Afghanistan – Page 4

Maddow cheerleads

Rachel Maddow, speaking after the president’s speech during MSNBC’s analysis, said something that puzzled me and really raises questions about whether she is anything more than a cheerleader for Obama.

I like Maddow, generally, but how she can think that this speech “neutralizes” critics is beyond me. The left certainly will not be pacified by this speech because the antiwar left knows that you can’t call an escalation a withdrawal (thanks to Bob Witanek for this line of thinking). The right, on the other hand, would criticize Obama for killing Osama bin Laden with his bare hands, their hatred for the president running so deep that it blinds them to reason.

And the independents? As Chris Matthews said (did I just write that?), they are weary of the war and want it to end.

The political analysis, of course, is the problem, whether it is Maddow cheerleading for the president or Fox making things up to make him look bad. Political analysis, however, is limited and empty. What we need is real policy analysis and real information.

We already have spent too many lives — on both sides — and money. We need to get out and get out quickly.

Time to rethink Afghanistan

I interviewed Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films, which produces video documentaries on progressive subjects with the goal of distributing them on a grassroots basis, earlier this evening, before the president spoke. (It is for next week’s Dispatches.)

His film, “Rethink Afghanistan,” pretty much makes the case that our presence in Afghanistan is only inflaming the situation in Afghanistan.

Greenwald told me that the president is working on the “misguided notion that this was making us more secure.”

Obama, he said, “should look at the fundamental issues.” He echoed something I said in this week’s column (out tomorrow): That the internal debate essentially “was a travesty of a debate.”

“It was whether to have 10,000, 20,000 or 30 ,000 more troops,” he said. “It should have been asking why are we there what are our security interests. If al Qaida is enemy, then what is the most effective way to get the less than 100 members who are in Afghanistan.”

Just as importantly, he added this: “How do you justify the billions of billions of dollars (on the war) when there is not enough money for healthcare, for jobs, for housing.”

I wish the president could have talked with Greenwald before his speech tonight.

‘Waist Deep in the Big Muddy’

Reading this story on the Obama troop increase in Afghanistan, this song from Pete Seeger comes into my head:

But every time I read the papers
That old feeling comes on;
We’re — waist deep in the Big Muddy
And the big fool says to push on.

Say it ain’t so O

Any notion that President Barack Obama will be scaling back our military involvement in Afghanistan has now come to a crashing halt.

Obama, according to The New York Times, said today “it is his intention to “finish the job” that began with the overthrow of the Taliban government in the fall of 2001.”

Mr. Obama, offering a tantalizing preview of what looms as one of the momentous decisions of his presidency, said he would tell the American people about “a comprehensive strategy” embracing civilian and diplomatic efforts as well as the continuing military campaign.

While he avoided any hints of the new troop levels he foresees in Afghanistan, the president signaled that he will not be talking about a short-term commitment but rather an effort muscular enough to “dismantle and degrade” the enemy and ensure that “Al Qaeda and its extremist allies cannot operate” in the region.

A round of White House meetings on Afghanistan, which concluded on Monday night, included discussions about sending about 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan, administration officials said. There are about 68,000 United States troops there now.

And now there will be more — and, despite the apparent inclusion of an “exit strategy,” they are going to be there for a long, long time.

The decision to double down on Afghanistan comes at a moment when the war has lost support among the American people and it is becoming clearer by the day that continued fighting will do little more than further inflame the situation.

A piece in the Sunday Times’ Week In Review by Robert Wright, author of an important
overview of religious history called The Evolution of God (I am reading it now and find it fascinating), offers a glimpse into the potential side-effects of this unnecessary remedy to our security ills.

These could include the creation of homegrown terrorists. Wright, focusing on the horrible case of “Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan and the Fort Hood massacre,” says — quoting the argument of dovish liberals — attempting to end terrorism by killing terrorists is counterproductive. It actually does more to spread terrorism than to stop it.

One reason killing terrorists can spread terrorism is that various technologies — notably the Internet and increasingly pervasive video — help emotionally powerful messages reach receptive audiences. When American wars kill lots of Muslims, inevitably including some civilians, incendiary images magically find their way to the people who will be most inflamed by them.

This calls into question our nearly obsessive focus on Al Qaeda — the deployment of whole armies to uproot the organization and to finally harpoon America’s white whale, Osama bin Laden. If you’re a Muslim teetering toward radicalism and you have a modem, it doesn’t take Mr. bin Laden to push you over the edge. All it takes is selected battlefield footage and a little ad hoc encouragement: a jihadist chat group here, a radical imam there — whether in your local mosque or on a Web site in your local computer.

If this is the case — and I believe it is — then the Afghanistan war and our incursions into Pakistan and potentially other hot spots becomes a game of “Wack-a-Mole.” Each time a mole pops up from its hole and we smash it, another mole pops up from another hole.

Bulking up our mission in Afghanistan, therefore, will do little to alter this and could do much to exacerbate it.

As Wright points out,

Central to the debate over Afghanistan is the question of whether terrorists need a “safe haven” from which to threaten America. If so, it is said, then we must work to keep every acre of Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, etc.) out of the hands of groups like the Taliban. If not — if terrorists can orchestrate a 9/11 about as easily from apartments in Germany as from camps in Afghanistan — then maybe never-ending war isn’t essential.

However you come out on that argument, the case of Nidal Hasan shows one thing for sure: Homegrown American terrorists don’t need a safe haven. All they need is a place to buy a gun.

I’m not arguing that we should ignore terrorism. On the contrary, we should address it using a law-enforcement model, which would require a greater reliance on intelligence gathering and investigation, while also focusing on international economic development and aid.

There is another drawback to Obama’s apparent “surge”: It will derail his domestic agenda, sucking dollars from the treasury while weakening support for the president at home. LBJ is the model for this, of course, as Bill Moyers reminded us last week, when he made the connection between Vietnam and Afghanistan and LBJ and Obama:

Now in a different world, at a different time, and with a different president, we face the prospect of enlarging a different war. But once again we’re fighting in remote provinces against an enemy who can bleed us slowly and wait us out, because he will still be there when we are gone.

Once again, we are caught between warring factions in a country where other foreign powers fail before us. Once again, every setback brings a call for more troops, although no one can say how long they will be there or what it means to win. Once again, the government we are trying to help is hopelessly corrupt and incompetent.

And once again, a President pushing for critical change at home is being pressured to stop dithering, be tough, show he’s got the guts, by sending young people seven thousand miles from home to fight and die, while their own country is coming apart.

And once again, the loudest case for enlarging the war is being made by those who will not have to fight it, who will be safely in their beds while the war grinds on. And once again, a small circle of advisers debates the course of action, but one man will make the decision.

We will never know what would have happened if Lyndon Johnson had said no to more war. We know what happened because he said yes.

I hope Obama is not following the path blazed by LBJ. That would be a tragedy for all of us.

Mythology of cost: Health care v. the war

Let’s do some simple arithmetic: The heathcare reform legislation approved by the House of Representatives last week — H.R. 3962 — is estimated to cost $891 billion over 10 years, while reducing the federal deficit by $109 billion, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. That’s about $90 billion a year.

Compare this with the cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which the CBO estimates cost the nation $604 billion during their first six years and have been cost in the neighborhood of $100 billion a year over all.

Basically, we could pay for healthcare — and maybe some other needs — were we to end the disastrous military conflicts and focus our attentions on repairing the cracks in our own foundations, cracks that have been widening with every dollar spent on war.

The discussion of our budget deficit rarely gets framed this way; rather, we talk only about our domestic priorities — heatlh care, infrastructure, the regulatory agencies — as contributing to the ballooning deficit and debt. Money spent on war, however, is a different animal altogether.

This is the point David Sirota makes today in his OpenLeft blog post, commenting on a weekend New York Times story on the costs of an expanded Afghan war:

Kudos, of course, to the Times for even reporting on the unfathomably large costs of intensifying militarism and adventurism. But as you’ll see in the story, there’s no attempt to put the costs into any context – specifically, there’s no mention that an escalation in Afghanistan would mean outlays for the one-year Pentagon budget is approaching the total outlays of the entire 10-year health care bill.

Earlier, in his syndicated column, Sirota sums up a contradiction that blames domestic spending — specifically spending that has a liberal or progressive goal, like eradicating poverty, ameliorating poverty’s impacts or making sure everyone has health coverage — for pushing the federal budget into deficit.

When the House considered a health care expansion proposal that the CBO says will reduce the deficit by $11 billion a year, tea-party protesters and Congress’ self-described “fiscal conservatives” opposed it on cost grounds. At the same time, almost none of them objected when Congress passed a White House-backed bill to spend $636 billion on defense in 2010.

The hypocrisy is stunning — lots of “budget hawk” complaints about health legislation reducing the deficit and few “budget hawk” complaints about defense initiatives that, according to Government Executive magazine, “puts the president on track to spend more on defense, in real dollars, than any other president has in one term of office since World War II.” And that estimate doesn’t even count additional spending on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Sirota blames “skewed reporting” and the lying liars like Sen. Joe Lieberman, who cherry-pick numbers and ignore what might be inconvenient to their argument.

I can but agree, though the failures of the news media are due not to any skewed motivation but rather to a flaw in how journalism is now practiced in Washington and the state capitals. Journalists have become stenographers to power — or boomboxes for the powerful, if you’re talking about broadcast/cable — who do nothing more than regurgitate what they are told by disingenuous politicians.

Add to this the ingrained desire to chase conflict and you have a recipe for lies and distortion becoming accepted wisdom — afterall, to paraphrase a quotation attributed to Vladimir Lenin, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.