional crimes, but that they would extend them?

But nobody talks about it. I see and hear a lot of chatter about the last spasms of health care reform, Wall Street excesses, and New York state’s gay marriage doublecross, but I’m not hearing a lot of “what the fuck is he doing with this Afghanistan bullshit?”–in spite of the fact that no one–NO ONE–thinks there’s a chance in hell of this mini-surge succeeding.

With my usual gratitude for Englehardt’s keen powers, but with an unusually heavy heart because what he says is so fricking depressing, I present “Meet the Commanded in Chief”, in which a very convincing case is made for this being Obama’s “anti-MacArthur moment”:

In April 1951, in the midst of the Korean War, President Harry Truman relieved Douglas MacArthur of command of American forces. He did so because the general, a far grander public figure than either McChrystal or Centcom commander Petraeus (and with dreams of his own about a possible presidential run), had publicly disagreed with, and interfered with, Truman’s plans to “limit” the war after the Chinese intervened.

Obama, too, has faced what Robert Dreyfuss in Rolling Stone calls a “generals’ revolt” — amid fears that his Republican opposition would line up behind the insubordinate field commanders and make hay in the 2010 and 2012 election campaigns. Obama, too, has faced a general, Petraeus, who might well have presidential ambitions, and who has played a far subtler game than MacArthur ever did. After more than two months of what right-wing critics termed “dithering” and supporters called “thorough deliberations,” Obama dealt with the problem quite differently. He essentially agreed to subordinate himself to the publicly stated wishes of his field commanders. (Not that his Republican critics will give him much credit for doing so, of course.) This is called “politics” in our country and, for a Democratic president in our era, Tuesday night’s end result was remarkably predictable.

The dysfunction here is quite intense. There is an unquestioned trend toward increased presidential power in the last half century or so, but not for a president who wants to buck the consensus in Washington. I’m not defending Obama, but I also really can’t imagine ANY president doing the right thing and sacking his insubordinate subordinates in the Pentagon for their brazen challenge to his authority. One wishes for more from the guy, but he never led us to believe he’d do anything different than what he’s doing. Still, the landscape is pretty dismal.

Unfortunately, the most essential problem isn’t in Afghanistan; it’s here in the United States, in Washington, where knowledge is slim, egos large, and national security wisdom is deeply imprinted on a system bleeding money and breaking down. The president campaigned on the slogan, “Change we can believe in.” He then chose as advisors — in the economic sphere as well, where a similar record of gross error, narrow and unimaginative thinking, and over-identification with the powerful could easily be compiled — a crew who had never seen a significant change, or an out-of-the-ordinary thought it could live with — and still can’t.

As a result, the Iraq War has yet to begin to go away, the Afghan War is being escalated in a major way, the Middle East is in some turmoil, Guantanamo remains open, black sites are still operating in Afghanistan, the Pentagon’s budget has grown yet larger, and supplemental demands on Congress for yet more money to pay for George W. Bush’s wars will, despite promises otherwise, soon enough be made.

A stale crew breathing stale air has ensured that Afghanistan, the first of Bush’s disastrous wars, is now truly Obama’s War; and the news came directly from West Point where the president surrendered to his militarized fate.

If only…

By timmukyPosted on November 20, 2009Posted in afghanistan, economy, militarism, politics, warTagged afghanistan, obama, politics, warNo Comments

Tom Englehardt has an excellent post on the speech Obama should give, but never will.

Tonight, in response to the realities of Afghanistan as I’ve just described them to you, I’ve put aside all the subjects that ordinarily obsess Washington, especially whether an American president can reverse the direction of a war and still have an electoral future. That’s for the American people, and them alone, to decide….

Given that, let me say as bluntly as I can that I have decided to send no more troops to Afghanistan. Beyond that, I believe it is in the national interest of the American people that this war, like the Iraq War, be drawn down. Over time, our troops and resources will be brought home in an orderly fashion, while we ensure that we provide adequate security for the men and women of our Armed Forces. Ours will be an administration that will stand or fall, as of today, on this essential position: that we ended, rather than extended, two wars.

It’s quite a thought. And of course the consequences of NOT making this speech are cataclysmic for the rest of us. But for the ruling party, short-term calculations trump everything. Better to keep spending a trillion a year on ~~defense~~ keeping the war juggernaut going, than to risk losing a couple seats in the mid-terms.

Blowin’ in the wind

By timmukyPosted on November 16, 2009Posted in environment, warTagged depleted uranium, enuvironment, fallujah, politics, war, white phosphorusNo Comments

fallufoot — The deformed feet of four-year-old Zahra Muhammad Photograph: Muhannad Fala'ah/Getty Images

This post by Siun at Firedoglake links to a number of articles about toxic fallout from U.S. attacks in Iraq, and by our Israeli chums in Gaza. As the Guardian reports in this heartbreaking image gallery (also, here), the incidence of birth defects and early life cancers has skyrocketed in Fallujah, Basra, Baghdad and Al – Najaf, all areas that fell under heavy bombardment by the U.S.

It’s one thing to hope, however vainly, that the U.S. government sees the light and pulls its military back from its murderous assaults against Iraq and Afghanistan, quite another to think we will ever do anything about the long-term environmental consequences.

The Guardian report is careful to note that it’s too early to draw definite conclusions about what caused this 15-fold rise in many chronic deformities in infants and a spike in early life cancers. Depleted uranium? White phosphorus? Well, maybe. And it will ever be so. The procedure is clear. Deny and obfuscate until it’s too late to do anything about it.

Gaza: “Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside…”

By timmukyPosted on November 4, 2009Posted in politics, Uncategorized, warTagged gaza, israel, politics, war, war crimesNo Comments

Congress votes (334-36, with 22 “present” and 30 “not voting”) to condemn the Goldstone report. It’s nonbinding, but “[calls] on the President and the Secretary of State to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration of the ‘Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict’ in multilateral fora.”

Amal, two and a half years old. All her insides were outside… and she was giving her last breath and she said, ‘I love you and I want sweets.’ Can you imagine, the last thing she said was, ‘I love you mom.’

Play this video from beginning to end. How can anyone oppose an investigation into how the bodies of little children came to be riddled with bullets? How can anyone oppose an investigation into a campaign in which Amnesty International states “1,400 Palestinians were killed, including some 300 children, and hundreds of other unarmed civilians, including more than 115 women and some 85 men aged over 50”?

Well, most of your Congressfolk oppose any “further consideration” of the topic. Maybe you should ask them why.

This video was even more heartbreaking. And you can read the transcript of the Bill Moyers video with Goldstone here.

The Israeli government, for its part, is indeed taking action. According to this AFP report, “The prime minister instructed the relevant government bodies to examine a worldwide campaign to amend the international laws of war to adapt them to the spread of global terrorism, his office said in a statement.”

In other words, change the rules of engagement to allow the firing of machine guns into the stomachs of three-year-old girls.

Remember These Children memorializes both Israeli and Palestinian children killed since 2000.

Crawling toward the light?

By timmukyPosted on November 2, 2009Posted in militarism, politics, warTagged obama, poltics, quagmire, vietnam, warNo Comments

For more on the pictures go here

Dave Eggers, reviewing a collection of early Kurt Vonnegut stories, offers the obiter dictum that “Vonnegut left the planet just about the time we, as a nation, were crawling toward the light again.” Well, I wonder.

For me, it’s difficult to choose the greater disaster unwinding in this new enlightened phase in our history. Is it the health care debacle? Obama’s ongoing one-upping of Bush era Constitutional transgressions? The fact that our economy has fallen down and can’t get up? Or is it the war that nobody sees or cares about? Every day one of these becomes the leading contender. For today, arbitrarily, I’ll choose Afghanistan, mainly because of this typically insightful Tomdispatch essay, Afghanistan as a bailout state.

The state of affairs, as Englehardt writes, is dire:

Here’s a partial rundown of news from that devolving conflict: In the last week, Nuristan, a province on the Pakistani border, essentially fell to the Taliban after the U.S. withdrew its forces from four key bases. Similarly in Khost, another eastern province bordering Pakistan where U.S. forces once registered much-publicized gains (and which Richard Holbrooke, now President Obama’s special envoy to the region, termed “an American success story”), the Taliban is largely in control. It is, according to Yochi Dreazen and Anand Gopal of the Wall Street Journal, now “one of the most dangerous provinces” in the country. Similarly, the Taliban insurgency, once largely restricted to the Pashtun south, has recently spread fiercely to the west and north. At the same time, neighboring Pakistan is an increasingly destabilized country amid war in its tribal borderlands, a terror campaign spreading throughout the country, escalating American drone attacks, and increasingly testy relations between American officials and the Pakistani government and military.

Meanwhile, the U.S. command in Afghanistan is considering a strategy that involves pulling back from the countryside and focusing on protecting more heavily populated areas (which might be called, with the first U.S. Afghan War of the 1980s in mind, the Soviet strategy). The underpopulated parts of the countryside would then undoubtedly be left to Hellfire missile-armed American drone aircraft. In the last week, three U.S. helicopters — the only practical way to get around a mountainous country with a crude, heavily mined system of roads — went down under questionable circumstances (another potential sign of an impending Soviet-style disaster). Across the country, Taliban attacks are up; deadly roadside bombs or IEDs are fast on the rise (a 350% jump since 2007); U.S. deaths are at a record high and the numbers of wounded are rising rapidly; European allies are ever less willing to send more troops; and Taliban raids in the capital, Kabul, are on the increase. All this despite a theoretical 12-1 edge U.S., NATO, and Afghan troops have over the Taliban insurgents and their allies.

A rational person, or nation, would see such a state of affairs and declare that it’s time to cut one’s losses. But that ain’t gonna happen with a president who only wants to please. As Englehardt has written, the only options he’s contemplating include the word “more.” This invokes comparisons to, er, a previous military engagement that didn’t end well. But even that might not convey the scale of catastrophe we’re courting:

In the Vietnam era, there was a shorthand word for this: “quagmire.” We were, as the antiwar song then went, “waist deep in the Big Muddy” and still wading in. If Vietnam was, in fact, a quagmire, however, it was so only because we made it so. Similarly, in changed circumstances, Afghanistan today has become the AIG of American foreign policy and Obama’s team so many foreign policy equivalents of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. And as with the economy, so with the expanding Af/Pak war: at the end of the day, it’s the American taxpayer who will be left holding the bag.

Let’s think about what this means for a moment: According to the U.S. Congressional Research Service, the cost of keeping a single American soldier in Afghanistan is $1.3 million per year. According to Greg Jaffe and Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post, it costs the Pentagon about $1 billion per year to station 1,000 U.S. troops in that country. It’s fair to assume that this estimate doesn’t include, among other things, long-term care for wounded soldiers or the cost of replacing destroyed or overused equipment. Nor do these figures include any civilian funds being spent on the war effort via the State Department, nor undoubtedly the funds being spent by the Pentagon to upgrade bases and facilities throughout the country. In other words, just about any decision by the president, including one simply focused on training Afghan soldiers and police, will involve an outlay of further multi-billions of dollars. Whatever choice the president makes, the U.S. will bleed money.
…..
The United States lived through all the phases of escalation, withdrawal, and defeat in Vietnam without suffering great post-war losses of any sort. This time we may not be so lucky. The United States is itself no longer too big to fail — and if we should do so, remind me: Who exactly will bail us out?

Crawling toward the light? I’ll agree with the crawling part…..