13th & 14th April, 2009
South African concert dates announced.
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The Hague concert date announced. Click
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Amsterdam concert date announced. Click
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Photo by Jay Hagan 11/08
©2008 All Rights Reserved
A Thought for Today
Dreams should not be allowed to die until
reality replaces them.
TO BEGIN WITH
Here’s something to think about.
WORTH READING
Progressive Think Tank Tells Obama to Escalate
in
Afghanistan?
By Tom Hayden, Huffington Post, March 27, 2009.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tom-hayden/progressive-think-tank-te_b_179174.html
The Center for American Progress has positioned itself as a
"progressive" Washington think tank, especially suited to channel new
thinking and expertise into the Obama administration. It therefore is
deeply disappointing that CAP has issued a call for a ten-year war in
Afghanistan, including an immediate military escalation, just as
President Obama prepares to unveil his Afghanistan/Pakistan policies to
the American public and NATO this week.
It is likely that Obama will follow most of CAP's strategic advice,
assuming the think tank to be the progressive wing of what's possible
within the Beltway.
That means a long counter-insurgency war ahead, with
everything from massive incarcerations and detention to
Predator strikes that amass increasing civilian casualties. CAP begins
by calling on the president to meet the request of his commander in
Afghanistan for another 15,000 troops in addition to the 17,000 Obama
already has committed, which would bring the near-term US total to
70,000. To pay for these additional troops, CAP proposes redirecting $25
billion annually from combat in Iraq to Afghanistan. In addition, CAP
favors up to $5 billion annually for diplomatic and economic assistance,
also from a redirection of Iraq spending.
Even assuming the economic assistance reaches villages
instead of corrupt middlemen, CAP's primary emphasis is
a military one, sending larger numbers of American troops on a
counterinsurgency mission in southern and eastern Afghanistan, as well
as the outskirts of Kabul. Make no mistake, the American mission will be
to fight, kill and capture, and, is intended to leave NATO allies in
secondary training roles. The CAP proposal seems to flesh out the Obama
strategy already described in a New York Times January 28 headline,
"Aides Say Obama's Afghan Aims Elevate War Over Development." The CAP
report calculates that in FY 2009, "the ration of funding for military
forces versus non-military international engagement is 18 to 1."
There is no exit strategy contemplated in the CAP proposal, although the
president apparently is been asking for one behind the scenes. Nor is
there any projected cap on future escalation The CAP timeline,
front-loaded with military force, is as fanciful about
Afghanistan/Pakistan as the neo-conservatives were towards Iraq in the
Nineties:
As a practical matter, all that is certain is that there will be blood.
When the problem is a nail, reach for the hammer. But military
occupation, particularly a surge of US troops into the Pashtun region in
southern Afghanistan and Pakistan, is the surest way to inflame
nationalist resistance and greater support for the Taliban. President
Hamid Karzai said last December that "the coalition went around Afghan
villages, burst into people's homes and has been committing
extraditional killings in our country." A United Nations investigator
made the same point in 2008, accusing the CIA and Special Forces "of
conducting nighttime raids and killing civilians in Afghanistan with
impunity."
Pakistan's prime minister said the same years that "if America wants to
see itself clean of terrorists, we also want that our villages and towns
should not be bombed." As a January 2009 report by the Carnegie
Endowment concluded, "the only meaningful way to halt the insurgency's
momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops
is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban."
CAP takes no notice of the torture and detention without human rights
protections at Kabul's Bagram prison, now undergoing massive expansion.
Obama's team already says his anti-torture executive order does not
cover the hundreds detained in Afghanistan, so it is likely that the
American forces will launch a massive "preventive incarceration"
campaign in the months ahead. CAP's silence on this matter is especially
disturbing since the think tank expressed deep concern over the same
policies in Iraq.
Many Americans are confused, but it is not necessary to
have a West Point or Ivy League degree to understand the heart of the
matter. Whether it is the street of LA or the alleys of Kabul,
law-and-order always comes first along with promises of jobs and
development "later, a later that gradually becomes never. In Afghanistan
and Pakistan, the levels of suffering are among the most extreme in the
world, and from suffering, from having nothing to live for, comes the
will to die for a cause.
United Nations recent development data places Afghanistan 173rd out of
178 countries; Pakistan is 136th. According to such estimates, about
sixty percent of children in the Pashtun areas are "moderately" or
"severely" stunted. In Afghanistan as a whole, such children will be
spared miserable lives because the] country has the highest infant
mortality rate in the world. No more need be said.
As to the threat from al Qaeda, it is understandable that the president
would define himself as an aggressive commander-in-chief. But he must
wonder if our killing so many civilians and stunting so many children
won't result in yet another generation dying to hate us. He must wonder
if he is squandering the good will of the world, including the Muslim
world, by sending more Americans to kill and die in a quagmire. He must
recognize that he is putting his eight-year presidency on the line.
He must wonder too, as he approaches his meetings in
Europe, why NATO is occupying countries so far from its
base in the mainly-white Western world. It is hard to avoid the hint
that the white man's burden is falling on the shoulders of our first
African-American president. The only solution to the Afghanistan /
Pakistan quagmires has to be a regional one, as argued forcefully by
Tariq Ali in his recent book, as well as by Barnett Rubin and Ahmed
Rashid, but NATO is the stranger in the neighborhood. CAP recognizes
this critical problem, as does Hillary Clinton who will meet the
regional players at the Hague next week. The problem is that NATO,
burdened with imperial assumptions, would like China, Russia, and the
Central Asian Republics constituting the Shanghai Cooperation
Organization, to be satellite parties to the Western occupation of
Afghanistan / Pakistan. But the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, while
having serious stakes in quelling instability in the region, calls on
the US and NATO to go home.
Can the burden be sustained politically and economically for ten years
more? Already Canada and the Netherlands have set timelines for
withdrawing their forces, assigned now to the most violent regions of
southern Afghanistan. Germany may be the next to balk. And with the
American economy in shambles, can anyone envision a war whose costs will
exceed one trillion dollars a decade from now? Only the
neo-conservatives, if Iraq is any example, which makes it tragic that
CAP has aligned itself with their strategy of the "long war."
Tom Hayden was a leader of the student, civil rights, peace and
environmental movements of the 1960s. He served 18 years in the
California legislature, where he chaired labor, higher education and
natural resources committees. He is the author of ten books, including
"Street Wars" (New Press, 2004). He is a professor at Occidental
College, Los Angeles, and was a visiting fellow at Harvard's Institute
of Politics last fall.
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