Beth's Afghanistan Blog

A humorously serious look at life’s trials & tribulations,
American politics, religion, and other social madnesses by Beth Isbell.

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Beth's Afghanistan Blog

Post by roxybeast » October 11th, 2009, 12:13 am

<center>US Will Not Pull Out of Afghanistan & Here's Why
by Beth Isbell, Oct. 10, 2009
</center>
Make sure to check the most recent replies to this article for updates and new articles on the Afghanistan war that you should know about.

The US is not going to pull out of Afghanistan anytime soon.

If you noticed, Gen. McChrystal said the main reason for the need for extra troops is to assign them to fighting in the North & West portions of Afghanistan ...

Well, what's West of Afghanistan & East of Iraq?

Iran.

While not publicly announced, our strategy in both wars is in large part to secure bases and territory on both sides of our biggest threat & potential enemy in the Middle East ... Iran.

And, particularly when you add all the other bases we have lining the Persian Gulf, ...
we now have them surrounded.

So unless & until Iran ceases to be a threat, don't expect that the US will withdraw.
Last edited by roxybeast on December 3rd, 2009, 3:05 am, edited 2 times in total.

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Post by Barry » October 11th, 2009, 2:15 am

What makes Iran a threat?

If Iran gets the Bomb, who might they use it on?

Certainly not the US, because they can't reach, but Israel?

Yeah, Israel.

Why is that a problem?

BECAUSE IT'S A PROBLEM IF ANYONE USES THE BOMB ON ANYONE ELSE. Or even threatens to.

Nobody has threatened to in a loong time.

But there's always Iran.

Now what's the problem?

Ending non-proliferation. That's the problem.

Reduction was in process.

Why reverse that?

Yeah, Iran's not the problem. It's so obviously America and their buddies, Israel.

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Post by roxybeast » October 11th, 2009, 2:39 am

To be perfectly clear, just because I personally favor withdrawal from both wars, does not mean that our government does ... & there is a reason for that, as I suggested. I also favor using technology to go after terrorists.

And as further evidence of how the US Government feels about Iran, for those who missed the news last month ... the US has redirected its missile defense program to ship based missiles targeted at the "Iranian threat":
"Now, in the age of Obama, the vision has descended from the stars to sea level. A president who was still in college during Reagan’s famous missile defense speech has turned a scaled-back version of the technology, which would first be based on ships, to a new mission: Convincing Israel and the Arab world that Washington is moving quickly to counter Iran’s influence, even as it opens direct negotiations with Tehran for the first time in 30 years."

Source - NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/18/world ... ssess.html
And as further proof of my war protesting ways, consider this original song I wrote to protest the Bush-Cheney war efforts ... called "Warmonger"

Anti-war protest song - "Warmonger"
http://www.reverbnation.com/tunepak/1538985

(I love this song, but wrote it about the Bush-Cheney Administration, so not sure I want to release it in the age of Obama ... but I still might re-record it & release it so that future generations can use it if need be.)

And actually, from the video of the chairman of the Nobel Peace Prize committee that I saw, one of the main reasons Obama won the award was because of his commitment to European leaders earlier this year that he would ramp up US anti-proliferation efforts & reduce nuclear weapons arsenals.

All I'm saying in this article is that as long as our government continues to see Iran as a major threat, even a nuclear threat, to us or our allies, the prospects of withdrawal in both Iraq and Afghanistan will be clouded and made far more difficult by this view. And it is unrealistic to expect that the US will end these wars or its occupation of either soon or ever as long as this "threat" exists, and certainly not without ensuring that we have bases and other mechanisms to insert our forces quickly in the event that Iran ever provides any reason to do so.

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Post by roxybeast » October 19th, 2009, 6:34 pm

<center>Bill Moyers Journal report on Afghanistan ... </center>

Watch the show/video: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10162009/watch.html

Transcript of interview:
October 16, 2009
BILL MOYERS: Welcome to the Journal.

President Obama has been holding one meeting after another trying to decide whether to escalate the war in Afghanistan. He would do well to hold off another discussion until he has sent everyone home for the weekend to read this new book with the provocative title, STRIPPING BARE THE BODY, and a cover that holds the eye like a magnet.

The subject is politics, violence, and war, and running through it is an old truth often forgot: you start a war knowing what you are fighting, but in the end you find yourself fighting for things you had never thought of.

In the meantime, you make decisions that inflict on people in far-off places suffering you never imagined.

That's but one stark truth you will find in these pages. The wars we fight, and the violence that feeds them, reveal like nothing else the hidden structures of power in Washington: the personal rivalries, the in-fighting and deal-making, the ambitions that decide our policies and often our fate. STRIPPING BARE THE BODY, you will discover, is a moral history of American power over the past quarter century.

Its author is Mark Danner, who throughout those 25 years reported from more mean places in the world than any journalist I know -- Iraq, the Balkans, Haiti, and Washington, among them. Despite more than one close brush with death, he keeps going back. He writes for some of our leading magazines and has produced a series of acclaimed books, winning awards left and right as well as receiving the MacArthur Fellowship. All the while Mark Danner has been teaching journalism and foreign affairs at both the University of California, Berkeley, and Bard College in upstate New York. He's been at this table before, and it's good to welcome you back.

MARK DANNER: Thank you, Bill. It's good to be here.

BILL MOYERS: First, the title. Very provocative. Where did it come from?

MARK DANNER: Well, it comes from a former Haitian president, who survived in office for about four months before being overthrown in a coup d'état, and he said he told me and said in speeches subsequently that political violence is like stripping bare the body, the better to place the stethoscope and hear what's going on beneath the skin. He meant that times of revolution, coup d'état, war, any kind of social violence going on tends to form anyone moment of nudity, as he put it. In which you can actually see the forces at work within the society stripped bare.

It's like one of those models in biology class, where you see the body, you see all the organs beneath it, and suddenly you see who's oppressing whom, who has the money, who has the power, how that power is exerted. And that that is the time to seize a society and look at it, to X-ray it, try to understand what exactly is going on in its intimate recesses.

BILL MOYERS: That's what one finds in the book, that when you do these moments of nudity or nakedness reveal power structures that you don't see without that violence.

MARK DANNER: Exactly. Exactly. Whether it's in the Balkans or Haiti or certainly Iraq the struggle between the Shia and the Sunni, for example, which was complex, multifarious, sectarian, and intrasectarian. Haiti itself struggles over poverty and power. Places a place where we thought a democracy could take root immediately after the Duvalier dictatorship.

But where any democratic vote in which everyone you know, one man, one person has one vote was deeply threatening to the power structure that had existed there for 200 years. Same thing in the Balkans. You know, complex social interaction, complex ethnic makeup which, as so often the case with when it comes to American power, the assumptions of our leaders are that we can apply discrete specific power in a given spot and alter the social landscape. And solve political problems. And in all of these places, I mean, Haiti's a very good example. 7 million people. Very poor country that the United States has occupied twice in the last century. And was essentially unable to change things. Given all its great power, you know, a country of 300 million, the most powerful military power in the world, and trying to alter the dynamics of a country of 7 million. And we failed miserably. Not least because when you apply American power, and certainly when you send American troops, you start the forces of nationalism in reaction. And we've seen that in every place Americans have intervened, including Afghanistan.

BILL MOYERS: But in Iraq, some things have changed, have they not? I mean Saddam Hussein is gone.

MARK DANNER: There's no question Saddam Hussein is gone. There now is a Shia government in power, which represents the majority of the people of Iraq.

MARK DANNER: Saddam, of course, was a Sunni. And he represented a minority in power. Now, it's a Shia power, sympathetic to Iran. It's unclear whether this invasion at the end of the day really helped American interests at all. We do know that it left 100 thousand or more Iraqis dead. It destroyed politically the Bush administration. And it left the American public and I think this is very significant, skeptical indeed about further U.S. military deployments. And this is what Obama has been left with, when he has to try to cope with Afghanistan. A public exhausted and skeptical.

I call this in the book the Athenian problem. Which is how do you have--

BILL MOYERS: Athenian meaning Athens of Greece, right?

MARK DANNER: Exactly. How do you have a democratic empire, how do you have an imperial foreign policy built on a democracy polity. It's like some sort of strange mythical beast that's part lion, part dragon. You know at the bottom is a democracy, and then it's an imperial power around the world.

MARK DANNER: And the problem is that the things demanded by an empire, which is staying power, ruthlessness, the ability and the willingness to use its power around the world, it's something that democracies tend to be quite skeptical about. And this is a political factor that looms obviously very large in his calculations.

BILL MOYERS: When you strip bare the body politic of our own country, after all of these years of war--Vietnam, two wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, of other places--what do you hear with that stethoscope you apply to us?

MARK DANNER: I think that the United States we're now living still in the backwash of the War on Terror. We're living still in what I've called Bush's state of exception. Which is to say a state of soft martial law, a state of emergency, state of siege that was imposed after 9/11. Whereby warrantless surveillance was allowed without the supervision of the courts.

Whereby widespread detention was allowed. Not only of illegal aliens but American citizens. And whereby especially torture. Extreme interrogation techniques as some call them was developed, allowed, and legally certified within the Department of Justice. And all of these things represent the legal shadow and the political shadow of the "war on terror."

Which Obama--a phrase that Obama no longer uses, but that indeed has changed the country I think quite dramatically. And this is something else he has tried to cope with. How do you perhaps change some of these decisions made by the Bush Administration without leaving yourself politically vulnerable in the case of another attack? And we see this struggle going on when the former Vice President, Dick Cheney, comes out advocating not only torture but condemning the Obama administration for renouncing its use. We see the political stakes here, which is that if indeed President Obama is seen to leave the country vulnerable in the wake of another attack on American soil especially he will be politically destroyed.

BILL MOYERS: You say that the decisions being discussed, and about to be made in Afghanistan right now have very little to do with the war in Afghanistan and more to do with the politics in America. Explain that.

MARK DANNER: I think the political background here is extremely important. We have a new president, who made his case on foreign policy during the campaign on his opposition to the war in Iraq. And that opposition, to quote his speech in Springfield in 2002, was built on the perception that he is not against all wars, just dumb wars. So in this construction, the smart-- the dumb war was Iraq. The smart war, the right war was Afghanistan. Afghanistan allowed his dovishness on Iraq. So he has come into office having vowed to prosecute that war and fight it, because it was in American interest.

And now he has found, especially in the wake of the failed elections in Afghanistan, that he is getting into he's taking on a hornet's nest, putting his hand into a hornet's nest in a way I think he didn't anticipate.

BILL MOYERS: You make the point that we're more likely to be the target of attack because Obama is trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Muslim world.

MARK DANNER: I think that's true. I think that he is a political threat. And I think you have to look at the character of this war. You know, we're accustomed to calling it the "war on terror," even though Obama's no longer using the word. But it isn't a war where you try to seize territory. It's not a war where you're going to kill every jihadist. It's a war about politics. Think of a target. What you want to do in this war is prevent people from moving toward the center. That is, you want the people getting the money to not become more active supports. You want the more active supporters to not become active jihadists, to actually go into the fight. So, you're trying to do something political. You want to stop young Muslims from supporting this movement and taking part of it. That's the only way that this war will eventually be "won," quote unquote. And for the-- you know, when you look at it in these terms, George W. Bush was an enormous gift to the jihadists. An enormous gift.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

MARK DANNER: Because he embodied the caricature of the United States that Osama Bin Laden had put forth. An imperial power using its power blunderingly around the world, suppressing Muslims, repressing Muslim countries, occupying Saudi Arabia. You know, think of that image of Lindy England the young military woman standing in her fatigues, smiling at the camera, holding a leash. A leash that goes down to the neck of a naked Muslim man lying on the ground, grimacing in pain.

Osama Bin Laden, if he had hired the most expensive advertising agency on Madison Avenue, could not have embodied more brilliantly his ideology, which is that the United States is suppressing, humiliating, shaming, undermining the Muslim world, and especially Muslim men.

Obama, on the other hand, stands for-- you know, he has an African name, he's black, he has a Muslim middle name, he speaks about inclusion. I mean, look at his Cairo speech. Ideologically, he's an enormous threat to Osama Bin Laden. Because he does the opposite of what Americans are supposed to do.

BILL MOYERS: As you speak, I think of something that Obama said during one of the debates last year. I believe it was early in January, just as the campaign for the nomination was starting. And he said, and I'm paraphrasing, I'm running for President because I want to change the mindset from waging war to peace. Now, was that naïve?

MARK DANNER: I don't think it was naïve. And I think he has begun to do that. I think one of the aspects, you know, one of the reasons behind the Nobel Prize, for example, was a recognition that the rest of the world is so grateful he's in place. And that he is speaking eloquently about a world of inclusion, of cooperation, and not of unilateralism.

Because the Bush administration was really the nightmare that the world had always feared, which is an America unbounded by anything but its own power. Unbounded by international law, judicial processes, anything. And Obama has changed that impression of the United States, which is extremely important.

And ideologically, it's important when it comes to the "war on terror," when it comes to, you know, with relations with Europe. European countries, European leaders can cooperate more easily with the United States when the American President is popular among their publics.

It stands to reason. These are democratic countries. So, this has had real consequences. The question is: can he make institutional changes? Can he go to the next step? Can he represent inclusion when it comes to multilateral institutions? Can he expand our security council?

BILL MOYERS: NATO, U.N.

MARK DANNER: Exactly.

BILL MOYERS: IMF, World Bank.

MARK DANNER: G-20, for example, which where he has indeed taken, you know, what was formally the Group of Eight countries industrialized countries, which made the big decisions on economic, world economic decisions, they met together. He now has shifted that decision-making power -- to be fair, carrying on a change that was going on under Bush -- to the Group of 20, which actually does include Brazil. It does include India. We have a much broader spreading of decision-making power that I think is extremely important. And that indicates a way to put these beautiful words of Obama into real action.

BILL MOYERS: So, for a moment, I mean, you've got a marvelous chapter here on the imagination, as it applies to politics and war. Use your own imagination for the moment, and try to get in the mindset of that group of nice Norwegians, peace-loving people, who are giving their shiny prize for peace to a man who's only been in office nine months. Who has no real accomplishments to his credit yet. And that's understandable, only nine months. What were they -- what message were they sending? Why did they do it?

MARK DANNER: I think they're thinking his eloquence, the vision he sets forth is so beautiful, and its beauty now is especially striking because of the darkness that it follows. And the great risk is that those aspirations will remain only aspirations. And we must do what we can do to ensure that they're not only set forth, but in some way, that they're embodied by true action. And our way of doing that is to confer this honor on him.

I think they perhaps didn't anticipate that it might have a controversial reaction within the United States. But I do think it's a clear expression of this enormous crevasse between the way he is viewed domestically in the United States and the way he's viewed internationally.

BILL MOYERS: That beautiful vision you talk about, which they seem to be acknowledging, encouraging, and supporting, how does that balance off against the realities of what he faces in Afghanistan?

MARK DANNER: Oh, I think I would not like to be in President Obama's position in making choices on Afghanistan. I think he's in a terrible place, where this war is already deeply unpopular among the American public, and deeply unpopular within his own political party.

If he expands it dramatically, as his general, his hand-picked general has suggested he should by sending 40 thousand or more new troops, fresh troops, he will lose much of his Democratic support at home, and be reliant on Republican support. If, on the other hand, he rejects this recommendation, the Republicans will attack him, and it will be part of the bill of particulars that will be cited against him in the event of another attack, along with the renunciation of torture.

BILL MOYERS: I began the show with the reminder that, as you say in here, that we go to war for one thing, and usually wind up fighting for different things we could not have anticipated. What's our aim now in Afghanistan? What are our basic interests there and what are we fighting for?

MARK DANNER: Well, part of what we're seeing now is the sorting out on the part of the administration and particularly I think in the mind of the President. In answer to precisely that question, what are our interests?

We've been told that our interests are to prevent the regathering of Al Qaeda and Afghanistan as a jihadist base of operations, from which more attacks like 9/11 can be launched. But the fact is that these people have a very light footprint. The idea that you can simply keep them out of a place by occupying it with, in effect, a handful of troops, I think is quite mistaken. There are other places they can go. Somalia, Sudan, various other countries.

So, I think, you know, what happens very frequently, our goals change during a war. The one goal which, George Kennan I quote saying in the book. The reason that we go in is often forgotten, and suddenly the goals become something like maintaining our dignity. Keeping up our international authority. Preventing a loss and the damage such a loss will do to our international profile. In other words, they all become I think what rhetoricians call heuristic. They're about the mission itself, not achieving anything else.

BILL MOYERS: So, are our troops there dying for primarily political reasons? For prestige, which the diplomats say is essential to maintaining our position in the world?

MARK DANNER: I think that's a very large part of it. I think the other irony here, and I think it's important to say this. One is the goals of 9/11 itself, of that attack was to draw the United States into Afghanistan to fight a counterinsurgency as the Soviets had done before them. And like the Soviets, to destroy the remaining superpower. That was actually what they were thinking.

It's one of the reasons why a major northern alliance leader was assassinated, was blown up a couple of days before 9/11. The anticipation was this would draw the United States in, and the United States would be defeated on Afghan soil.

The fascinating thing is that the Pentagon, of course, at the time in 2001 avoided this. They didn't want a major ground involvement. They used air bombardment and Afghan allies on the ground. They've been much criticized for this. But, in fact, they were trying to avoid what is exactly happening right now, which is a major land involvement, which will become, in David Halberstam's famous words, a quagmire.

BILL MOYERS: Well, you say our boys, our soldiers there are bait.

MARK DANNER: They are indeed. I mean, it's fascinating when you look at what the procedures are. You have at the moment anyway a lot of quite small bases. You know, where you have 20, 40 soldiers. And they go out each day on patrol. It's very difficult territory. Very often, these bases are at the bottom of valleys.

They go out on patrol, essentially trying to elicit or encourage what soldiers call contact, engagement. That is, people shooting at them. It's the only way they can find the Taliban. So, they use themselves as bait. And then, hope to be able to respond. And they have an enemy who, you know, it's their territory. They can blend into the population.

BILL MOYERS: Taliban.

MARK DANNER: Yes. And they're extremely experienced. It's a thankless, thankless job, I think for the soldiers.

BILL MOYERS: You don't answer it in Stripping Bare the Body, but you leave me perplexed with the unresolved question of what accounts for this boundless capacity for evil that expresses itself all over the world and from deep in human nature. You have any thoughts about that?

MARK DANNER: I wish I could -- you know, there's this sense, and I say this in the book, that the wonderful voluptuous thing about reporting, the great voluptuous pleasure of it, is that you will look at a place from afar and it will seem-- will think you understand it. You will look at Iraq and you'll say, "My God, look at what's going on. I understand it. Well, I can say to you this and this and this?"

And as you get closer, as you set foot on the ground, as you talk to people, tens of people, you know, scores of people, as you travel around, as you see what's going on the ground, bit by bit, your certainty is stripped away, and you know less and less. Until you reach a moment, a couple weeks in, usually in my case, where you've been bombarded with sense impressions.

You've been bombarded with opinions. You've been bombarded with descriptions. And you suddenly think, I know nothing. I know nothing about this place. And that is a wonderful place to reach because you've achieved a kind of tabula rasa. You know, now I can try to understand it on my own terms. It's a wonderful thing about reporting, but unfortunately, it's not necessarily very good at understanding the ultimate ontological questions that you push-- that you just put to me.

What is evil? What is-- where does the evil come from that lies behind someone like Saddam Hussein, or Radovan Karadzic, or General Claude Raymond in Haiti. As I say, I've tended to find these people-- I mean, Saddam, I've never met or interviewed-- but these other people to be rather disappointing. Their political goals were mundane. What they had working for them was opportunism, was very often cleverness and was ruthlessness.

BILL MOYERS: So evil becomes a tool.

MARK DANNER: I think it-- I think it does. It's a tool and it's an advertisement.

BILL MOYERS: An advertise--

MARK DANNER: It's a means of persuasion. If you can-- you know, in the Balkan Wars, the ruthlessness of the Serbs allowed them to kill only 100,000 people rather than 500,000 people. They were able, through their own use of rape and mass murder, they were able to send five times that many people fleeing Serb territory. So they used it, in essence to cleanse the land.

Ethnic cleansing, as we called it, quite inaccurately, because the ethnic groups were actually the same. But I wish I could find for you, you know, the ontological source of evil. But I think the more reporting I do, the more I see violence used in an instrumental way. And also, I should say, our own tendency, when we use violence, because the United States does use it extensively-- to ignore what we think of as the hygienic use of force.

You know, the Iraq war, in the first couple of weeks-- the so-called combat stage, as the George W. Bush administration called it-- the best estimate made by the Associated Press of civilian casualties, civilian deaths, which is certainly an understatement, It's a hospital count so it's only people who were brought to hospital morgues, was 3400 people. Now this is in two weeks.

This is more than the number in the United States who died in 9/11. And of course, Iraq is a tenth or an eleventh the size of the United States. So the equivalent, on the US side, would be 35,000 people died, civilians, in that war. They were never on camera. You never saw those bodies. You saw very few bodies. It was as if the American army simply marched up the road to Baghdad. And in fact-- you know, the military before the war, estimated collateral damage at 10,000, 15,000, something like that.

And you know, when you make a decision like that and say 10,000 to 15,000, or 7000, or whatever the number was, will probably be killed as a result of this intervention, people who have no-- you know, are not military and so on-- that it strikes me as an extremely serious thing. It's not like trying to kill civilians in a terrorist attack, needless to say. It's not, because that's your intention. But it's not entirely different. I mean, you are setting out, and knowingly, on an operation that's going to kill large numbers of civilians. And we tend not to look at it, and then we tend to forget it.

BILL MOYERS: As we--

MARK DANNER: --American amnesia.

BILL MOYERS: As we speak, Congress is about to pass a law forbidding the Pentagon from releasing any more of the photographs of American troops torturing--

MARK DANNER: Yes.

BILL MOYERS: --Muslims. What does that say?

MARK DANNER: Well, I think it's-- I think it's a mistaken decision. I think President Obama and the new administration should have gotten this stuff off, out of the way immediately. I think these photographs should have simply been released. And--

BILL MOYERS: Is torture the purest expression of evil that you've seen?

MARK DANNER: I think if you're looking for a pure expression of evil, torture is pretty-- is a pretty good candidate.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

MARK DANNER: Well, because you are taking-- I mean, it's also the most illiberal policy, the sort of most diametrically opposed to what we are as a polity. A liberal state has as its heart the notion that government is limited. That there is an area of privacy of our daily lives in which governmental power, state power, cannot intervene.

And torture takes over someone's nervous system. Torture takes over what they feel. Torture takes over and penetrates into their mind and into their body. It's not only illegal, it's immoral. And it's against-- it's against the heart of what the American political tradition stands for, which is an enlightenment tradition. And in which the abolition of torture, by the way, in the 18th and 17th century, was extremely important. So it's going back into darkness, I think, in a very dramatic way.

BILL MOYERS: Last question, and an unfair question. You write stories and report. You don't make policy. But what would you do about Afghanistan at this point, if you were the President?

MARK DANNER: I think that the first point to be made is there is no "solution" in Afghanistan. Solution I put in quotes. We live in an op-ed culture, which is to say, you always need to have a solution. The last third of that op-ed piece needs to say, "Do this, this, this and this." There is no this, this, this, and this, that will make Afghanistan right.

I think the first thing we need to do is be clear about our interests there, which I think are very, very limited. I think we need to be clear about the fact that our presence on the ground is going far toward undermining the very raison d'être for our presence, which is to say, we do not want to encourage future terrorist attacks on this country. We don't want to allow large scale jihadist organizing, if we can prevent it. But our presence in Afghanistan is a major rallying cry for those groups precisely. I would gradually disengage from Afghanistan.

But I think the war is going badly there. And frankly, it's going badly here. And I'm glad the Obama administration, I think the President himself, has, in the wake of the Afghan elections-- because that really was the turning point, the realization that the partner on the ground there was corrupt and illegitimate. And in the wake of those elections-- all of the early perceptions about the war that Obama had set out on are being reconsidered.

And I think sometimes we should admire that in a president. Which is to say, it seems to me he's thinking, "You know what? My original ideas about this place, things I said in the campaign and so on should not bind me and keep me from making the right decision." And I'm encouraged by that. I'm encouraged by his willingness to reconsider and actually look at the facts on the ground. I don't know what decision he'll come to. As I say, there's no right decision here, as in so many other instances.

BILL MOYERS: This is a remarkable book of reportage and writing, STRIPPING BARE THE BODY: POLITICS, VIOLENCE AND WAR. And Mark, I appreciate your being with me to talk about it.

MARK DANNER: Thank you, I've enjoyed it.
--------------------------

Another Bill Moyers' interview on Afghanistan:

Watch show/video: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09252009/watch.html

Transcript of interview:
September 25, 2009

LYNN SHERR: Welcome to the Journal. I'm Lynn Sherr, sitting in for Bill Moyers, who's away this week.

Afghanistan was supposed to be the war that made sense, if any war can be said to make sense. That's where the masterminds behind 9/11 were hiding. End of story.

Eight years later, and we're still there, at a cost exceeding 220 billion dollars. More than 1400 have been killed among American troops and our NATO allies. This week, a classified report from by the American commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal was leaked to the press, a report that called for as many as 40,000 additional U.S. troops, without which, the General wrote, our effort, "...will likely result in failure." If approved by President Obama, our military force there would escalate to more than 100,000.

The President's in a fix. He can accede to the General's wish, despite fading support from Congress and the American public, gambling on success or wading deeper into a Vietnam-like quagmire. Or he can cut back, as he is being urged by Vice President Joe Biden and others. They believe we should stop trying to nation-build and restore the mission's original intent: protect America from terrorism by concentrating firepower on al-Qaeda.

For all its beauty, Afghanistan is a difficult, mountainous land of corrupt warlords, complex alliances and ancient tribal hatreds. It has defied occupation by outside forces since the time of Alexander the Great, and it is, in the words of my guest, "a graveyard of predictions," where nothing is as it seems or goes as planned.

Rory Stewart may know Afghanistan better than any other westerner. A professor and director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard University, Stewart is a former British soldier and foreign service officer. His expertise on the region has gained him the ear of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, and the U.S. Senate, where last week he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Back in 2002, shortly after the start of the war in Afghanistan, Stewart traveled the entire country by foot, a death-defying, 6000-mile trek chronicled in his book "The Places in Between."

Rory Stewart, welcome to the Journal.

RORY STEWART: Thank you very much.

LYNN SHERR: Let me start by asking — what in heavens name made you decide to walk across Afghanistan, at a time when there was a war on?

RORY STEWART: I didn't-- I really believe that in order to talk about a country you need to spend time in villages, because this is a country where 80-90 percent of the population live in villages, and if you spend your time in an embassy compound or dealing with other diplomats or dealing with fancy cabinet ministers, you simply miss the tenor of it. So the privilege for me was that, on that walk — and I also walked across Iran, Pakistan, India, Nepal — I stayed in 500 different village houses. Night after night, I sat on people's floor, I heard them talk about their families, about religion, about the government. By the end of it, I had a little bit more confidence in my work, so if I'm asked, "Are we going to be able to beat the Taliban and build a state?," having spent some time in those village houses gives me a little bit more confidence in saying, "These people may not completely be with the program in the way that you expect."

LYNN SHERR: You write very eloquently about the country. And yet you're a realist. You don't romanticize it. Give me, give us a sense of what it was like from the foot-walker point of view.

RORY STEWART: Well, one thing is that Afghans were incredibly generous and kind to me. I walked alone from one end of the country to the other at a time when there was no government. So, the first lesson I took away from that is how good these communities are in surviving in the absence of the government. It wasn't only they took me into their houses, but they looked after my security, they accompanied me from village to village, often at great personal risk to themselves. So, that's the upside. On the other side, of course, I noticed sitting night after night in these village houses that people are quite conservative. They're quite suspicious of foreigners. They don't know a great deal about the outside world. I mean, one of the things that's a little misleading about people who say, "If we don't fight the Taliban in Afghanistan, we're going to have to fight them in the streets of the United States" is that most of these people we're dealing with can barely read or write. They live very limited lives where, in the winter, they're basically holed-up in their houses. They're often three hours walk from the nearest village. The idea that they're somehow going to turn up on the streets of the United States with a train of goats behind them in order to conduct war here is a bit misleading. They couldn't find the United States on a map.

LYNN SHERR: You talked before, about our goals in Afghanistan. The President has a big decision to make — more troops, not more troops. Lay it out for us, is that what he's facing?

RORY STEWART: I think the President has defined a very, very narrow objective. He's said that we're there to do counter-terrorism. That's what he's been saying since January. But then he said in order to get there, we need this huge project, which amounts really to building a state, that's all dressed up in this language of counterinsurgency, fighting the Taliban. So we end up in this paradox, where we have this very small objective, which is to protect the United States against terrorist attack, but on the President's order, in order to get there, we need to defeat the Taliban, we need to bring development, we need to create legitimate, effective governmental structures.

LYNN SHERR: And that means, according to the leaked report, either more troops or not more troops.

RORY STEWART: Absolutely. So, the military, which is leading the fight against the Taliban, says that if you really want to build this kind of state, if you really want to defeat the Taliban, we're going to need many more troops. General McChrystal's asked for another 40,000, but when I was testifying on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, a Colonel sitting next to me said they needed 600,000 total. Which is both Afghan and U.S. troops, but would-- would be a huge footprint on the ground.

LYNN SHERR: You're saying that what General McChrystal is said to have asked for this is 40,000 — you're saying, in fact, that's not going to be the final request?

RORY STEWART: No, my imagination is that the American military will continue to ask for more and more. Because if they're saying 600,000 total is what they want, and let's say that's about 400,000 Afghan police and Army, that'll be about 200,000 international forces. So I'd like to go back to the military and say, "Why are you only asking for 40,000, if your doctrine actually requires far more than that?" And the answer probably is that's as much as they think they can get away with, which isn't really the kind of answer we want to hear.

LYNN SHERR: If you were a betting fellow, how would you bet President Obama is going to respond to this request?

RORY STEWART: I'd say President Obama has no choice. If he's not going to send the troops, he should have stopped the General from sending in the report. He's now completely boxed in.

LYNN SHERR: But he's indicating that there's not only a lot of wiggle room, but that he's actually reconsidering.

RORY STEWART: I think it would be a political catastrophe for the President to refuse to accede to a request from the man on the ground. Broadly speaking, this is a civilian President. He's said that he believes in defeating the Taliban. He believes in building a legitimate effective state. There's a highly respected General on the ground — who's backed up by Admiral Mullen, who's backed by General Petraeus — saying we need 40,000 more troops. It would be almost inconceivable, at this stage, for the President to refuse that request.

LYNN SHERR: So, this is an image problem, in part, for the President.

RORY STEWART: It's an image problem. It's also the way he's framed the problem. He said that he wants to build a legitimate effective state and defeat the Taliban. He's asked the experts what their view are. The experts have come back and said, "If you want to do that, give me 40,000 more troops."

LYNN SHERR: Whoa, whoa, but he's also said, certainly recently, "Maybe we need to reassess. We need to figure out exactly what we do want to." Isn't he giving himself a chance to maybe change the objective?

RORY STEWART: No. I don't honestly believe he is. And furthermore, I'm a little bit surprised that he's going around saying that he's skeptical — if he's actually skeptical and not sure about the strategy -- maybe it's inappropriate for me to talk about this kind of stuff — but he shouldn't have allowed the general to produce the report in the first place. He could have easily said to General McChrystal two or three months ago, Listen, to be honest, I'm not sure about this state-building, defeating the Taliban stuff. So, just hold a second. That isn't really the strategy anymore. I don't want a report on that. I don't want to know how many troops you need for that. I want to focus on a much narrower counter-terrorism strategy. But it's too late now. He's defined it. The general has provided his advice. And I would be extremely surprised if the President doesn't come out in favor.

LYNN SHERR: President Obama has made it clear that he wants two things to happen in Afghanistan, right? He wants us to rout the Taliban and build a safe country for the Afghanis. And, by the way, not have a place for Al Qaeda to operate from, correct?

RORY STEWART: Correct.

LYNN SHERR: What's wrong with those goals?

RORY STEWART: So, the problem is that these are all quite different objectives. In and of themselves, they're fine. But they're not connected, necessarily, in the way the President thinks. There's a huge theory that everything that we want to do is somehow connected. The stability of Pakistan. The security of the United States. Beating the Taliban. Beating Al Qaeda. Bringing development to the Afghan people. But we end up in a bit of a muddle, because we tend to be pursuing five objectives at once, assuming that they all amount to the same thing. The real problem is that some of these things just may not be possible. They may be possible over the long term for Afghans themselves to build a stable state. But it's probably a project of decades. It needs indigenous leadership, a sort of Afghan Thomas Jefferson, to rebuild its state. It's not something that foreigners can come in and do from outside. The United States, its allies, are quite good at certain kinds of things -- building roads, providing some training to the military, helping to build hospitals and schools. But building a state is a project for a founding father. The same with fighting the Taliban. Again, they have quite a lot of support from villages in the south of Afghanistan. And the Kabul government, as we saw in the last election, just doesn't have much credibility or support. It's perceived as having won in a corrupt fashion, and it's going to be very difficult for the United States to try to put itself between the Kabul government and the Taliban.

LYNN SHERR: So, you're saying that the goals are simply wrong--

RORY STEWART: I'm saying that the goals are absolutely mistaken in terms of U.S. national security, and probably in the end in terms of the interests of the Afghan people.

LYNN SHERR: They're wrong because we can't accomplish them? Or because it's not what we should be trying to do?

RORY STEWART: We can't accomplish them. And in trying to do so, we're often making the situation worse. Afghanistan is very poor, very fragile, very traumatized. To rebuild a country like that would take 30 or 40 years of patient, tolerant investment, and probably that's what we should be aiming for. But in order to do that, we need to have a presence there which is affordable, which is quite small, which is realistic, and which the American people will endorse. People aren't going to put up with over 100,000 troops on the ground and this level of casualties forever. So, probably better for us, better for the Afghans, would be to step back and say, "Hey, we're not going to try to do all this stuff. We've got two very limited objectives — we'd like to make sure that Al Qaeda doesn't significantly increase its ability to harm the United States, and we'd like to do something for the Afghan people. And we recognize that doing those two things is a very long term process, and so, we probably need fewer troops, not more."

LYNN SHERR: How many troops do you believe are needed in Afghanistan right now?

RORY STEWART: Not that many. I would have thought what you needed from point of view of Al Qaeda counterterrorism is probably 10-20,000 special forces and intelligence operatives. Doing pretty much what they've been doing quite successfully over the last seven, eight years. People are saying we've failed in the counterterrorism objective, of course, we haven't really. Osama Bin Laden isn't in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda hasn't got bases in Afghanistan. And I think we could continue to ensure that was the case.

LYNN SHERR: With 10 or 20,000 troops on the ground, can we, can the United States, can the allies, A) keep the Taliban out? and B) keep Al Qaeda out?

RORY STEWART: We need to distinguish between Taliban and Al Qaeda. The answer is, of course, if we reduce the troop numbers, the Taliban presence, particularly in the areas where they have a lot of support would grow. And that is a risk. And that's a problem. And it's a very sad thing. Because the Taliban are a horrendous group. I mean, this is the problem that we're dealing with here. They have been vicious, their treatment of women is appalling. Many Afghans are horrified by them and don't want that, and anything that we can do to try to support more positive elements in Afghan society, we should do. But we cannot try to write a blank check. If we go for sort of all-or-nothing approach, I think we're going to end up abandoning the country in five years time, being less kind than we would the other way. So, distinguish Taliban from Al Qaeda. The Taliban, broadly speaking, are Afghans — farmers, subsistence farmers. As I say, most of those people can't find the United States on the map. Al Qaeda, traditionally, are much more educated, middle-class people, often from Egypt, from Saudi Arabia, North Africa. People who have masters degrees, who've lived in Hamburg, who learned to fly airplanes. We can't confuse those two. There's no point us getting into a fight with six million Afghans when our real target is probably a few hundred terrorists who have the capacity to harm the United States. Our real issue is not who wants to harm the United States — our real issue is who can. And how do we prevent those people who actually have that ability to do that.

LYNN SHERR: And with 10 or 20,000 troops, do you believe that the allies can get rid of Al Qaeda?

RORY STEWART: I'm not a military expert, but I would like to ask the military that question. I'd like to go to them and say, "Listen, you're not going to be able to have 600,000 troops. You're not going to be able to stay for 40 years. So, let's just turn this around. Let's say you've only got 10,000, you've only got 20,000, but we can maintain it for 20 or 30 years. What would you be able to do?" And my guess is, they'd come back and say, "Okay, with that, we can probably make sure that Osama Bin Laden never again sets up a major training camp in Afghanistan.

LYNN SHERR: Let me read to you something that former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was quoted as saying the other day: "…if you want another terrorist attack in the U.S., abandon Afghanistan."

RORY STEWART: I would say that Secretary Rice is exaggerating the situation. Pakistan is much more of a threat than Afghanistan to U.S. national security. Al Qaeda is in Pakistan, not in Afghanistan. Pakistan, of course, has a nuclear weapon. Pakistan's a much larger country. It could destabilize India. Afghanistan is, of course, a poor, fragile state. Like Somalia, like Yemen, like many other countries in the world. Of course, we should be doing things to try to stabilize it. But that is — and I want to disagree respectfully with her — not the place where the next attack is most likely to come from.

LYNN SHERR: Let's talk about the politics of this a little bit. You've met with Secretary Clinton?

RORY STEWART: Sure.

LYNN SHERR: You've met with Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke?

RORY STEWART: Sure.

LYNN SHERR: What do you tell them?

RORY STEWART: Again, my message is: focus on what we can do. We don't have a moral obligation to do what we can't. People can get very fixed by saying, "But surely you're not saying we ought to do nothing? Surely you're not saying we ought to allow the Taliban to do this or that?" And I just keep saying "ought" implies "can"-- you don't have a moral obligation to do what you can't do.

LYNN SHERR: How is your advice taken?

RORY STEWART: I think what I see at the moment is that people are polite, because they imagine maybe I have some experience with Afghanistan. But I'm one of a broad community of people — we have nine people working in my center at Harvard who've worked there for 20 or 30 years and the problem we all have is that if the Administration has for some reason already decided that they're going to increase troops, they're going to do a counterinsurgency campaign, it's very difficult for them to take on board people coming back and saying, "Look, actually, I don't think this is going to work. It's a great idea. I can see why you want to do it. But by trying to do the impossible, you may end up doing nothing. I'd like to present an alternative strategy, which is lighter, more intelligent, and may end up actually achieving something."

LYNN SHERR: And again, their reaction? They listen politely, you say?

RORY STEWART: They listen politely, but in the end, of course, basically the policy decision is made. What they would like is little advice on some small bit. I mean, the analogy that one of my colleagues used recently is this: it's as though they come to you and they say, "We're planning to drive our car off a cliff. Do we wear a seatbelt or not?" And we say, "Don't drive your car off the cliff." And they say, "No, no, no. That decision's already made. The question is should we wear our seatbelts?" And you say, "Why by all means wear a seatbelt." And they say, "Okay, we consulted with policy expert, Rory Stewart," et cetera.

LYNN SHERR: Does the West, do the NATO allies, do they simply not understand Afghanistan?

RORY STEWART: I think they understand the country, but they have a much more basic problem, which is that they believe failure is not an option. There's no alternative. And once you get into that mindset, everything follows from that.

LYNN SHERR: You also suggest that if you add more troops, that will create a backlash that will somehow ultimately cause us to abandon Afghanistan. How does that syllogism work?

RORY STEWART: That basically works because American voters, American taxpayers are not going to put up with this. You can already see public support going against this. You can see Congress and Senate increasingly skeptical. I think it's very irresponsible — if you care about Afghanistan — to increase troops much more. Because I can see us going from engagement to isolation, from troop increases to total withdrawal. The path the President has started us on, I would predict, would mean that in five, six years time, everybody will simply get fed up with Afghanistan and abandon it entirely. And--

LYNN SHERR: And, in fact, we're seeing that in the polls right now. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll-- 51 percent of adults say the war is not worth fighting.

RORY STEWART: Right. This is the very worse thing for a country like Afghanistan. This was the "Charlie Wilson War" effect — we go in there, we give it a billion dollars this year; we give it zero the next year. It's sort of boom to bust. What we actually should have done is capped our troop levels at quite a modest number — twenty, thirty-thousand — which is what we had in 2004, 2005, and tried to stay with the long, difficult game of protecting the United States and helping Afghans.

LYNN SHERR: Do you think that our leaders are just too far removed from the people to understand?

RORY STEWART: I definitely believe — I obviously teach at the moment in a school where a lot of young people are trying to go into these kinds of jobs — and I do believe that it is so important to spend a year or two living in a rural community, because the experience of that totally changes your view of what's possible. And that relates also to my work in Afghanistan over the last three and a half years, where I've been trying to run a nonprofit. Where the lessons day by day, both on what can be done, but almost as importantly, what cannot be done, are rammed home in minute by minute, in trying to do quite simple tasks.

LYNN SHERR: Your nonprofit has a truly wonderful name-- Turquoise Mountain. Describe what you're trying to do there.

RORY STEWART: So, we've gone in, we're restoring the center of the old city of Kabul. We're trying to provide incomes to Afghan women and men. We train people in woodwork, calligraphy, ceramics, jewelry. There are great gemstones in Afghanistan. We also work to simply restore that part of the city. We bring in water supply, sewerage. We have an elementary school. We have a clinic. We've restored about 65 buildings, got about 500 employees. It's probably the most satisfying thing I've done in my life.

LYNN SHERR: And how does it fit into the larger picture of what we are trying to do in Afghanistan?

RORY STEWART: Well, I think, firstly it teaches me that it's all about Afghan leadership. The best bits of our project work because the Afghans have asked for it. They came to me and they said, "We'd like an elementary school." And I said, "That's not in my strategic plan. I don't want to do an elementary school." And they said, "Well, you better build an elementary school." And it's turned out to be the best bit about it. 165 children turned up within about an hour, and it just makes me very happy seeing it.

On the other hand, it's also taught me the kind of scale of challenges you're facing. We arrived and the garbage, the trash was seven feet deep in the streets -- people were climbing over their courtyard walls, because they couldn't get through their doors. We had to clear 17,000 trucks of garbage. And this is only two years ago, 200 meters from the Presidential Palace in the center of Kabul. So, just to get a sense of what very -- there's no sewage system in the capital city, which has got nearly four million people. When you take that on board — the idea that you're somehow going to be able, overnight, to create legitimate, effective, stable state structures, and the writ of the government will run into every ruined village, and that the Taliban will be defeated once and for all, and we're just going to be able to go home in three years time, mission accomplished — is missing the point. This is like talking to somebody, maybe, I don't want to push this analogy too far, but somebody who works in another poor country, like working in sub-Saharan Africa or working in Nepal — it's a long, painful process where even delivering water supply turns out to take a lot of ingenuity and two years of negotiation.

LYNN SHERR: From all of your travels in Afghanistan, particularly the work with your charity, what do you think the Afghan people would like us to do?

RORY STEWART: I believe the Afghan people are divided. This is a very atomized country. There are certainly some people in the Taliban areas in the south and the east who are fighting with the Taliban, and who are very skeptical about foreign presence and perceive us as an occupation. In the center and the north of the country, there are many people who see the United States as their saviors, who see us as their best defense against the Taliban. There are many Afghan women, of course, who are very, very grateful for the opportunities they now have, and they're looking on us to protect them against, particularly, extremists and those who they think would suppress those rights.

But most of all, Afghans I think day to day are not actually obsessed with the Taliban. What they're obsessed with is normal security. By which they mean crime, looting, kidnapping, gangsterism. Most of my colleagues in Afghanistan would be scared to get in a car to go down to Kandahar, not because of the Taliban, but because of the criminal gangs. They're horrified by their police, which is perceived as very predatory, very corrupt. They're very skeptical about their government. They're impatient with how slowly the aid development has come. There's a lot of inflation. They find it difficult to pay their rent. So--

LYNN SHERR: -- they're just trying to get by, is what you're saying?

RORY STEWART: Right. And just to turn it around, I mean, one way of putting it, I don't know whether this is helpful-- but if you're an Afghan villager, you sit in your village, maybe in Southern Afghanistan, and one day the Taliban turn up. And you probably don't like them very much, because they're young, fanatical men, banging on about religion. But you might give them a cup of tea, they go away. Next day, maybe some Canadian soldiers turn up. Maybe they search your house. That makes you a little bit uncomfortable, but you give them a cup of tea, they go away. The next day, the Afghan police turn up. They may not be wearing uniforms, they're waving guns around, they may be rude to your daughter. You give them a cup of tea, they go away. Basically, you want these people, by and large, to go away. Most Afghan villagers are finding themselves trapped in a very, very unpleasant battle between forces that they barely understand. And the Afghan government needs to take the initiative. The Afghan government needs to convince these people that they have a long term future in working with the government in Kabul. It's not something that foreign troops can do.

LYNN SHERR: Rory, you're on your way to Afghanistan this week. Will you be trying to change anybody's mind, when you go over there?

RORY STEWART: I try all the time. And I think maybe one way of looking at it is to say, "Look, maybe I can't change your mind today. But let's at least sketch out an alternative strategy." What I would say is, a strategy which is more modest, a strategy which tries to think very, very clearly about what we're going to achieve over the long term and how to resource it. Unless you understand what a frankly low base that country's starting from — a country where 60 percent of civil servants don't have a high school education, where maybe 40 percent of the population can't read and write, where maybe a quarter of teachers are illiterate. Unless you get that, you don't get why you can't build that amazing thing that you're trying to build. And people keep coming back and saying, "Oh, all you're saying is we need to be realistic in our expectations." And my response is, "Yeah, but you don't quite get how realistic I mean. I don't just mean drop it from Jeffersonian democracy to vaguely stable state. I mean, even that vaguely stable state is a pretty distant dream. That you can't--

LYNN SHERR: You're saying these people need water– they need the simplest things before they can even think about the larger issue?

RORY STEWART: Right. Absolutely. And that you can invest 20-30 years in Afghanistan. And if you were lucky, you would make it look a bit like Pakistan. I mean, unless you understand that Pakistan is 20-30 years ahead of Afghanistan, you don't understand where we're starting from. And Pakistan is still not an ideal state. But the Pakistan army, the police, the civil service, the financial administration, the education are whole decades ahead of the Afghan. So, our whole model is broken from the beginning. Because you could put all this investment in, you would make Afghanistan look a bit more like Pakistan, but that wouldn't achieve whatever your national security objectives seem to be.

LYNN SHERR: So, to sum up, President Obama has his big decision, and your advice is?

RORY STEWART: My advice to President Obama is, you're going to have to increase troops now. It's too late for you, because you're going to be destroyed politically if you oppose your general on the ground on something like this. But let's think now six months, a year down the line. We're going to have to decrease again. We can't keep these numbers indefinitely. Cap it. Don't go up any further. That's it. If the military come back in six months and say, "By the way, we'd like another 50,000, another 60,000." No. Say, "This is all you're going to get. And furthermore, this is all you're going to get, and the numbers are going to decrease." Force the military to work out what they're going to do with less. This isn't an ideological point. It's just a fact. They're going to have less in two years, three years, five years than they have today. So, let's try to frame the policy that works out what we can do to protect the United States and help the Afghan people with fewer troops. And hopefully, that'll mean we can have a long-term sustainable relationship, instead of this boom and bust, in and out, that I fear is coming.

LYNN SHERR: Rory Stewart, thank you very much for your insights into Afghanistan.

RORY STEWART: Thank you very much.
Last edited by roxybeast on November 2nd, 2009, 3:20 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Arcadia
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Post by Arcadia » October 20th, 2009, 12:33 pm

some related note in our newspapers...

http://www.pagina12.com.ar/diario/elmun ... 10-18.html

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Post by roxybeast » October 25th, 2009, 1:48 am

Personally, I strongly agree with the advice in this column, which mirrors a column I recently submitted to the Washington Post ...
Everything You Have Been Told About Afghanistan Is Wrong: The Three Great Fallacies
by Johann Hari

Huffington Post, October 20, 2009

Is Barack Obama about to drive his Presidency into a bloody ditch strewn with corpses? The President is expected any day now to announce his decision about the future of the war in Afghanistan. He knows US and British troops have now been stationed in the hell-mouth of Helmand longer than the First and Second World Wars combined - yet the mutterings from the marble halls of Washington, DC, suggest he may order a troop escalation.

Obama has to decide now whether to side with the American people and the Afghan people calling for a rapid reduction in US force, or with a small military clique demanding a ramping-up of the conflict. The populations of both countries are in close agreement. The latest Washington Post poll shows that 51 per cent of Americans say the war is "not worth fighting" and that ending the foreign occupation will "reduce terrorism." Only 27 percent disagree. At the other end of the gun-barrel, 77 percent of Afghans in the latest BBC poll say the on-going US air strikes are "unacceptable," and the US troops should only remain if they are going to provide reconstruction assistance rather than bombs.

But there is another side: General Stanley McChrystal says that if he is given another 40,000 troops - on top of the current increase, which has pushed military levels above anything in the Bush years - he will "finally win" by "breaking the back" of the Taliban and al-Qa'ida.

How should Obama - and us, the watching world - figure out who is right? We have to start from a hard-headed acknowledgment. Every option from here entails a risk - to Afghan civilians, and to Americans and Europeans. It is not possible to achieve absolute safety. We can only try to figure out what would bring the least risk, and pursue it.
There is obviously a huge risk in sending an extra 40,000 machine-gun wielding troops into a country they don't understand to "clear" huge areas of insurgent fighters who look exactly like the civilian population, and establish "control" of places that have never been controlled by a central government at any point in their history.

Every military counter-insurgency strategy hits up against the probability that it will, in time, create more enemies than it kills. So you blow up a suspected Taliban site and kill two of their commanders - but you also kill 98 women and children, whose families are from that day determined to kill your men and drive them out of their country. Those aren't hypothetical numbers. They come from Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, who was General Petraeus' counter-insurgency advisor in Iraq. He says that US aerial attacks on the Afghan-Pakistan border have killed 14 al-Qa'ida leaders, at the expense of more than 700 civilian lives. He says: "That's a hit rate of 2 per cent on 98 per cent collateral. It's not moral." It explains the apparent paradox that broke the US in Vietnam: the more "bad guys" you kill, the more you have to kill.

There is an even bigger danger than this. General Petraeus's strategy is to drive the Taliban out of Afghanistan. When he succeeds, they run to Pakistan - where the nuclear bombs are.

To justify these risks, the proponents of the escalation need highly persuasive arguments to show how their strategy slashed other risks so dramatically that it outweighed these dangers. It's not inconceivable - but I found that, in fact, the case they give for escalating the war, or for continuing the occupation, is based on three premises that turn to Afghan dust on inspection.

Argument One: We need to deprive al-Qa'ida of military bases in Afghanistan, or they will use them to plot attacks against us, and we will face 9/11 redux.

In fact, virtually all the jihadi attacks against Western countries have been planned in those Western countries themselves, and required extremely limited technological capabilities or training. The 9/11 atrocities were planned in Hamburg and Florida by 19 Saudis who only needed to know how to use box-cutters and to crash a plane. The 7/7 suicide-murders were planned in Yorkshire by young British men who learned how to make bombs off the Internet. Only last week, a jihadi was arrested for plotting to blow up a skyscraper in that notorious jihadi base, Dallas, Texas. And on, and on.

In reality, there are almost no al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's not my view: it's that of General Jim Jones, the US National Security Advisor. He said recently there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. That's worth repeating: there are 100 al-Qa'ida fighters in Afghanistan. Nor is that a sign that the war is working. The Taliban or warlords friendly to them already control 40 per cent of Afghanistan now, today. They can build all the "training camps" they want there - but they have only found a hundred fundamentalist thugs to staff them.

Even if - and this is highly unlikely - you could plug every hole in the Afghan state's authority and therefore make it possible to shut down every camp, there are a dozen other failed states they can scuttle off to the next day and pitch some more tents. Again, that's not my view. Leon Panetta, head of the CIA, says: "As we disrupt [al-Qa'ida], they will seek other safe havens. Somalia and Yemen are potential al-Qa'ida bases in the future." The US can't occupy every failed state in the world for decades - so why desperately try to plug one hole in a bath full of leaks, when the water will only seep out anyway?

There are plenty of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan - but they are a different matter to al-Qa'ida. The latest leaked US intelligence reports say, according to the Boston Globe, that 90 per cent of them are "a tribal, localised insurgency" who "see themselves as opposing the US because it is an occupying power." They have "no goals" beyond Afghanistan's borders.

Argument Two: By staying, we are significantly improving Afghan human rights, especially for women.

This, for me, is the meatiest argument - and the most depressing. The Taliban are indeed one of the vilest forces in the world, imprisoning women in their homes and torturing them for the "crimes" of showing their faces, expressing their sexuality, or being raped. They keep trying to murder my friend Malalai Joya for the "crime" of being elected to parliament on a platform of treating women like human beings not cattle.

But as she told me last month: "Your governments have replaced the fundamentalist rule of the Taliban with another fundamentalist regime of warlords." Outside Kabul, vicious Taliban who enforce sharia law have merely been replaced by vicious warlords who enforce sharia law. "The situation now is as catastrophic as it was under the Taliban for women," she said. Any Afghan president - Karzai, or his opponents - will only ever in practice be the mayor of Kabul. Beyond is a sea of warlordism, as evil to women as Mullah Omar. That is not a difference worth fighting and dying for.

Argument Three: If we withdraw, it will be a great victory for al-Qa'ida. Re-energised, they will surge out across the world.

In fact, in November 2004, Osama bin Laden bragged to his followers: "All that we have to do is to send two mujahedeen [jihadi fighters] to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written "al-Qa'ida" in order to make generals race there, and we cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses - without their achieving anything of note!" These wars will, he said, boost al-Qa'ida recruitment across the world, and in time "bankrupt America." They walked right into his trap.

Yes, there is real risk in going - but it is dwarfed by the risk of staying. A bloody escalation in the war is more likely to fuel jihadism than thwart it. If Obama is serious about undermining this vile fanatical movement, it would be much wiser to take the hundreds of billions he is currently squandering on chasing after a hundred fighters in the Afghan mountains and redeploy it. Spend it instead on beefing up policing and intelligence, and on building a network of schools across Pakistan and other flash-points in the Muslim world, so parents there have an alternative to the fanatical madrassahs that churn out bin Laden-fodder. The American people will be far safer if the world sees them building schools for Muslim kids instead of dropping bombs on them.

He can explain - with his tongue dipped in amazing eloquence - that trying to defeat al-Qa'ida with hundreds of thousands of occupying troops and Predator jets is like trying to treat cancer with a blowtorch. Now, that really would deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/johann-ha ... 27914.html

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Post by roxybeast » October 26th, 2009, 3:26 pm

Why Increased U.S. Sanctions on Iran Don't Work
Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN)

Huffington Post, October 26, 2009

Fifteen years of sanctions on Iran have taught us one important lesson: They have not produced the intended results. More sanctions are unlikely to produce results now. In fact, additional sanctions, while satisfying some, are more likely to produce results that we do not intend. If we impose increased sanctions, we will likely strengthen President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's hand and risk snuffing out the emerging democracy movement in Iran.

No doubt about it: The Iranian government armed with nuclear weapons is objectionable. And the U.S. must stand firmly on key issues like human rights.

But, Congress needs to give President Barack Obama's diplomatic efforts a chance before increasing sanctions. So far, President Obama's disciplined diplomacy is working. There is finally some progress in dealing with Iran's nuclear aspirations. President Obama's diplomacy has yielded an agreement that increases inspections and verification, and reduces Iran's stockpiles of enriched uranium. This is a good step.
If Congress insists on further sanctions on Iran, it could derail President Obama's diplomatic efforts at this delicate time. Iranian Americans, like Trita Parsi of the National Iranian American Council, agree:

The progress we have seen is partly due to Obama's ability to unite the Security Council. But if Congress moves forward with sanctions that target our allies, the unity will collapse. Where Obama has been a uniter, Congress will become a divider.

Increasing sanctions enables the Iranian president the opportunity to change the subject -- from his failed policies to the nationalistic pride symbolized by nuclear energy. Right now the Iranian people are focused on accountability for abuses committed after an election that was deeply flawed. What the world witnessed this summer was the birth of a civil rights movement in Iran. We need to listen to, help and not hinder the Iranian people at this critical moment.

Iranian leaders like Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi and Akbar Ganji tell us that sanctions will only hurt the people of Iran. Opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi has denounced sanctions, saying that anyone who supports his "Green" movement should also oppose additional sanctions. According to Mousavi, "Sanctions would not actually act against the government -- rather, they would only inflict statesmen. We are opposed to any types of sanctions against our nation. This is what living the Green Path means."

Researchers agree that increased sanctions on Iran will not serve U.S. interests. A recent report by the RAND Corporation documented a growing corollary between the power of Iran's Revolutionary Guard, a branch of the military associated with much of Iran's corruption -- and sanctions. With inflation in Iran at over 20 percent and with manufacturing in serious decline, sanctions will only lead to higher prices and greater black-market trade, which is already controlled by the Revolutionary Guard.

Michael Axworthy, a lecturer in Middle Eastern and Iranian history at the University of Exeter in England, thinks that increased U.S. sanctions on Iran are exactly what the Revolutionary Guard wants. He said, "(The Revolutionary Guard) profit by a situation in which there are sanctions and shortages and in which the people can't get what they want, and they are able to control a fairly small stream of what the people want at an inflated price. I don't think the Revolutionary Guard is very likely to put pressure on the Iranian regime to open politically in order to open economically."

Iran has been able to ward off some consequences of sanctions by boosting trade with Russia, China and India. The more we take trade opportunities away from American businesses the more Russian and Chinese businesses step into the vacuum.

Increased sanctions have not worked in Iran. When they do "work," they likely do so at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable -- as they did in Iraq. Researcher Richard Garfield estimated "a minimum of 100,000 and a more likely estimate of 227,000 excess deaths among young Iraqi children from August 1991 through March 1998" from all causes including sanctions.

Iran's political leaders use polarizing rhetoric to demonize the United States and allies. But they are also shrewd. Increased sanctions at this time, while actually harming their own people, rally and strengthen the nation's resolve to further its nuclear ambitions in the name of self defense. If we fall prey to their trap, we run the risk of losing both a nuclear-free, and a democratic, Iran.

The change we seek in Iran can only be brought about through a disciplined dialogue and determined diplomacy, as President Obama's talks are showing.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-keith ... 33894.html

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Post by roxybeast » October 27th, 2009, 9:47 am

Matthew Hoh Resigns: State Department Official Quits Over Afghan War
by Karen Deyoung

Huffington Post, October 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — A former Marine who fought in Iraq, joined the State Department after leaving the military and was a diplomat in a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan has become the first U.S. official to resign in protest of the Afghan war, the Washington Post reported early Tuesday.
Matthew Hoh said he believes the war is simply fueling the insurgency.

"I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan," Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, dated Sept. 10 but published early Tuesday. "I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end."

Richard Holbrooke, the administration's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Post he disagreed that the war "wasn't worth the fight," but did agree with much of Hoh's analysis.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/2 ... 34840.html
Maybe Matthew should have read my column and then he wouldn't be wondering why and to what end - he'd know, it's Iran.

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Post by roxybeast » October 27th, 2009, 11:41 am

Evaluating Obama's Afghan Policy
by Sam Black

Huffington Post, October 26, 2009

In the last few weeks, most of the reporting on the president's updated plan for Afghanistan has often been, in my view, simplistic (the number of new troops) or silly (how often does Obama speak to McChrystal?).

The first of these questions, while certainly relevant, is far from the only or even the most important factor. The second question is largely irrelevant. As long as the president gets good advice, including accurate assessments of on-the-ground conditions, it doesn't matter who provides it.

Unfortunately, some vital questions and distinctions have tended to be overlooked. In order to appropriately judge whatever updated Afghanistan plan emerges, omitted questions must be taken into account. Here are a few of them:

Goals vs. Strategy vs. Tactics

Goals define what we want to have happen in Afghanistan. Tactics are the methods employed by military forces (and, increasingly, their civilian counterparts) on a day-to-day basis. Strategy sequences and prioritizes tactical engagements so that we might attain our goals. The number of additional troops we deploy is contingent on goals and a strategy - it's not step one. That being said, goals and strategy have to be chosen with resource limitations in mind, or else they will fail.

It seems that there is general agreement on what our goals are for Afghanistan. It would be best if Afghanistan were not used to plan and resource attacks against us. Similarly, we have an interest in minimizing the external stresses - from refugees or terrorists - placed on Pakistan from its western neighbor.

The strategy to achieve these goals has been conflated with the tactics employed on the ground. Counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are neat labels, but they tend to fall through the cracks between strategy and tactics. Both might be usefully employed to achieve our goals in different areas. For example, we might choose to employ counterinsurgency tactics in densely populated areas and reinforce these military guidelines with concentrated development aid and civilian assistance. Simultaneously, we might use limited raids and airstrikes - counterterrorism tactics - to limit the presence of Al Qaeda and its allies in areas outside Afghan government control.

The Key Variables

There are a number of variables which have strong effects on the likely effectiveness of various strategies. One important variable is the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Afghan government. If the government is hopelessly corrupt, fraudulently-elected, and generally wretched, counterinsurgency tactics designed to bolster its legitimacy are not likely to succeed without massive outside intervention. If, on the other hand, the upcoming runoff election is less fraudulent, the most corrupt officials are publicly removed, and government performance begins to improve, counterinsurgency could be more appropriate.

The second key variable is the character of the relationship between Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. Smart people have assessed it in very different ways: Peter Bergen thinks it's been growing closer while Stephen Walt points out some reasons why the Afghan Taliban might not accept the presence of Al Qaeda a second time. The amazing story of David Rohde's capture, detention, and escape from a particularly nasty Taliban faction is informative but inconclusive: the Taliban foot soldiers probably hate America enough to accept the presence of Al Qaeda, but take orders from commanders whose broader interests might rule out such a relationship. Few outside analysts (myself included) are knowledgeable enough to assess this relationship with any certainty.

The Distractions

Some assertions are essentially distractions that should be ignored. One is that we should be focusing more on poppy farming and smuggling. Yes, opium smuggling is bad. Yes, the production, trafficking, consumption of heroin in Afghanistan and elsewhere is harmful. But, based on recent press reports, drugs are not the main source of funding of the Afghan insurgency. Drug eradication efforts alienates the population without affecting output, which reached an all-time high (no pun intended) in 2007 and declined only slightly from that high in 2008. Even if we could control all of Afghanistan's borders, which we can't, stemming the infiltration routes of militants, not drug smugglers, would be the focus. Poppy production is likely to fall where counterinsurgency efforts are successful (because of increased security, improved infrastructure, and more effective governance - keys to COIN success), and counterterrorist tactics will likely be focused on militants, not traffickers. The drugs argument is largely a distraction.

The other assertion, one that is particularly infuriating, is about whether insurgents will be "emboldened" if we take certain actions. If they are fighting us, is their baseline level of boldness not already pretty high? The argument that the motivations of your average rank-and-file religious fanatic are strongly dependent on U.S. policy is ludicrous. The idea that a deliberative policy process emboldens insurgents is similarly bizarre (again, see the Rohde tales for a glimpse into the mindset of a Taliban foot soldier). NATO and U.S. forces are continuing to fight as changes are debated - a policy review does not turn Afghanistan into the Islamic extremist version of Spring Break Cancun. And, as Walt points out, clarifying that U.S. support is not unconditional can have positive effects.

The Point

This is not a complete list of important factors. But I hope (though do not by any means expect) that items on it, and others, will be taken into account when the public judges the president's Afghanistan plan. Troop numbers are important, but are only one element of a holistic strategy. And a holistic strategy, not some arbitrary number of reinforcements, gives the best chance of success in Afghanistan.

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-black ... 34705.html

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Post by roxybeast » November 1st, 2009, 5:33 pm

<center>AFGHANISTAN: EXAMINING THE COST OF WAR</center>
The best part of Bill Moyers' show on PBS this last Friday was the part that you didn't see on the air. The web exclusive interview with Glenn Greewald, recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media Izzy Award, on what the US role should be in Afghanistan blended with an incredible insight into the world's view of U.S. war policy. Must watch!

THIS IS A MUST WATCH INTERVIEW WITH GLENN GREENWALD
BY BILL MOYERS ON AFGHANISTAN & AN EXAMINATION OF US WAR POLICY ... WATCH VIDEO:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/blog/ ... nwald.html

TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW:
October 30, 2009

BILL MOYERS: Welcome to The Journal. I'm Bill Moyers and it's time now for a web exclusive conversation with Glenn Greenwald, whose reputation for sharp analysis and insight into current affairs keeps spreading across the web. You may have read best-selling books, HOW WOULD A PATRIOT ACT? and A TRAGIC LEGACY. Or his most recent, GREAT AMERICAN HYPOCRITES.

His articles have appeared in a variety of publications, both liberal and conservative And Earlier this year, Glenn Greenwald received the first annual "Izzy Award," named for I.F. Stone, from the Park Center for Independent Media, which saluted his "path-breaking journalistic courage and persistence in confronting conventional wisdom, official deception, and controversial issues." You'll find his blog on SALON.COM. It's good to see you again.

GLENN GREENWALD: Great to see you, too.

BILL MOYERS: The story this week I want to ask you about: it turns out that the brother of the Afghanistan president has been receiving regular payments from the C.I.A. for as many as seven or eight years now. What does that tell you about our mission in Afghanistan?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, several things. First of all, I think it underscores that the propaganda that governments typically generate about wars very rarely reflect reality. One of the prime arguments as to why we ought to remain in Afghanistan is to create a kind of system of government there that will enable us to stay secure, which means eradicating the influence of drug lords, first and foremost, that spread pervasive corruption in that country.

And yet, here we are, while insisting that that's one of our goals in Afghanistan, at the same time, keeping on our payroll one of the most corrupt of drug lords in Afghanistan. Not just somebody who is engaged in the drug trade, but also somebody who played a major role in the overwhelming fraud that marred the democratic election that we claim is so central to our role there.

I think the other aspect is that, what it illustrates is that it is very difficult for the United States, even with the best of intentions, even if our intentions were really what we say they are, to actually manage and construct other countries, other cultures, other societies. The only way that there's any chance that it can be done is if we make common cause with some truly awful people, like the president's brother.

And once we make common cause with awful people, we're doing exactly the reverse of that which everybody agrees we need to do to stay safe, which is reduce anti-American sentiment. If we're propping up drug lords in Afghanistan, we're obviously going to be generating hostility, more hostility towards us.

BILL MOYERS: Is it conceivable, in your mind, that the president of Afghanistan would not know that his brother was on the payroll of the C.I.A.?

GLENN GREENWALD: It's absolutely inconceivable, I think. And one reason I think that that's the case is because — although there's no direct evidence that President Karzai himself, for example, is involved directly in the drug trade — the relationship that he has with his brother is extremely close. And the influence that his brother has is due, in large part, to President Karzai's status and position.

And so, we've been working hand in hand with Karzai from the beginning. We've seen him as our man in Kabul, as central to everything that we're doing. And so, the idea that somehow he's been kept in the dark, both by his brother and his handlers in the United States about this relationship is highly unrealistic.

BILL MOYERS: Of course, some people will say, "This is not a neat and clean world, Greenwald, Moyers. I mean, let's score one for the C.I.A. for getting us an inside ear, right at the brother's desk."

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the whole reason, ostensibly, that we are so concerned with the drug trade in Afghanistan is because according to the government, it's the drug trade that funds the Taliban and the insurgency against the United States. Apparently, or allegedly, what's happening is that the drug trade generates money for drug lords who then give money to the Taliban.

So, if we are funding drug lords, like the President's brother, what we're doing, by our own reasoning, is we're essentially indirectly funding the Taliban. Funding the insurgency against which we are now fighting. We're basically funding our enemies. And the other aspect of it that I would add is that it may be true that you cannot avoid ending up in bed with some truly heinous and corrupt and violent people when you try to manage and control the internal affairs of other countries.

BILL MOYERS: Nothing--

GLENN GREENWALD: That, I would suggest, is a reason not to do that.

BILL MOYERS: Yeah, but nothing new about that. Whether it's the Shah of Iran and his enforcers, or Diem in South Vietnam — who we ultimately, the United States Government ultimately had to get rid of — or any one of them. You spend a lot of time in Latin America, you know that we don't run around with the nicest guys in town.

GLENN GREENWALD: But isn't that the issue? Because what happened in the wake of September 11th was when we were attacked so traumatically and so violently was it spawned the cliché question of why do they hate us? And many Americans wandered around sort of dazed and confused and confounded that there were people in the Muslim world who hated us so much they were willing to sacrifice their own lives in order to inflict some minimal damage on the United States. Minimal, relative to the damage that's inflicted on the world.

And I think it's become quite apparent that the answer to that is because we have been involving ourselves in the Muslim world to their detriment in so many ways. I mean, you just mentioned the overthrow of the Iranian Government in 1953, engineered by the C.I.A., which was then followed by decades of propping up one of the most brutal tyrants the Muslim world has ever known, which is the Shah of Iran.

And, of course, we fund and we fuel the Israelis to do all kinds of mischief in the Muslim world, including bombing lots of countries or bombing lots of countries ourselves. So, if we're going to continue to engage ourselves in other countries' businesses this way and end up doing the sorts of things that you just described we've been doing for decades, it's not just probable, but inevitable that there will be lots of people who are adversely affected by what we're doing in their world, who will want to bring similar violence and similar destruction to our world. And the question is, do we really want to continue to invite that?

BILL MOYERS: Were you surprised when you read that story about the brother?

GLENN GREENWALD: No, I was completely unsurprised. I mean, one of the interesting things was if you look, for example, at Iraq and what's happening in Iraq, the mythology that's being disseminated is that the surge was a great success. And we were able to — through added troops and a brilliant counterinsurgency strategy — finally bring peace and security to that country, after failing for several years to do so.

The reality, though, is that there was a group of people in Iraq, the Sunnis, who for years were called terrorists by the United States government and by the Bush administration for committing the crime of attacking us after we invaded their country. And what we essentially ended up doing was bribing them into passivity. We just paid them enough money--

BILL MOYERS: "The Awakening" they called it.

GLENN GREENWALD: Exactly. "The Awakening" was accomplished by big briefcases full of cash. And so, we ended up paying the very people who for years were called the terrorists, that we needed to stay in order to fight. So, the idea that we're paying off people who we claim are the enemy, in order to do the things we want, is one of the least surprising things one can imagine. War is a very dirty business. And you can look at it and say, "Well, that means that you just have to accept it." Or you can look at it and say, "That's a good reason not to fight them."

BILL MOYERS: Better to buy them than bomb them, though, right? And in fact, I hear — read — just this week that we're thinking about-- we're considering, seriously, buying off the Taliban. You know, just follow the money, and you'll see the Taliban coming over to our side, as happened in Iraq.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And I mean, of course, but one of the problems that happens is that in order to justify war, you need to demonize a large group of people, because that's what ends up justifying the war. And so, how now, after eight years of telling the American people that the Taliban are terrorist enablers, and themselves terrorists — who we need to risk enormous amounts of American lives in order to defeat, that we need to spend billions and billions of dollars in order to vanquish.

Now, suddenly the solution is that we're going to pay them off and make them our partners. And bring them into the fold in order to govern Afghanistan. Of course, that's vastly preferable to continuing to occupy their country forever, bankrupting ourselves in the process, killing all sorts of civilians there and ourselves. But the problem politically is how, after propagandizing the population for eight years about the evil Taliban, do you now suddenly turn around and as your solution to leaving the country decide that you're going to negotiate with them and accommodate them? And I think that's the problem that the political establishment faces.

BILL MOYERS: As you know, the President, our President is about to announce his decisions on Afghanistan and all the reporting is to expect that he will give General McChrystal some, if not all, of the 44,000 new troops that he wants. The astonishing thing to me is there's been-- the only debate about this for all practical purposes has been among beltway elites. Where is the public on this?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think that's one of the most crucial questions. Of course, if you poll Americans on Afghanistan, you find the type of divisions that became apparent with Iraq. Where lots and lots of people were really questioning what it is that we're doing there and why we need to-- our treasury and risk American lives in order to occupy the country. There's clearly that question being asked among Americans.

The endless efforts on our part to interfere in and control and occupy other countries is something that Americans don't accept nearly as much as they did say, when 9/11 was much closer. The problem, however, is that because we don't have a draft, because we have an all-volunteer military, only a tiny sliver of the population actually bears the burden of war. For everybody else it's actually just an abstract game that can be played.

And on top of that, you know, George Orwell talked about how the modern airplane in warfare was going to be one of the best things that could ever happen, because now people who sent their armies off to war and hid in the capitals would no longer be able to hide, because modern warfare would be fought by airplanes, which means their cities would be bombed as well, and that would reduce the incentive to war.

But we only attack countries that can't actually inflict that kind of a damage on us. And so, I think that's the reason. People can question intellectually why a war is being fought. They can even offer justification, but they're not paying any price for it. They're not bearing any burden for it. And so, they don't really care that it continues, as long as the effects are kept away from them.

BILL MOYERS: You quoted from Adam Smith, the great economist, the Scottish economist, in one of your recent columns. I was struck with it and wrote it down. Smith said, "In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them, scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies..."

Now, right after you'd written that column, I ran into some people in Washington, who were talking about this. And one of them asked me, "Well, you had Greenwald on your show, doesn't he live on Capital Hill?" And I smile, because I know you don't live on Capital Hill or in the capital. And yet you write as if you are there. I mean, as if you had been listening to yesterday's cocktail parties or reading the documents that I.F. Stone used to read. How do you do that? How do you get inside the elites of the beltway, the way that you do?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, I think a couple of things, one is technology. The technology of the internet, for example, enables constant interaction and examination of what's taking place in the beltway without being physically present there. It's amazing the kind of access that you can actually obtain through that technology. Virtually all the communications that the political and media elite have is now available online. The documents that they produce, the policies that they espouse, the debates that they engage in, the type of thinking that controls and shapes what it is they do can be examined much more effectively, including from afar, than ever before. And the other aspect of it that I would add is that if you live inside Washington, as is true for any culture-- the culture starts shaping your own thinking. It starts infecting the way it is that you think. Everybody you speak to is infected by it. Everybody that you know is a part of it. And it's very difficult to step back and to look at it and examine it when you're too enmeshed in it.

On top of that, people who live in the beltway are invested in the people who are there. They are their friends, those are their colleagues. The people on whom they rely for their next job. And for their support. And so, if you're actually removed from it. If you stay far away from it and outside of it, I think you can actually understand it better than if you're enmeshed in it and sort of subsumed by it. And the less invested you are in that culture, I think, the freer you are to think about it and critique it and understand it, without any fear of repercussions.

BILL MOYERS: Are you ever surprised by whom you see or what you see on the Sunday morning talk shows inside the beltway?

GLENN GREENWALD: The pattern of who goes on those shows is so constricted and so formulaic that you can almost predict who's going to be on, based on the news events, without any fail. There is an effort underway, because they've been pressured so much to start including fresher voices, different voices--

BILL MOYERS: Rachel Maddow has been showing up from time to time, for example, on MEET THE PRESS.

GLENN GREENWALD: Right. And I think one of the reasons for that is because MEET THE PRESS is an NBC program. And Rachel Maddow is an MSNBC personality. And there's some pressure to promote her for that reason. But it's still an important and different kind of voice to be included. And just this weekend, on MEET THE PRESS — Jane Mayer the superb journalist who did so much excellent work on the Bush torture regime was on MEET THE PRESS, as well. And I was noticing that she seems almost like an animal from outer space who couldn't quite fit into the mores and conventions of--

BILL MOYERS: It is weird.

GLENN GREENWALD: --of the conversation. You really notice it when there's a real journalist or a different voice that's part of the conversation. And we talked about this before. But there's a very concrete set of beliefs. And a concrete way of conducting political debates that these shows are structured around. And so, anybody who speaks about things or thinks about things outside of those conventions has a very difficult time participating in the discussion. It's almost as though they're speaking a different language. And these shows are therefore incentivized to only have on people who are already embracing the orthodoxies on which the show is-- in which the show is grounded.

BILL MOYERS: You recently took on one of the biggest players in Washington, THE WASHINGTON POST -- the editorial team at THE WASHINGTON POST -- for demanding that Obama's health care plan not be paid for with borrowed money. While, as you said, at the same time, supporting escalating the war in Afghanistan without specifying how it should be paid for. What struck you about that?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think that was actually one of the most illustrative and meaningful editorials, because it reflects how Washington thinks. There really is this sense that it would be a luxury, something nice to do, if we could do it, to provide American citizens, the millions and millions of Americans without it with health care coverage. That would be a nice thing to do, but it's not really urgent. It's not really necessary. And so, we can't do it until we can afford it. Until we don't have to borrow money in order to do it.

That's what this editorial explicitly argued. By contrast, said the Washington Post editors, the war in Afghanistan is an absolute urgent necessity. There's no choice to it. It's something that we have to do. Apparently our country will implode if we don't continue to control and occupy that country.

And so, therefore, it doesn't matter whether we're paying for our foreign adventures generally in our occupation of Afghanistan specifically with that, because there there's no choice. And to me, it just illustrates how warped and backwards the priorities are of the ruling class. Because what we're actually allegedly doing in Afghanistan, if you look at counterinsurgency doctrine -- the idea of counterinsurgency doctrine is that we're going to not only protect the population of these foreign countries. But we're going to nation-build. We're going to provide all sorts of services to them. Schools and roads and infrastructure and health care.

BILL MOYERS: Acknowledging that that will take a very long time.

GLENN GREENWALD: Decades. And extraordinary amounts of money. And so, what people like the Washington Post editors and really the political elite, generally, are saying is that it's more important for us to go into debt to provide services to other nations, so that we can control them, than it is to provide services to our own citizens who lack those same services.

And I think the reason for that is clear: That because the people who are saying that — the people at THE WASHINGTON POST editorial board — already have access to those services. They already have health care coverage. And so, to them it's just a purely abstract issue. It's a purely abstract question whether Americans who don't have health care coverage can have it. But I think that they're reflecting what the priorities are. That it doesn't matter what our foreign adventures and foreign domination costs, we do it no matter what. But everyone inside the United States, ordinary Americans, have to wait, and can't get basic services from the government, as long as we have to go into debt in order to pay for it.

BILL MOYERS: The editorial did say that wars come to an end, entitlements never do. Right? It did say that.

GLENN GREENWALD: It did. It made that claim. But if you-- first of all, if you look at the way in which we have been fighting wars since the end of World War II, it's very hard to say that wars come to an end. It may be true that individual specific wars come to an end. But the idea of the United States fighting wars is something that seems to exist no matter what. We constantly find new enemies, we constantly find reasons to fight war. We're basically a nation perpetually at war.

I mean, the '90s were supposedly the time of peace. The time that we went into a peace posture. Enjoyed a peace dividend after the fall of the Soviet Union. Yet, even throughout the '90s, we continued to engage in military actions inside other countries, far more than any other country. In fact, all the other countries in the world combined. And certainly in this last decade, we've been nothing but an occupier and a bomber and an invader of foreign countries with no end in sight.

I mean, if you listen to government officials, they don't talk about the war ending any time soon. They call it the long war in government documents. And they talk about it lasting decades, at least. So, I think the idea that, "Oh, the war, the end of the war is around the corner and therefore it can be distinguished from entitlements" is a fantasy.

BILL MOYERS: Andrew J. Bacevich — whom you know and have quoted; was at this table — wrote the book, THE LIMITS OF POWER, and has recently said, and reiterated the fact, that war is a permanent condition in American society today. Not only because there might be ready, steady fighting, but because of the accumulated cost. And all the money that's being spent on preparing for the next episode. And he said that war has become a permanent condition of America. Do you agree with that?

GLENN GREENWALD: I absolutely agree with that. And I think it's really the central political fact that Americans need to reexamine. And the reason for that is because it's not just that wars cost an enormous amount of money and drain our resources. I mean, they do. I mean, the wars that we fight are being paid for by money that we borrow from China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and a variety of other countries.

It's not just that in enormous numbers of people are killed — both our own citizens and the citizens of the country that we attack. That's also true. But if you look at countries throughout history that can be described — as ours should be described — as permanent war-fighting states, then you see that the character of the country changes in all sorts of radical and fundamental ways.

When you're fighting a war, it means that the government has claims to far more power than it does when wars aren't being fought. The executive branch has all kinds of claims to unfettered and unchecked power. There are secrecy justifications that are made constantly and are accepted in the name of war that allow the government to exist in a very opaque fashion.

So, beyond all the moral cost and the financial cost and the human cost of endless war — which are, by themselves, sufficient to make this endless war posture something that's horrible — it changes the nature of what kind of country we are. And I think more than anything that's the debate that's missing. What is it doing to the United States to say that we're going to devote as our primary activity our resources to being a warrior state. A state that fights wars permanently?

BILL MOYERS: But the Washington Post editorial went on to say that our national security is involved in what is happening in Afghanistan. It was a base for the attacks of 9/11. It is right there in a very sensitive area of the world where there are a lot of potential if not immediate adversaries and enemies of the United States. And that you have to clean the swamp, so to speak, of those potential threats to America before you can have a healthy society with everybody enjoying universal health care.

And that's the point at which, if you read their website, so many other denizens of Washington responded. Said, "Yes, we have to keep in mind, this is an issue of national security. Not just of national quality of life."

GLENN GREENWALD: Here's what amazes me about that point, which I think is the conventional wisdom in Washington culture. In 2004, the Pentagon commissioned a study that was-- Donald Rumsfeld asked, "Are the policies that we're pursuing — namely, the war in Afghanistan, the war in Iraq — helping the problem of terrorism or worsening the problem of terrorism?"

And what this study concluded — and it was a Pentagon study — was that the crucial threat, the central threat to American national security comes in the form of anti-American sentiment. The only reason why people are going to strap on bombs to their waists or give their lives up to drive airplanes, to steer airplanes into our buildings is because they're so consumed with hatred towards the United States that they're willing to give up their own lives just to inflict some minor tragedy, some minor harm on the empire.

That's the central national security threat. And this study concluded what ought to have been obvious, which is that the more we invade and occupy other countries in the Muslim world, the more we kill Muslim civilians, the more imagery that we create of prisons being created, where we put Muslims without any charges of any kind, the more hatred there is towards the United States, and therefore the greater the terrorist threat is.

And so, you know, to me, what I wrote about recently is I think the central problem is a lack of empathy. And my biggest wish is that if Americans-- that every American in sort of a national collective exercise would spend just ten minutes thinking about the following question, which is:

Suppose there was a Muslim country that invaded the United States with 150,000 troops, and proceeded to occupy our country for the next eight years: dropped bombs on wedding parties, slaughtered men, women, and children who were innocent. Created prisons in our country, where they arrested American citizens and put us for years without charges. Created an overseas island prison where they shipped some of us to without any recourse whatsoever. And at the same time, were threatening to do that to several other Western countries. How much rage and anger and a desire for vengeance and violence would we feel towards that country that was doing that to us?

I mean, just look at what the singular one-day attack of 9/11, the kind of anger and rage it unleashed. And I think if Americans were to think about how we would react towards other countries, and what we would want to do to them, if they were doing to us what we are now doing to them, I think a lot of light would be shined on what it is that we're really achieving in terms of our national security.

BILL MOYERS: No one wrote earlier or more powerfully about the claims, the extra legal claims that the Bush and Cheney Administration made after 9/11. Doing many of the things you just described, because they invoked national security and the fact that to fight terrorism you often have to use the terrorists own tactics.

To what extent has President Obama begun to deconstruct that extra-legal apparatus, the excessive secrecy, the use of extra-constitutional means of interrogation? To what extent is he undoing the infrastructure of excessive government claims that you wrote about during those last eight years?

GLENN GREENWALD: Very little. And not only is it the case that he is deconstructing that framework in only symbolic and inconsequential ways, but he's doing the reverse. Which is he is finding new and often more effective ways to embrace many of those same instruments, and to institutionalize them further. It's not the case that Obama is the equivalent of Bush and Cheney, in this regard--

BILL MOYERS: Like you, he was trained as a constitutional lawyer. You were too, right?

GLENN GREENWALD: Absolutely.

BILL MOYERS: And he prides himself and often refers to the fact. "I'm a con-- I studied the constitution. I'm a constitutional lawyer." So, it can't be a matter of personal predilection, can it be?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, it means, obviously the architects of the Bush/Cheney lawlessness were themselves very smart lawyers. I mean, David Addington and John Yoo, were all smart. I mean, they're all trained as lawyers. They understand the Constitution. And they use that knowledge and that intelligence to subvert the Constitution. Rather than to uphold it, as they swore to do.

So, the mere fact that somebody is a constitutional scholar and has knowledge of the Constitution doesn't mean that they are any more inclined to abide by it. In fact, they may understand better how to circumvent it. And I think, you know, the theory of political science for centuries has long when that power corrupts. And so, somebody gets into office as President and sees all these shining jewels of executive power. And either because they're convinced that they're good and won't abuse them, or will put them to good ends, or because they think there's political cost to reducing them — there's an obvious strong incentive to preserve them and expand them rather than to reduce and discard them. And I think you see Obama doing that on many, many fronts.

BILL MOYERS: For example?

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, one of the principle controversies of the Bush Administration, one of the defining aspects of their radicalism, was the idea that we can take human beings who we don't capture on a battlefield, who we simply abduct and pick up, who we suspect of engaging in terrorism and put them into cages for years or decades without having to charge them with any crime.

That — simply based on executive authority — the ability to point to someone and say, "This is a terrorist," then justifies the elimination of all due process and putting them into prison forever. Obama, several months ago, said that he not only believes in that power, but wanted Congress to enact a statute that would permanently enshrine this theory of law into Presidential power.

He gave up on that because there was going to be difficulty in terms of getting the bill that he wanted passed through the Congress. So, instead what he did was he embraced the Bush/Cheney justification as to why the President can do that, which is that the Congress implicitly authorized it.

And so, we're continuing our scheme of indefinite lawless detention, free of due process, free of any charges of any kind. Where we can pick up people anywhere around the world and put them into cages. He's actively defending that power in Afghanistan, by saying that people who we abduct far away from the battlefield, far away from Afghanistan, and then ship to Afghanistan and imprison at Bagram have no rights even to habeas corpus, which the Supreme Court said at least that Guantanamo detainees have.

And so, that's just one example where for years liberals yelled and screamed vehemently that Bush was subverting the Constitution and degrading the American culture, political culture, by asserting this power. And yet, here you have Barack Obama not just refusing or taking his time undoing it, but himself actively defending and advocating it. And there's very little outcry. And that repeats itself in terms of the state secrets privilege. And the effort to block accountability for torture victims. And a whole variety of other powers that Bush and Cheney asserted to great controversy.

BILL MOYERS: I've been very concerned about the fact that they're trying to block the access to the freedom of information process. They're not making it easier for journalists or scholars or citizens to get the documents that have been often excessively classified as secret.

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, look at what just happened with the photographs that are in the Pentagon's possession showing that detainees were tortured, not just at Abu Graib, but throughout the entire detention system. A very crucial point to have disclosed, because the excuse of Abu Ghraib was that these were just some rogue officers and enlisted people, who were sadistic and psychotic and you couldn't control them.

What these photographs show is that the abuse was actually throughout the entire detention system. A byproduct of the policies, the war crimes that Bush and Cheney authorized. And two federal courts, a district court in New York and an appellate court, unanimously, in the second circuit, ruled that under the Freedom of Information Act, the government has no justification whatsoever to withhold these photographs.

And at first, Obama said that he was going to abide by the court's decision to release them. And then he changed his mind two weeks later and said that, actually, he was going to defy the court ruling and appeal it. And once they realized that they would probably lose again in the Supreme Court, because the Freedom of Information Act is so clear, they decided they were going to change the Freedom of Information Act.

And he used Lindsey Graham, the Republican Senator, and Joe Lieberman to lead the way. And they just wrote an exemption into the Freedom of Information Act that allows the Defense Secretary in his own sole discretion to keep concealed photographs of America's torture regime. He's essentially covering up for Bush's war crimes. And he's writing an exemption into the Freedom of Information Act. I interviewed the Congresswoman Louise Slaughter who said that the Freedom of Information Act is the crown jewel of the Democratic Party. They fought with the Johnson Administration and--

BILL MOYERS: I remember.

GLENN GREENWALD: I'm sure you do. And she said that that was as important as social security and Medicare in terms of the Democratic Party values. And here's a Democratic Congress with a Democratic President rewriting it to allow evidence of war crimes to be suppressed. And I think that's illustrative of what you just suggested.

BILL MOYERS: I talked last weekend, briefly with a top ranking military officer at the Pentagon who is concerned about what you just said, but she also said that they were torn by their concern for what would happen to American prisoners captive in Afghanistan, or anywhere else for that matter, but particularly in Afghanistan, if those pictures were once again prominently displayed throughout the Muslim world. And she said, "I really had a difficult time with that decision. I understand about the Freedom of Information Act, but as an officer, I'm concerned about what those pictures do to make vulnerable our soldiers in Afghanistan."

GLENN GREENWALD: Well, first of all, the claim of the Obama Administration as to why these photographs could be suppressed was that they, according to government officials, don't provide anything new. That they're not very graphic. That they don't actually convey anything that isn't already known.

So, if that's the case it's very difficult to understand why they would have the negative impact on our troops. And inflaming the Muslim world that the claim is being made as to why they need to be suppressed. I think the real issue is that what would have happened if these photographs had been released is the impact would not have been on the Muslim world, which already knows that we maintain a worldwide torture regime, they're well aware of that.

The real impact would have been on the American domestic debate. It would have refocused attention on the fact that our government systematically committed war crimes. And it would have re-raised the question that the Obama administration is desperate to avoid, which is how is it that we can possibly justify continuing to ignore these past crimes and immunize the people who were responsible?

I mean, of course, every government would like to keep hidden evidence of wrongdoing on the ground that if it gets released then it will increase hostility toward that government. That's a justification for keeping everything concealed. I mean, that would be like saying, "If we drop a bomb on an Afghan village and kill lots of women and children shouldn't we lie about what we did and hide evidence that we did it? Because otherwise it will inflame the Muslim world." The solution to that sort of concern is not to cover up evidence of wrongdoing. It's to avoid doing the wrong doing in the first place. And we made the decision 40 years ago that transparency is more important.

BILL MOYERS: This brings me back to what we were discussing much earlier. Whether it's constitutional liberties and rights or threats, or whether it's escalating the number of troops in Afghanistan and prolonging the war: Where is the public in all these debates? I mean, some of these issues I would think would drive people to the Bastille, you know? Or to the kind of outpourings in the Vietnam War. Even the Iraq war, there were several hundred thousand people together. But we seem strangely mute today.

GLENN GREENWALD: I agree. I mean, if you look at what happened with the financial crisis, and the way in which Wall Street was — through its own recklessness — the principle cause of what became a virtual worldwide economic collapse and, to this day, continues to result in mass joblessness and misery and suffering on the part of the American people.

And to realize that not only have they been greatly enriched on the way to causing that crisis, but continue to exert principle control over the government and to have laws written designed to benefit only them, while the masses in the United States continue to suffer financially. I mean, that is the sort of thing that has caused great backlash in the past. And, for example, Simon Johnson, who I know you've had on your show several times before--

BILL MOYERS: The economist--

GLENN GREENWALD: And former I.M.F. official, talks about how what has typically happened in more unstable countries, and countries we think about as being the third world and developing countries and under-developed countries, is that the oligarchs and the financial elite will cause the sort of financial crisis through their own corruption and the government will then step in and try and help and aid the very oligarchs who caused it, at the expense of the citizenry. And that will continue until the riots grow too large. That's what he wrote in an article in THE ATLANTIC. And that typically happens. But in the United States, that doesn't seem to be happening.

BILL MOYERS: Why?

GLENN GREENWALD: There is no end to that. And--

BILL MOYERS: You look at our culture, you study our culture, you write about it. What's your theory, at least?

GLENN GREENWALD: I think there's several aspects to it. But I think the principle one is — and interestingly, Barack Obama actually talked about this in his Presidential campaign, quite eloquently and insightfully — that there gets to be a point where citizens look at the government, and they look at both political parties, and they conclude that the system itself is so radically corrupt and the political parties are so fundamentally nonresponsive that no matter what it is that they do, they aren't going to be able to achieve any change. They feel a sense of learned helplessness. And they essentially accept whatever it is that's done to them and simply hope that it's not too bad. And I think that's the population. It's not that they're apathetic. It's that they've come to believe in their own impotence. And I think that's actually sadder and-- and more dangerous.

BILL MOYERS: I'm going to test your patriotism now.

GLENN GREENWALD: Okay. I love patriotism tests.

BILL MOYERS: Were you in Brazil when the announcement was made about the Olympics?

GLENN GREENWALD: About the Rio De Janeiro Olympics. I was in Brazil when that happened.

BILL MOYERS: And so, what were your feelings?

GLENN GREENWALD: I was actually ambivalent. And I don't know that any of them were noble. In-- in one sense I was--

BILL MOYERS: You weren't rooting for Chicago?

GLENN GREENWALD: I was torn. And in one sense, I was rooting against the Olympics coming to Rio De Janeiro, because I know it's going to flood the city in which, at least at the moment, I live most of the time with all sorts of annoyances and inconvenience. On the other hand, Brazil is an amazingly fascinating country that I think it would be incredibly beneficial for the world to get to know. They have extraordinary poverty there. Which I think the Olympics, in many ways, is going to help alleviate.

And so, I think that was a good thing. And I think the most important thing was that the country itself was desperate to have it. Because it was a source of great pride. And Americans were for a variety of reasons quite ambivalent, including people in Chicago themselves. And so, I think given that Brazilians were eager to have it, I think it ended up being a just result.

BILL MOYERS: So, are they still ebullient?

GLENN GREENWALD: I mean, the celebration has not even remotely died down. It has, you know, I think one of the things that people in the United States typically forget. Is why-- it's interesting. We talk often about the international community does this. The international community does that. And what we mean by that is United States, Britain, and France. And maybe a couple other Western European countries.

There's actually an entire rest of the world that is having an increasingly large impact on international affairs. And so, for Latin America to be finally recognized as a place that warrants this sort of sporting event, and for Brazil specifically, which, you know, is going to only grow in economic strength and political importance, to be recognized that way, is a source of enormous pride for the people of that country.

BILL MOYERS: Do they sometimes think they're not even on the same map that we Americans look at? I mean, as you say, it must be France, Britain, the United States, Mexico, you know, because of obvious reasons. And then maybe China. But do the South Americans think they're even on this same--

GLENN GREENWALD: No, and it's actually it's a source of resentment. And understandably so. Now, I'll tell you what was interesting. Recently when the facility in Iran, at Qom, was revealed by the Iranians and the presidents of Britain, France, and United States had a press conference to condemn--

BILL MOYERS: This was the revelation that there was a nuclear facility there.

GLENN GREENWALD: Exactly. The American media talked about this. And this is what I was just referencing in part as the, "International community" unified together in order to condemn what had happened. The reality is that enormous parts of what's called the non-aligned world -- countries in Africa, poorer countries in Asia, and certainly Latin America -- actually are on Iran's side in this dispute, because they think it's critically important that countries maintain the right which the Western world has reserved for itself, not to have nuclear weapons, but to enrich uranium for civilian purposes.

And there's an extraordinary hypocrisy they see with countries that possess huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons, and that allow countries like Israel and India and Pakistan to have nuclear weapons without any sanction, trying to bully the entire rest of the world out of having this right.

And so, there's this imbalance in international relations that Western Europe doesn't see, because they benefit from it. But almost all of Latin America sees. And a similar incident happened with the U.S. trying to put military bases in Colombia. And all Latin American leaders from Chavez to the President of Argentina and Brazil banded together to object. There's clearly a sense, historically, that they've been maltreated by Western Europe and the United States, especially.

And they see that the center of power is shifting. It's more diffuse now and dispersed than it ever was before. And an important part of what they want to achieve is to prevent that kind of domination from continuing. And I think the United States ought to be a little bit more aware that that's happening.

BILL MOYERS: This is a conversation to be continued. Glenn Greenwald, thanks for being back with me on THE JOURNAL.

GLENN GREENWALD: It's always a pleasure.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10302 ... ript5.html
Finally, a short video essay by Moyers on the cost of war. Suggesting that a draft might spread the human losses around more evenly so that perhaps the people making and funding the decision will sooner come to realize its tremendously devastating human costs, family costs, political costs, and the on-going damage caused to US influence and respect in the rest of the world, and begin to act accordingly.

WATCH VIDEO ESSAY BY BILL MOYERS/PBS ON COST OF WAR: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10302009/watch3.html

TRANSCRIPT OF ESSAY:
October 30, 2009

BILL MOYERS: Watching the CBS Evening News on Afghanistan this week I thought for a moment that I might be watching my grandson playing one of those video war games that are so popular these days.

REPORTER: An American military convoy traveling northwest--

BILL MOYERS: Reporting on the attacks that killed eight Americans, CBS turned to animation to depict what no journalists were around to witness. This is about as close to real war as most of us ever get, safely removed from the blood, the mangled bodies, the screams and shouts.

October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.

The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.

I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.

Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.

Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.

But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."

Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. …If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."

This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.

So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.

Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.

Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.

Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.

BILL MOYERS: That's it for this week. Log onto our website at pbs.org and click on "Bill Moyers Journal." You'll find a web exclusive conversation with the political analyst Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. There's also more from economist James Galbraith and the Journal's complete coverage of the financial meltdown and bailout.

That's all at pbs.org. I'm Bill Moyers and I'll see you next week.

Source: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10302009/watch3.html

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Post by roxybeast » November 1st, 2009, 7:52 pm

A very nice commentary by Bob Schieffer this week on Fact the Nation:

WATCH VIDEO:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id= ... ontentBody

And here's Schieffer's interview with David Axelrod & White House position on Afghanistan & recent withdrawal of opposition candidate in upcoming election because of Karzhei's refusal to remove corrupt election officials, and position on committing more troops to Afghanistan war:
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id= ... ontentBody

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Post by roxybeast » November 2nd, 2009, 2:46 pm

Here's an interview with Robert Greenwald on withdrawal in Afghanistan ...

STORY/VIDEO: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/2 ... 98705.html

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Link discussed in interview to new documentary about the Afghan war:
http://www.rethinkafghanistan.com/
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Post by roxybeast » November 2nd, 2009, 3:03 pm

<center>Abdullah Withdraws From Election Because Karzhei Refuses to Remove Election Officials Accused of Fraud and So, Kharzei Is Declared the Winner</center>
Frankly I was a bit shocked to see Hillary Clinton stand there and claim that this is no big deal, Abdullah just made a bad political decision, Karzhei wins, and it won't have any impact on US foreign policy. But that is the new spin. If we discuss why he withdrew, over fraud allegations that the Karzhei government (which includes the US) refused to fix, then that sounds bad, so instead we have to spin this quickly to "too bad, so sad, life moves on" and act like it's no big deal. And maybe, if we refuse to discuss the refusal to protect against fraud in the runoff election and instead just repeat our new mantra over and over and over again in the media, maybe nobody will notice!

Which tells you ... the President has already decided to commit more troops ... the only question at this point is how many?
Karzai Gets New Term as Afghan Runoff Is Scrapped
By ALISSA J. RUBIN and ALAN COWELL

New York Times, November 2, 2009

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan officials canceled a runoff presidential vote set for Saturday and declared President Hamid Karzai the winner on Monday, a day after his remaining challenger, , Abdullah Abdullah, withdrew.

The announcement capped a fraught election widely depicted as deeply flawed by corruption and voting irregularities.

Azizullah Ludin, the chairman of Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission, said the Constitution did not require a runoff and the second-round vote, set for Saturday, had been canceled after Mr. Abdullah’s announcement that he was dropping out.

Mr. Ludin said Mr. Karzai had won the majority of votes in the first round “and was the only candidate in the second round,” and so was “declared the elected president of Afghanistan.”

Among the commission’s reasons for canceling the vote, Mr. Ludin said at a news conference, was to spare Afghans the high costs and security risks of a fresh round of balloting. Those concerns reflected the difficulties of holding an election amid a growing Taliban insurgency.

But Mr. Karzai and the election commission had been under intense pressure from Afghanistan’s international backers, including the United States, to cancel the runoff, in part because of worries that the vote-rigging that marred the first round might be repeated.

While the international community and the United Nations congratulated Mr. Karzai and urged him to set about unifying the country, the way ahead was foggy at best. There has been talking of forming a unity government, but Mr. Abdullah said he would not participate.

Further, there is little popular support in Afghanistan for that option. For many Afghans a coalition government brings to mind the chaotic period in the 1990s when armed strongmen competed for turf in bloody battles that killed many civilians around the country and destroyed a swath of Kabul.

Officials from the United States and United Nations welcomed the decision and congratulated Mr. Karzai.

“We congratulate President Karzai on his victory in this historic election,” said a statement from the United States Embassy in Kabul, “and look forward to working with him, his new administration, the Afghan people and our partners in the international community to support Afghanistan’s progress towards institutional reforms, security and prosperity.”

The United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Kabul on Monday, said the election process had been “difficult,” and urged Mr. Karzai to form a government that would have the support of Afghanis and the international community.

“I welcome today’s decision by Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission to forego a run-off vote and to declare Hamid Karzai as the winner of the 2009 presidential elections,” Mr. Ban said in a statement. “I congratulate President Karzai.”

Since the first round of voting on Aug. 20., casualties have mounted among American and allied forces fighting the Taliban, while accounts of widespread vote-rigging to deliver Mr. Karzai’s victory have strengthened.

Earlier on Monday, Mr. Ban met both Mr. Karzai and Mr. Abdullah “to assure them and the Afghan people of the continuing support of the United Nations towards the development of the country and the humanitarian assistance that the U.N. provides to millions of Afghans every day,” a United Nations statement said.

He arrived days after three men dressed as Afghan police officers attacked a guesthouse in Kabul, killing eight people, five of them foreigners who worked for the United Nations. But Mr. Ban said his organization would not be deterred from working in Afghanistan.

In an emotional speech on Sunday to thousands of supporters here, Mr. Abdullah said he could not take part in a runoff that he believed would be at least as fraudulent as the tainted first round in August, in which almost a million ballots for Mr. Karzai were thrown out as fakes.

“I hoped there would be a better process,” he said. “But it is final. I will not participate in the Nov. 7 elections.”

Advisers to President Obama called Mr. Abdullah’s decision a personal choice that would not greatly affect American policy and was in line with the Afghan Constitution. They portrayed the election of Mr. Karzai as essentially settled, enabling Mr. Obama to move forward with deciding whether to send as many as 40,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, although an announcement probably remains at least three weeks away.

“Every poll that had been taken there suggested that he was likely to be defeated anyway, so we are going to deal with the government that is there,” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama, said on “Face the Nation” on CBS.

Administration officials alluded to the criticisms bedeviling Mr. Karzai — focusing on corruption and ineffectiveness in fighting the intensifying Taliban insurgency — in their comments on Sunday. But they sought to focus on security questions rather than governance and political stability, emphasizing that the chief American goal now in Afghanistan was to make sure that Al Qaeda would not re-establish bases there.

“Obviously, there are issues we need to discuss, such as reducing the high level of corruption,” Mr. Axelrod said. “These are issues we’ll take up with President Karzai.”

Mr. Abdullah’s supporters, who traveled from all over the country to hear his decision in Kabul, were unanimous in calling Mr. Karzai an illegitimate leader.

The decision was clearly a hard one for Mr. Abdullah. He choked up at the moment of announcing it before his supporters and had to pause to drink water before speaking.

“It did not come easily,” he told the crowd, which had begun cheering at his announcement. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, traveling in Morocco, released a statement saying that while the Obama administration would support Mr. Karzai as president, she hoped Mr. Abdullah would “stay engaged in the national dialogue and work on behalf of the security and prosperity of the people of Afghanistan.”

Mr. Abdullah rejected any suggestion of joining Mr. Karzai’s government, and he clearly signaled that he was positioning himself as a future player in Afghan politics. In a news briefing later at his home, he said: “I did it with a lot of pain, but at the same time with a lot of hopes toward the future. Because this will not be the end of anything, this will be a new beginning.”

Alissa J. Rubin reported from Kabul, and Alan Cowell from Paris. Carlotta Gall contributed reporting from Kabul, Jeff Zeleny from Washington, and Joseph Berger and Jack Healy from New York.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/world ... fghan.html

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Post by roxybeast » November 2nd, 2009, 3:12 pm

With Karzai, U.S. Faces Weak Partner in Time of War
By DAVID E. SANGER

New York Times, November 1, 2009

WASHINGTON — With the White House’s reluctant embrace on Sunday of Hamid Karzai as the winner of Afghanistan’s suddenly moot presidential runoff, President Obama now faces a new complication: enabling a badly tarnished partner to regain enough legitimacy to help the United States find the way out of an eight-year-old war.

It will not be easy. As the evidence mounted in late summer that Mr. Karzai’s forces had sought to win re-election through widespread fraud to defeat his main challenger, Abdullah Abdullah, administration officials made no secret of their disgust. How do you consider sending tens of thousands of additional American troops, they asked in meetings in the White House, to prop up an Afghan government regarded as illegitimate by many of its own people?

The answer was supposed to be a runoff election. Now, administration officials argue that Mr. Karzai will have to regain that legitimacy by changing the way he governs, at a moment when he is politically weaker than at any time since 2001.

“We’re going to know in the next three to six months whether he’s doing anything differently — whether he can seriously address the corruption, whether he can raise an army that ultimately can take over from us and that doesn’t lose troops as fast as we train them,” one of Mr. Obama’s senior aides said. He insisted on anonymity because of the confidentiality surrounding the Obama administration’s own debate on a new strategy, and the request by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the American military commander in Afghanistan, for upward of 44,000 more troops.

“Needless to say,” the senior aide added, “this is not where we wanted to be after nine months.”

That is a huge understatement.

In the early days of Mr. Obama’s presidency, he and his aides searched desperately for a plausible alternative to Mr. Karzai. They found none. Since the spring, there has been little doubt that Mr. Karzai would remain in the presidential palace after the election was over. The question was whether that vote would demonstrate that a desolate nation that has always been at the mercy of larger powers would show it could find its own way.

Mr. Obama’s decision last March to add 21,000 troops was justified in part by the need to assure a relatively peaceful, fair election. The idea was to bolster Mr. Karzai’s credibility so that his authority would reach beyond Kabul, the capital.

Here in the United States, Mr. Obama began scaling back American ambitions. With the advice of his defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, he dropped the Bush-era talk of turning Afghanistan into a Western-style democracy. He carefully avoided the word “victory,” which Mr. Bush had used so often. He narrowed the United States’ military objectives to destroying Al Qaeda — which is thought to be based largely in Pakistan — while simply subverting the Taliban’s ability to once again take over the country.

“All we need to do is degrade the Taliban enough for the Afghan Army to be able to deal with them,” one of Mr. Obama’s top national security aides said recently.

James Dobbins, who tried to formulate an Afghan approach for the Bush administration — and wrote of his frustrations as attention turned to Iraq — told Congress earlier this year that the objective should be to “ensure that fewer innocent Afghans are killed next year than this year.”

“In a counterinsurgency campaign,” he said, “this is the difference between winning and losing.”

But even Mr. Obama’s most limited goals require a legitimate government in Kabul, one with the authority to manage the army and to rebuild an incompetent and corrupt police force. It also needs the ability to install competent governors and spend Western aid effectively.

Before the election was effectively ended with Mr. Abdullah’s withdrawal from the Nov. 7 runoff, Mr. Obama asked his national security aides and the State Department to come up with an agenda they could press on Mr. Karzai. It included reaching out to his political opponents, cleaning out the worst of his governors and ministers, and announcing a major new push on corruption. And it included peeling away — through whatever inducements work — the least committed of the Taliban, or at least those with no links to Al Qaeda.

“If this is to be a turning point,” said Senator John Kerry, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, who helped twist Mr. Karzai’s arm to accept that he must go along with a runoff, “we must strengthen the capacity of the Afghan government and insist that its leaders embrace lasting reforms.”

The United States has already spent nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in Afghanistan, all the while talking about those lasting reforms. The Bush administration made periodic efforts to warn Mr. Karzai that his own family’s reputed links to corruption threatened his government. It sent mission after mission to teach good governance, some of which succeeded and some of which ran into what former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called “the Afghan allergy” to dictates from foreign occupiers.

For eight years, the United States and its allies have been struggling to train an Afghan Army; while it currently has a force of more than 90,000, American commanders put the number who can sustain themselves in a fight at closer to 50,000.

And in the end, that force — an Afghan Army that can be trusted to defend the central government — is Mr. Obama’s route out of the country. If that army emerges as a trusted one in Afghanistan, able to control significant areas of the country with the cooperation of the local tribal leaders, Mr. Obama may be able to declare that the country cannot again be overrun by militants. Only then could he pull back from what he termed over the summer a “war of necessity.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/world ... ssess.html

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Post by roxybeast » November 4th, 2009, 2:09 pm

<center>Interview with Matthew Hoh:
U.S. Has Lost Track of Why It Is in Afghanistan
</center>
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Matthew Hoh, the first U.S. government official to formally resign his post because of objections to America's course in Afghanistan, makes a compelling case that America has lost its strategic sensibilities in this war which President Obama has adopted as "the good war".

In this Al Jazeera/Riz Kahn Show interview above, the former military and foreign service officer articulates what some of us on the outside have been saying about America's engagement in Afghanistan -- there is confusion about mission, a lack of focus on al Qaeda, a muddled picture of the contours and motivations of the Taliban, and embrace of a government that is not liked in many parts of the country. Hoh argues, along similar but more informed lines that I have, that we are embedded in the middle of a civil war.

Read more about Matthew Hoh in this fascinating piece by the Washington Post's Karen DeYoung: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03394.html

by Steve Clemons, Huff Post, 11/4/09 ... Steve publishes the popular political blog, The Washington Note

Source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steve-cle ... 45109.html

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