Spell "Quagmire" A-F-G-H-A-N-I-S-T-A-N

punditman says...that punditman is posting yet another article about Afghanistan. Why is punditman doing this? Because it seems the lessons of the past have not been learned. It seems that bewildered politicians and generals were playing hooky for one lesson in particular. That's the one that explained that occupying armies almost always end up being resisted, especially if they hang around long enough to do a lot of damage. Afghanistan is no exception. Duh!

Meanwhile, we can depend on the Washington Post and other bastions of brilliance to play their usual subservient roles.

By Joshua Holland, AlterNet

There are few pundits quite as dishonest as the WaPo's Jackson Diehl, so who knows if his concern-trolling on behalf of our European allies is even true:

As the president and his National Security Council privately debate whether to send tens of thousands of troops to war, America's European allies watch with a mixture of anxiety and anguish. They know that if the deployment goes forward, they will be asked to make their own difficult and politically costly contributions of soldiers or other personnel. But they are, if anything, even more worried that the American president will choose a feckless strategy for what they consider a critical mission. And they are frustrated that they must watch and wait -- and wait and wait -- for the president to make up his mind.

To back his contention, he cites Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, then fleshes it out with the words of a "senior commander in one European army," "the words of one ambassador" and "another ambassador." So there are two Europeans whose quotes are perfectly inline with Diehl's personal preference for more military force in Afghanistan. And apparently, they basically represent a continental consensus:

European governments bought in to Obama's ambitious plan to pacify Afghanistan when he presented it in March. Unlike the U.S. president, they mostly haven't had second thoughts. By and large they agree with the recommendations developed by the commander Obama appointed, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who says that unless the momentum of the Taliban is broken in the next year, the war may be lost.

Even if we buy his story, it's worth noting that Diehl's never met a foreign war he didn't like and was naturally far less sympathetic to European sensibilities when most of those in the Old Country vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq.

Now he's become so preoccupied with the idea that the Yur-peans may think us wobbly -- and perhaps less-than-manly -- if the Obama administration chooses not to escalate the conflict that he doesn't bother to argue why we should.

He doesn't articulate what success in Afghanistan might look like, and he takes it as a given that more troops would finally give NATO forces the upper hand.

But that is anything but a sure thing ...

Here are a few recent stories to consider when weighing the prospects of achieving "victory" in Afghanistan.

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War Without Purpose

punditman says...This article by Chris Hedges outlines the utter disaster that is the Afghan War. The word quagmire comes to mind. Punditman has said from the beginning that you don't fight terrorists with armies who call in airstrikes that destroy villages full of civilians, or by pushing a button on the other side of the world that causes some drone to instantly vaporize people who did nothing to harm you. It's madness. But that is what armies do. Right from the beginning, the whole Afghanistan intervention, with its changing, nebulus justifications has turned into a series of blunders, scandals and slaughters.

Unfortunately, there is not much left of the antiwar movement because too many people think Afghanistan is a "good war" (unlike Iraq). The Obama Effect has essentially anesthetized critical thought. Was the movement against the Iraq War just an anti-Bush movement? You begin to wonder. Alex Cockburn over at counterpunch, sums up the pathetic state of the antiwar movement, thusly:

Where are the mobilizations, actions, civil disobedience? Antiwar coalitions like United for Peace and Justice and Win Without War (with MoveOn also belatedly adopting this craven posture) don’t say clearly “US troops out now!” from Afghanistan. They whine about the “absence of a clear mission” (Win Without War), plead futilely for “an exit strategy” (UFPJ). One letter from the UFPJ coalition (which includes Code Pink) to the Congressional Progressive Caucus in May laconically began a sentence with the astounding words, “To defeat the Taliban and stabilize the country, the U.S. must enable the Afghan people…”

To "defeat" the Taliban? With a peace movement like that, who needs a war movement? No wonder the war drags on and on. Even Western politicians have begun calls for negotiating our way out of this ill conceived mess.

By Chris Hedges

Al-Qaida could not care less what we do in Afghanistan. We can bomb Afghan villages, hunt the Taliban in Helmand province, build a 100,000-strong client Afghan army, stand by passively as Afghan warlords execute hundreds, maybe thousands, of Taliban prisoners, build huge, elaborate military bases and send drones to drop bombs on Pakistan. It will make no difference. The war will not halt the attacks of Islamic radicals. Terrorist and insurgent groups are not conventional forces. They do not play by the rules of warfare our commanders have drilled into them in war colleges and service academies. And these underground groups are protean, changing shape and color as they drift from one failed state to the next, plan a terrorist attack and then fade back into the shadows. We are fighting with the wrong tools. We are fighting the wrong people. We are on the wrong side of history. And we will be defeated in Afghanistan as we will be in Iraq.

The cost of the Afghanistan war is rising. Tens of thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed or wounded. July has been the deadliest month in the war for NATO combatants, with at least 50 troops, including 26 Americans, killed. Roadside bomb attacks on coalition forces are swelling the number of wounded and killed. In June, the tally of incidents involving roadside bombs, also called improvised explosive devices (IEDs), hit 736, a record for the fourth straight month; the number had risen from 361 in March to 407 in April and to 465 in May. The decision by President Barack Obama to send 21,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan has increased our presence to 57,000 American troops. The total is expected to rise to at least 68,000 by the end of 2009. It will only mean more death, expanded fighting and greater futility.

We have stumbled into a confusing mix of armed groups that include criminal gangs, drug traffickers, Pashtun and Tajik militias, kidnapping rings, death squads and mercenaries. We are embroiled in a civil war. The Pashtuns, who make up most of the Taliban and are the traditional rulers of Afghanistan, are battling the Tajiks and Uzbeks, who make up the Northern Alliance, which, with foreign help, won the civil war in 2001. The old Northern Alliance now dominates the corrupt and incompetent government. It is deeply hated. And it will fall with us.

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Iraq: Five Years of War

...and the Media are still M.I.A.

punditman says...

Five years of combat, over 1.2 million Iraqi deaths, almost 4,000 American dead and tens of thousands of US wounded -- and still, the Iraq War's apologists and its media sycophants still don't get it. Or they refuse to. Instead, they remain so blinded by chesty notions of "American exceptionalism" and "good intentions" that they still can't see the desert for the shrubs.

Meanwhile, Iraq drowns in an ocean of suffering.

And whose fault could this be? According to the war's apologists, it lies not only with Jihadists and suicide bombers (who, it should be stressed, were conspicuously missing in pre-invasion Iraq), and other insurgents, who for some reason refuse to lay down their arms -- but also with the incompetents responsible for the "poor planning" behind the occupation and the lack of a "effective counter-insurgency strategy." In other words, blame the bureaucrats for messing up an otherwise "noble project." Missing from this analysis is the vileness of the project itself. Also missing is any hint that those who are directly responsible should be held directly accountable; namely, the Bush administration and others in the "coalition of the willing."

Typical of this mindset are the views expressed in an article by Pulitzer prize winner, John F. Burns, of the New York Times, entitled No end in sight to bleeding in Iraq.

Burns chronicles his and other journalists' boosterism as the first bombs began to fall on Baghdad five years ago:

On the evening of March 19, 2003, a few Western journalists had grandstand seats for the big event in Baghdad, the start of the full-scale American bombing of targets in the Iraqi capital.We were on the 21st-storey roof of the Palestine Hotel, with a panoramic view of Saddam Hussein's command complex across the Tigris River.

The first cruise missile struck the vast, bunker-like presidential command complex in what would become, under the U.S. occupation, the Green Zone. Then missiles and bombs struck palaces, military complexes, intelligence buildings, the heart of Saddam's tyranny. Iraqis yearning for their liberation called it "the air show.''

Among many on the roof, there was a sense that the suffering of millions of Iraqis that we had chronicled, and pitied, was ending. Those missiles and bombs seemed to be retribution for a ruthless dictator and the wretchedness he had visited on Iraq's people.

I get it. So the sentiment went something like this: "Yeah, sure, war is hell and all that, but we're embedded with the good guys...now on with the big event"!

Burns sees the whole Iraq debacle primarily in terms of a series of bureaucratic missteps, from the failure to stop mobs from looting historic sites while US marines stood by and followed their orders to protect only the Oil Ministry, to "the failure to find weapons of mass destruction; the absence of a serious plan for the period after Baghdad fell; the disbanding of the Iraqi army, and thus casting aside the help it might have given in fighting the insurgency; the lack of an effective American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year."

The failure to "find" weapons of mass destruction? Is he suggesting there was something significant to find? Are we to believe he never listened to former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter?, who, in the lead up to the ill-fated Iraq invasion, argued that Iraq possessed no significant weapons of mass destruction?

The lack of an "effective" American counterinsurgency strategy until the troop increase last year? Ah, yes the "surge is working" -- that is if you consider ethnic cleansing and a bloody stalemate to be signs of "success."

Burns continues...

There were also instances when America's intentions were betrayed by its troops, with the abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib, with the shooting deaths of 24 civilians in Haditha and with the rape and murder of a teenage girl at Mahmudiya, along with the killing of three of her family, all leading to court-martial hearings that tore at the heart of anyone who starts from a position of admiration for the U.S. military.

Alright, now I am embarrassed for the guy. America's "intentions" (lilly white of course), were "betrayed" by a few soldiers? What did he expect would happen? I have a sneaky feeling he may have missed a few more "instances," so perhaps he should tune in to Winter Soldier.

Burns can easily be considered an early cheerleader of the Iraq invasion -- one of those journalists who urged it on, a laptop bombardier, if you will. Here is an excerpt from an October 2007 interview with him in The Independent:

In the pages of the New York Times he has argued that, even without WMD, "the stronger case [for military intervention] was the one that needed no inspectors to confirm: that Saddam Hussein, in his 23 years in power, plunged this country into a bloodbath of medieval proportions, and exported some of that terror to his neighbours."

This is liberal interventionism at its worst. Find a dictator with an appalling human rights record (easy enough), and viola! Causis belli! Invade the country, foist our Western ways on them, toss an election in and install a puppet regime. Aside from myopic idiocy, this sort of media cheerleading supports the doctrine of "preventive war," which stands in direct contravention to, and respect for, international law, treaties and institutions.

What's more, Burns sees his home-side rooting as having had no impact:

Although I was writing for an American newspaper with considerable reach and influence in Washington, DC, I didn't see myself as being a player in that process. I felt that that was something that was quite independent, at least in my mind.

Not a player? Just another "guy with an opinion" who called for the invasion of a country of 27 million people? I guess we are not supposed to notice where he works or the power of that soapbox (oddly enough, he is correct, but in hindsight: why should anyone trust the NY Times anymore, after the unmasking of Judith Miller as an administration mouthpiece in the lead up to war?).

The sycophantic mindset necessitates turning a blind eye to the crime of international aggression while ignoring other possible motives that the US and Britain might have had. Why Iraq? Why not Burma?

So, if there was no legal basis to invade Iraq, what moral imperative gave Bush the right to invade? Wait...it always comes to me...9-11! Media mealy mouths never fail to remind me of this. Never mind that Iraq had nothing to do with what occurred on that fateful day. But the sycophants ignored this long established fact, and in many cases, actually parroted this Cheney fiction in the lead up to war.

In an world full of honest reporting, the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq would by now be considered, an historic crime of great magnitude. A crime not just against the Iraqi people, who did not threaten anyone, but a crime against humanity and a crime against the truth. Not so.

You would think that after the release of a study by The Centre for Public Integrity that shows that at least 935 demonstrably false statements were made on 532 separate occasions by President George W. Bush, Vice-President Richard Cheney, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, and press secretaries Ari Fleischer and Scott McClellan -- that the media would care to report the truth about stove-piped intelligence. Not so.

What should be headline news is generally ignored or brushed aside and instead, we are supposed to believe that 935 false statements were the result of "faulty intelligence" -- instead of blatant lying and systematic propaganda.

If the mainstream media had viewed the Iraq War as the supreme crime that it is, then impeachment proceedings against Team Bush would have begun by now. And Team Blair and all other team members in the "coalition of the willing" would be facing similar charges. But not so.

Part of the basis for any such legal action would necessarily involve the idea of deliberate deception. Not surprisingly, neo-con apologists have never liked such talk. Back in July, 2003, Norman Specter wrote in the The Globe and Mail that, "The case for war did not rest on whether he (Saddam) had X number of biological weapons laboratories or Y amount of nerve agent. It rested on his record and ambitions."

At the time, Punditman wrote the following:

Well, no actually.

The "case for war", at least according to those who sent soldiers to wage it at their behest, actually rested upon Iraq being an imminent threat to the security of the US, indeed to "the peace of the world," (to pluck just one Orwellian passage from Bush's infinite inventory).

And that "case" was built upon a very specific set of claims, accusations, and assertions concerning Mr. Hussein's apparent possession of "vast quantities" of WMDs and his supposed links to Al Queda. These "facts" we were told, left the United States and Britain no choice but to attack ASAP. The cruelty of Saddam's regime and his previous aggressions and miscalculations notwithstanding were simply ad-on pretexts for regime change, once it became clear that the world wasn't buying the Bush-Blair "case for war."

Finally, you would think--you would hope, by now--that establishment media would at least view the Iraqi catastrophe through the lens of the victims while pointing out the underlying cause of the tragedy. Not so.

In June 2007, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees published a study that estimated that 2.2 million Iraqis had been displaced to neighbouring countries, another 2 million were displaced internally and 40% of Iraq's middle class is believed to have fled the country.

Meanwhile, in the seven months preceding the end of May, 2007, a mere 69 Iraqis were given refugee status in the United States. Good luck to the Iraqi refugee trying to flee to America! And yet his or her plight is the direct result of the violence and chaos brought about by this horrific war--a war initiated by the United States, a war that was unnecessary, unprovoked, and illegal -- and a war that has made conditions much worse in the region and, in many ways, much worse for America itself.

Then again, average Iraqis, and I dare say average Americans, were never the main concern of those who have so callously plotted their destinies, their deaths and their sufferings.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to do their job of masquerading as a functioning "fourth estate" -- as they kiss the king's behind.

Torture a Kabul speciality

Ottawa's deal to inspect prisoners shows it hasn't learned from war history in Afghanistan

punditman says:
The names may change and the roles may reverse, but the reality of Afghanistan's brutal history is something that Canada is learning about the hard way. Quagmires are created by a combination of arrogance, ignorance, naivete and stubborness. Canada is following the script to a tee.