The Long Crisis

Posts Tagged ‘President Obama’

President Obama’s prime time speech from West Point this past Tuesday evening contained elements that only could originate in a brain dead airless Washington D.C. environment. Barack Obama used to be an intelligent man. But then he won the job of being the President and occupied the Whitehouse. As a result his brain has been quickly infected with a dangerous and probably non-curable “think tank” Washington disease. Unfortunately, most of his advisers have carried the disease for years so we have quite a negative feedback loop at work in the oval office that almost guarantees fuzzy dream thread worn thinking.

President Obama spoke of building up the government capacity in Afghanistan. As well said in Juan Cole’s Informed Comment blog when it comes to a government in Afghanistan there is no there there.

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President Barack Obama’s commitment to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending 55,000 US troops to that country (counting the 21,000 he dispatched last winter shortly after being inaugurated) depends heavily on a hope of building up an Afghan government and army over to which the US can eventually turn control. But one of the questions we seldom hear any detail about concerns the country’s governmental capacity. Does the government function? Can it deliver services?

As might be expected, governmental capacity is low, but here are some specifics. Months after the controversial presidential election that many Afghans consider stolen, there is no cabinet, and parliament is threatening to go on recess before confirming a new one because the president is unconstitutionally late in presenting the names. There are grave suspicions that some past and present cabinet members have engaged in the embezzlement of substantial sums of money. There is little parliamentary oversight. Almost no one bothers to attend the parliamentary sessions. The cabinet ministries are unable to spend the money allocated to them on things like education and rural development, and actually spent less in absolute terms last year than they did in the previous two years. Only half of the development projects for which money was allotted were even begun last year, and none was completed.
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Committing more resources to fight to support a totally corrupt government in Afghanistan is pure madness. It will surely lead to Obama being a one term President. President Obama you need to get out of the airless Washington environment and rethink Afghanistan. All our involvement there is accomplishing is to make a few corrupt politicians and warloards filthy rich. All at the expense of the drowning US taxpayer.

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As a US Vietnam veteran I saw for myself how careless the American military machine was in “protecting” the people we were supposed to be helping. No one knows for sure how many Vietnamese we dispatched to an early grave but it was probably between 2,000,000 to 3,000,000, the vast majority of them civilians. The tonnage of bombs that we dropped on that small Asian nation was more than all of the bombs dropped in World War Two.

The justification for the massive cost of the war in blood and treasure was based upon the absurd assertion that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong were a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. What complete nonsense. Pure BS is a better description and all but the most rabid of the troops who served in Vietnam for more than a month or two knew it.

The Vietnamese were first of all dedicated nationalists fighting a war to reunite the two Vietnams that emerged by decree of the allies after World War Two while the US mistook the war effort by the VC to be the first step in expanding communism across SE Asia. This misreading by US leadership as to the intentions of the Viet Cong cost the US and the Vietnamese people dearly. One clear fact is that in both Vietnam and Afghanistan the US threw its support to corrupt and inefficient governments while losing the support of the general population.

It seems that US “leaders” have learned nothing from the Vietnam experience. In Afghanistan Obama is making the same sort of claims that were made so many years ago by Johnson and Nixon about the critical nature of the Vietnam War to American security. Obama is saying that a rag tag group of probably no more than 20,000 Taliban fighters, who want foreign troops out of their country and the right to install their form of government in their own country, are a grave threat to the security of the US. The Taliban, while certainly fanatics with a style of governing that is harsh, are a local organization, not an international terrorist group.

The Bush position, now adopted and promoted by President Obama, that if the Taliban win they will give al Queda secure bases in Afghanistan from which to plot further attacks upon the US just doesn’t make sense. If we are so concerned about al Queda bases why don’t we take on al Queda in Somalia or Yemen? No matter what Dick Cheney may say the Taliban are not al Queda; in fact the Taliban considers al Queda fighters as unwanted foreigners much as they look upon US troops as unwanted foreigners. Today Al Queda is no more welcome in Afghanistan than American and NATO forces and have almost no presence in the country.

As with Vietnam the frequent use of air power by the America military and the resulting “collateral” damage to civilians is one reason that Americans are far less welcome in Afghanistan than they were eight long years ago. While the military has promised to be “more careful” in calling in air strikes the occasional bombing of peasant villages, wedding parties, and funeral processions along with the initial denials of such acts by the military until evidence of the destruction pours in, only gives strength to the Taliban. Afghanistan is really a war that American can not win. President Obama is a smart guy and deep down must know that. Or judging from his actions maybe not.

I’m very disappointed in President Obama for adopting the same mantle of hubris, arrogance, and fuzzy thinking that has kept the US mired in one war after another since World War Two. By escalating the Afghanistan War into the Af-Pak theater Obama stands a very good chance of reaping a completely unmanageable set of unintended consequences that will hasten America’s fall from status as a first rate world power.

Sadly, the refusal to admit mistakes seems to be a requirement to become President of the United States. Presidents seem to be so fearful of “losing” any war on their watch that they are willing to continue on and escalate a path of destruction even when they know the probability of a favorable outcome is poor to none.

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I’ve always thought that the War in Afghanistan is nuts. I also think that a good understanding of Afghanistan and its centuries old traditional tribal organizational structure and culture has been and is still sorely lacking by our generals and top level government officials.

Sure, America had the right to go after those responsible for the 9/11 attacks. But to invade Afghanistan with a conventional military force was a stupid way to go about it. To take on the Taliban was like taking on a hotel owner because one of its guests, the US CIA trained and funded Osama bin Laden, who helped us fight our proxy war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, turned on us and committed a horrific crime. What a case of blowback.

Surely, the powerful US, with its teams of highly trained special forces and Navy Seal teams could have gotten the revenge job done in a smart, fairly low cost way. If only at the time we had a President with a fully functioning brain we wouldn’t still be in Afghanistan eight years after 9/11 and have Osama bin Laden still unaccounted for.

Then to make matters much worse we took our eye off Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and invaded a country whose leader had been one of our big Mid Eastern buddies for eight years during the Iraq – Iran War but whom we didn’t like very much when he wouldn’t dance to our tune. What a gift to Osama. His plan all along was to bleed the US dry and he has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been wildly expensive misguided endeavors for the US both in blood and treasure.

President Obama has a considerably higher amount of brain power than George W. Bush but yet he immediately made the Afghanistan War his to lose by escalating the conflict rather than seeking to find an honorable way out. So instead of finding ways to defuse the conflict the US, under Obama’s orders, has stepped up combat activity with the predictable result. US military deaths for the month of August, 2009 are the highest of the entire war and the trend looks to be for more bad news.

Is it the old American hubris trap that Obama has fallen into? And why has he continued with the misguided Bush policy of authorizing the launch of destabilizing drone air missile attacks into Pakistan? US long distance “warriors” are probably killing or wounding ten innocent Pakistani civilians for every al Queda suspect taken out. And in a country where revenge is a matter of honor many more anti-American militants are being created than destroyed.

The missile attacks are political poison to the democratically elected government in Pakistan and are complicating an already complicated situation. Our own missiles may have the unintended consequences of bringing down the Pakistan government. One that may well be replaced by truly crazy and violent fundamental extremists who do hate the US.

But all of this is not just my opinion. Watch the above video. The video brings you three former high-ranking CIA agents explaining why there is no “victory” to be won in Afghanistan. Unless he is very lucky President Obama’s War is going to cost him his reelection chances.

It is a stupid war for the US to be engaged in. Our war against Osama bin Laden has been transformed into a war against the Taliban. Since the Taliban were created and still have the support of important segments of the Pakistani military and are mostly local Afghanis, and the puppet Karzai government is increasingly corrupt and ineffective, we are involved in a war that is so complicated with local nuances that we don’t even understand the forces we are dealing with. In fact, I suspect that we are being played by corrupt Afghani officials and warlords who place profit far above serving their country.

Is pushing the US vision and version of oil pipelines across the far reaches of Afghanistan so important to us that we are willing to engage in a perpetual war across the entire Af-Pak region? Is Obama so quickly under the control of special interest groups who are war profiteers? I only ask the questions. I have no facts to back up my worse fears. I do know that high ranking CIA agents think that the War in Afghanistan can not be won. Which begs the question. If the war can not be won what in the world are we hoping to accomplish in Afghanistan?

Oh yes. I understand that our generals still think that the war can be won. But then they think that of every war they are engaged in or they would not be generals. I very well remember General Westmoreland and his always optimistic statements about winning the Vietnam War. All that was required was more time and more troops. History records that the general was a bit too optimistic as generals often are.

The arguments made for the escalation of the war by the Obama administration sound as contrived and frankly nuts to me as those made by Bush and his band of fuzzy thinkers or the predictions of Presidents Johnson and Nixon about the “light at the end of the tunnel” in Vietnam. What do you think? Is there any hope left that the US can win a war in far away remote and rugged Afghanistan?

And if we do “win” what have we won? The right to build a nation that is currently one of the poorest and most corrupt in the world? Do we really think we can manage that task when four years after Hurricane Katrina we have been unable to even restore New Orleans, an important American city. Hubris and the inability to admit mistakes carries a high price.

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