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Afghanistan: War Without End?
Obama promised no open-ended occupation – and to draw down forces from July. A 2.5% cut is hardly an encouraging start
Afghanistan was supposed to be the campaign promise that President Barack Obama actually kept. He said he would escalate that war, and sure enough he did. Is he now going back on promises he's made as president, by proposing to withdraw 2.5% of US forces in July?
Here are the relevant promises:
"After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home … [O]ur troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended – because the nation that I'm most interested in building is our own." – President Barack Obama, 1 December 2009
"I'm confident that the withdrawal will be significant. People will say this is a real process of transition; this is not just a token gesture." – President Barack Obama, 15 April 2011
"In July of 2011, you're going to see a whole lot of people moving out, bet on it." – Vice President Joe Biden, quoted in Jonathan Alter's The Promise
But let's first review how we got here. When loyal Democrats heard candidate Obama say he would escalate the war as president, they mistakenly understood him to say he would end it. Progressive bloggers have planned a panel for next month to discuss their disappointment with this "broken promise" that was actually kept.
President Obama sent the first additional 17,000 troops before he'd been in office a month and explicitly before coming up with any plan for Afghanistan. Sending the troops was, apparently, an end in itself. Then, Obama sent more. He got the total up from 33,700 US troops in late 2008 to 68,000 in late 2009. These numbers do not include tens of thousands of European troops, untold numbers of "intelligence" personnel, mercenaries hired through the US state department and US defence department contractors almost equal in number to the US troops.
Obama's 2009 "surge", which more than doubled the US troop presence in Afghanistan preceded any public debate on an Afghanistan surge. The publicly debated surge, actually Obama's second, was "debated" between the commander-in-chief and his supposed subordinates, and then executed in 2010. By the end of 2010, according to the US defence department (pdf), there were 96,900 US troops and 87,483 supporting contractors in Afghanistan. In rough terms, there are 200,000 Americans now in Afghanistan, against the will of the American people. Here are some recent polls from the weeks and months preceding the killing of Osama bin Laden:
• By 73% to 21%, Americans say: withdraw a substantial number of US combat forces from Afghanistan this summer – ABC/Washington Post
• By 63% to 30%, Americans want complete withdrawal – Bloomberg (pdf)
• By 72% to 25%, Americans want to speed up the withdrawal – USA Today/Gallup
• By 53% to 39%, Americans say US troops should not be involved in Afghanistan – CBS
• By 50% to 44%, Americans say: remove all troops ASAP – Pew
• By 64% to 31%, Americans say the war has not been worth fighting – ABC/Washington Post
• By 58% to 40%, Americans oppose the war – CNN/Opinion Research Corporation (pdf)
That first poll, with the 73% in favour of a "substantial" withdrawal this summer, is a poll on whether the president should keep a promise. On 1 December 2009, President Obama said of his upcoming second "surge" in Afghanistan:
"Taken together, these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces, and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011."
This deadline for "beginning" the withdrawal has been repeated for a year and a half. In May 2010, Obama said he was "confident" he could meet the deadline, but that it would just be a beginning. Many observers believed July 2011 was a promised date for completing a withdrawal, but in reality, it was always a promised date for beginning it. Still, most people assumed that beginning a withdrawal would involve a substantial number of troops leaving. After all, if a pair of "surges" of 70,000 troops lasts for years, in what sense are they "surges" rather than ordinary escalations?
In November 2010, the White House started talking about December 2014, leading the Washington Post to print this headline: "When it comes to Afghanistan policy, December 2014 is the new July 2011." It wasn't. July 2011 was still the date to start the withdrawal, and 2014 was the date by which a pretence would be established of Afghan "sovereignty", despite the ongoing presence of tens of thousands, but not hundreds of thousands, of foreign troops.
In President Obama's 25 January 2011 state of the union address, July was still the start date: "This year, we will work with nearly 50 countries to begin a transition to an Afghan lead. And this July, we will begin to bring our troops home." Yes, but how many troops, and how many contractors? Of 200,000 people, will you bring home three-quarters? Half? A quarter?
Apparently, the answer is 2.5%.
We learned this week that: "US military officers in Afghanistan have drawn up preliminary proposals to withdraw as many as 5,000 troops from the country in July and as many as 5,000 more by the year's end, the first phase of a US pullout promised by President Barack Obama, officials say." This is what you call a trial balloon. It could easily be revised upward if the American people or the United States' allies raised enough hell. It could go away entirely if we meekly accept it. The Wall Street Journal report continued:
"The proposals, prepared by staff officers in Kabul, are likely to be the subject of fierce internal debate in the White House, state department and Pentagon – a discussion influenced by calculations about how Osama bin Laden's death will affect the Afghan battlefield. The plans were drafted before the US killed the al-Qaida leader, and could be revised. They have yet to be formally presented to General David Petraeus, the commander of US forces in Afghanistan, who must then seek White House approval for a withdrawal."
And this trial balloon is smaller than the 5% withdrawal it appears to be. You might assume that 5,000 troops from a total of 100,000 would mean 5,000 contractors departing as well, for a total of 10,000 people out of 200,000. But you'd be wrong. The 5,000 seems to be a total of troops and contractors:
"If approved by top military officers and the president, an initial withdrawal of 5,000 would represent a modest reduction from the current 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan, allowing the military to preserve combat power through this summer's fighting season. Some of the troops that leave in July will be combat troops but commanders hope to minimise the impact by culling support staff as well."
In other words, 5,000 out of 200,000 – or 2.5% of US forces – would be withdrawn under this plan. Does that seem like a substantive beginning to you? It does to some anonymous military officials: "Some military officials believe a cut of 10,000 troops this year would be significant because it would represent one-third of the troop surge." The only thing significant here is the fudging of the numbers. We've "surged" close to 70,000, not 30,000, troops, plus a similar number of contractors.
According to Congressman Dennis Kucinich, "the announcement of such a paltry troop withdrawal is an Orwellian attempt to appear to drawdown the war without actually ending the war." Kucinich pointed out that at this pace of withdrawal, the Afghanistan war would drag on for another full decade. The proposal may actually be better than that, and worse as well. The plan that has now been floated publicly would supposedly withdraw 70,000 troops by 2014, meaning the pace of withdrawal would pick up. But 20,000 to 30,000 US troops would remain indefinitely. As would British troops. And multi-year plans are notoriously subject to revision.
I'm glad to be working with groups in the US and in the UK that intend to reject this latest plan. Now is the moment to put an end to the "global war on terror", not to ease our way into its permanent establishment.
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15 Comments so far
Show AllObama's less than truthful rhetoric is reminiscent of the observation that writer Mary McCarthy made of playwright Lillian Hellman:
"Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the' ".
Fuck you Obama you right wing bitch.
J.P. Morgan's hunt for Afghan gold
http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2011/05/11/jp-morgan-hunt-afghan-gold/
[snip]
To Hannam, chairman of J.P. Morgan Capital Markets, Afghanistan represents a gigantic, untapped opportunity -- one of the last great natural-resource frontiers. Landlocked and pinioned by imperial invaders, Afghanistan has been cursed by its geography for thousands of years. Now, for the first time, Hannam believes, that geography could be an asset. The two most resource-starved nations on the planet, China and India, sit next door to Afghanistan, where, according to Pentagon estimates, minerals worth nearly $1 trillion lie buried. True, there is a war under way. And it's unclear how the death of Osama bin Laden will impact the country's political and economic environment. But Hannam is not your usual investment banker: A former soldier, he has done business in plenty of strife-torn countries. So have all the members of his team, two of them former special forces soldiers who have fought here.....
At age 67, I hate to say that for the majority of the years of my life, our country has been at war (end of the Second World War, the Viet-Nam War, and now the "War" on terror). And, of course there was the first World War that occurred before I was born.
I wonder what greatness we could have achieved had we not been involved so endlessly in wars and killing!?????
I feel sorry for young people these days - it looks as though they'll be experiencing a state of war during their entire lives.
FrankS
I was with you until your last sentence. Unlike the time that I and others of my generation grew up the generation of today does not have to fear receiving a letter which starts off with that ominous word Greetings and then proceeds to tell the recipient of that letter when to report to the nearest induction center in order to take his physical for the military. The point here is that since the youth of today do not have to worry about being drafted into the military this then means that they have very little concern about wars that the United States is constantly being engaged in overseas. One has to realize a crucial point and that is that, in my opinion, most Americans by far have very little regard for the fact that many innocent people are being killed in foreign countries by the United States military. This would then lead one to conclude that the thinking of many if not most Americans is that if something does not effect them personally or directly in some way then they simply do not give a damn about what is going on outside the borders of the United States.
Erroll, they simply outsource things....
Four More Contractors to Get Piece of $10 Billion Global 'Civilian Police' Pie
http://peacockbiz.typepad.com/tram/
Please feel free to go the above site's homepage and read the other articles.
Thank you for this link ----- it's exactly what I've been looking for. I hear lots of talk about what these invasions and occupations (war is something else) have cost us but not enough about the profits that have been made.
In another recent article David said ---- Bring home the troops and the contractors and the mercenaries. Those are the words we should post across this country, gets to the heart of the matter.
Frank is correct in saying that our young people will be living in a state of war during their entire lives. The corporate forces that rule our nation, the plutocracy, profit greatly from the unending wars while we, the people of this nation, suffer the consequences. We see nearly all of our tax funds going to the wars and all of our domestic programs being cut or terminated.
This dreadful situation is caused by the death of our democracy. These polls on the opinions of the people of our country clearly show that the people want an end to the wars. Under a democracy this would happen.
We must face the fact of the total corruption of our government in order to change the situation. We must stop choosing between one evil corporate political party or the equally evil other one. There can be no hope of any change without us refusing to vote for either a Republican or a Democrat.
I think we also will have to make things uncomfortable for the plutocracy. We need a rebellion in our nation. A rebellion that will insist that the rich pay taxes and that the wars end. We, as a nation, need to take care of the needs of the people and protect our environment. In that way, our young people can live in peace and prosperity.
" It is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank". Obama. October 27, 2007. The people that really run American foreign policy must have been laughing all the way to their bank when they heard this BS fed to the sheeple people!
"This is what you call a trial balloon. It could easily be revised upward if the American people or the United States' allies raised enough hell. It could go away entirely if we meekly accept it."
Not to worry. The American people will most decidedly "meekly accept it." They always do. Raising hell over our perpetual wars is so Sixties! And we're so over that. As Erroll points out, so long as there's no draft, young people will remain more interested in IPhone apps, video games and looking cool around each other than worrying about how many lies Obama tells in efforts to conceal his deep commitment to perpetual war.
And Americans will answer like true progressives to polls asking whether they think we should get the hell out of Afghanistan, but that's as far they'll take it. They'll check the box saying "The US should withdraw immediately from Afghanistan," and then tune in American Idol or Dancing with the Stars. They just did their civic duty by answering like peaceniks and proceeding to ignore the necessity of DOING anything about it.
Even though these criminal wars are bankrupting us, economically and morally, it's still possible to ignore that they actually affect our daily lives in any measureable way. Until Obama's Bush-like stubbornness that keeps the military quagmired in unwinnable wars is shown to obviously erode Americans' quality of life, they won't lift a finger to stop any of them. If the economy tanks again, and it almost certainly will, they can always listen to Faux News telling them how "the liberals" caused it. Watch the right wingers destroy the country while voting more Republicans (or their Democratic surrogates) into office. The likelihood of Americans raising serious hell about this absurd war is about as great as Bush and Cheney turning themselves over to al Qaeda.
Yes
This article is righrt on the mark, and the GOP big wigs can read these polls results and will definitely take them into account. They want the presidency back not some ideological purity test for presidential candidates in their party. Ron Paul will gladly cut a deal and cut and run, and Mitt Romney will surely cut a deal and cut and run in the end. Romney and Paul are the front runners even among conservative Republicans. What does that tell everybody with a brain? It's all over for the arm chair solidier in the White House to paraphrase a line from a Doors' song.
The GOP is where the action is. It should have been in 1968 with Mitt Romney's father in the presidential race. That was a viable option recommended by an anti war ex paratroop general, dove, and combat vet. But we had to go our glorious way with Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy. But the bosses and the machines and the adminsitration stacked the deck so completely against them that they didn't have a chance even with winning one every state where the pro war side showed its face. Meanwhile the GOP race became a done deal for Trick Dick. Now it's time we learned from history. Sitting presidents don't get beat within their own party. They must be beaten by the other majjor party. It can be done, and we should have done it that then. Maybe Robert Kennedy and Euigene McCarthy would have both been around after a dove Republican took the presidency in 1968 to help put the pieces together. We need to learn from that or else we keep up this sillliness that we just have to keep the Republicans out. Give me a break!
On January 28th, 2011, CD published "State of the War in Afghanistan: The Good, The Bad and The Inaccurate"
by Tom Andrews*. It discussed the status of the Afghanistan boondoggle in light of Obama's State of the Union Address.
Here, with some editing, is an excerpt of a comment I wrote to that article:
______________
Remember, Commander-in-Chief Obama had his "High Noon" moment in 2009, when he tasked his generals with providing a workable withdrawal plan for Afghanistan. The generals declined. Obama blinked. Instead, we got another "surge". Game, set, match.
Team Obama is dedicated to ensuring that any and all public pronouncements from the Oval Office Throne will contain sufficient ambiguity, doublespeak, and wiggle room to give the Imperial military cover and full play. Their purpose is to spread squiddy clouds of obfuscation, appease credulous, complacent, and unreflective pundits and citizens, and save face.
And if Obama actually does unequivocally propose a substantial draw-down in Afghanistan-- something more concrete than blithely declaring the end of "combat operations", as he did with Iraq-- as likely as not it will only be a subterfuge to step up military operations elsewhere, e.g. Yemen or even Pakistan. Or perhaps even Antarctica-- it's tough to keep up with the Permanent Global War on an Abstract Noun.
And even if Obama really means it, he can propose something different the next day, or week, or year with impunity.
Look, Team Obama is hoping-- there's that word again!-- to hornswoggle the fearful, bemused, and hysterical Amerikan masses long enough to remain on the Throne in 2012. There's not a snowball's chance in hell that he's about to Man Up and start telling the truth at this point. Don't kid yourself!
______________
I wish David Swanson and his allies and associates all the best in their efforts.
But one will sooner catch a unicorn than hold Obama to account by diligently recapitulating official statements and other evidence of record, or expecting public critiques and rebuttals to influence the policies and actions of civilian and military authorities in the Amerikan Imperium.
Such attempts to hold Team Obama's collective feet to the fire are doomed to die a-borning.
As I never get tired of observing, those "feet" are actually well-greased cloven hooves-- exhausting to get hold of in the first place, and well-accustomed to warm places even if one manages to get a brief, tenuous grip on them over a sputtering campfire.
Though I sincerely wish it were otherwise, I can't be sanguine about Swanson's approach because I believe that the status quo is chillingly but accurately summed up in journalist Ron Suskind's 2004 quote from "a senior adviser to Bush", reportedly Karl Rove:
"The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'"
* http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/01/28-11
This article explains in complete clarity and detail why I could never vote for Obama again!!!!!!!!!!
And the price of illegal, immoral, endless WAR...............continues to bankrupt this nation. Maybe we should blame the hardworking, middle class. Oh, I forgot. It's already being taken care of. Fuck the right!