Of course, that’s not how it’s reported. “US troops may stay in Afghanistan until 2024,” was the understated headline in The Telegraph. Under negotiation is an agreement keeping 25,000 American troops in Afghanistan a full decade after the current withdrawal deadline. Also on the table are military bases that the United States doesn’t want to give up…ever.

This is madness. “If the job is not done,” said the Russian ambassador to Kabul, “then several thousand troops…will not be able to do the job that 150,000 troops couldn’t do.”

The only thing worse than the hopelessness of this plan is the backwardness of it. In an effort to prevent terrorism, we are continuing the very thing that creates terrorism: our presence!  

Al Qaeda “has been precise in telling America the reasons [it's] waging war on us,” according to CIA analyst Michael Scheuer, who tracked Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999. “None of the reasons have anything to do with our freedom, liberty, and democracy, but have everything to do with U.S. policies and actions in the Muslim world.”

In his book Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism, political scientist Robert Pape analyzed every known case of suicide bombers from 1980 to 2005. He found that “what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.” Specifically, he discovered that “al Qaeda is today less a product of Islamic fundamentalism than of a simple strategic goal: to compel the United States and its Western allies to withdraw combat forces from the Arabian Peninsula and other Muslim countries.”

The Obama administration can’t pretend that it doesn’t know this fact. In 2004, the Pentagon concluded that “American direct involvement in the Muslim World has paradoxically elevated the stature of and support for radical Islamists, while diminishing support for the United States to single-digits in some Arab societies. Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. [In] the eyes of the Muslim world, American occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq has not led to democracy there, but only more chaos and suffering.”

Firsthand accounts confirm these conclusions. British journalist Johann Hari interviewed former Islamic militants who had since rejected jihad. He probed them, in independent interviews, about what made them join the cause in the first place. “Every one of them said the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 — from Guantanamo to Iraq — made jihadism seem more like an accurate description of the world.” One of them put it this way: “You’d see Bush on the television building torture camps and bombing Muslims and you think — anything is justified to stop this. What are we meant to do, just stand still and let him cut our throats?”

New York Times reporter David Rohde saw this attitude up close when the Taliban held him hostage for seven months. Looking back on his captors, he remembered, “Commanders fixated on the deaths of Afghan, Iraqi and Palestinian civilians in military airstrikes, as well as the American detention of Muslim prisoners who had been held for years without being charged.”

These are the sad facts of a desperate region. We do not condone their violence, but we must understand their motives.

American troops and bases in Afghanistan will only make it easier for terrorists and insurgents to recruit angry young men to fight and die for their cause. By extending the withdrawal deadline, we are not stopping terrorism at the source, as President Obama would have us believe. We are multiplying their ranks. We are taunting and humiliating them. We are endangering our nation.

==========

This op-ed was published in today’s Hazleton Standard-Speaker.

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According to the Brookings Institution, for every militant that is killed “10 or so civilians” can also consider themselves victims. It is a little known fact that President Obama has drastically increased these attacks since taking office.

For too long now, the West has been murdering innocent Pakistani civilians…whilst criticizing Taliban or al-Qaeda attacks that have killed analogous numbers…

Playing the China Card: Has the Obama Administration Miscalculated in Pakistan? — Dilip Hiro

To supply the 100,000 American troops now in Afghanistan, as well as 50,000 troops from other NATO nations and more than 100,000 employees of private contractors, the Pentagon must have unfettered access to that country through its neighbors. Among the six countries adjoining Afghanistan, only three have seaports, with those of China far too distant to be of practical use. Of the remaining two, Iran — Washington’s number-one enemy in the region — is out. That places Pakistan in a unique position.

Obama Troop Surge Decision Ignored Pak-Taliban Ties — Gareth Porter

…Pakistan was determined to avoid an Afghan government “led by a Pashtun sympathetic to India” — i.e., Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The conclusion was that the Pakistanis would continue to aid the insurgency the U.S. was trying to defeat.

The NIE on Afghanistan concluded that the United States was unlikely to succeed in Afghanistan unless Pakistan changed its policy to take military action against insurgent sanctuaries in Pakistan. But the estimate on Pakistan made it clear that no such change in Pakistani policy could be expected.

But Obama approved a plan for 30,000 additional troops anyway…

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What do we have to show for that tab? Two wars that continue to occupy 150,000 troops and tie up a quarter of our defense budget; a bloated homeland-security apparatus that has at times pushed the bounds of civil liberty; soaring oil prices partially attributable to the global war on bin Laden’s terrorist network; and a chunk of our mounting national debt, which threatens to hobble the economy unless lawmakers compromise on an unprecedented deficit-reduction deal.

All of that has not given us, at least not yet, anything close to the social or economic advancements produced by the battles against America’s costliest past enemies.

What If Bin Laden Had Stood Trial? — Robert Lambert

[The] war on terror lost moral authority and became a gift to al-Qaida propagandists. The fact that the most effective counterterrorism is always closely focused on the prosecution of terrorist conspirators appeared to be of no concern in the Pentagon or Whitehall.

The Osama bin Laden Exception — Glenn Greenwald

The Allied powers could easily have taken every Nazi war criminal they found and summarily executed them without many people caring. But they didn’t do that, and the reason they didn’t is because how the Nazis were punished would determine not only the character of the punishing nations, but more importantly, would set the standards for how future punishment would be doled out.

Surveillance, Not Waterboarding, Led to Bin Laden — Spencer Ackerman

[Waterboarding] and other abusive techniques failed to get the name out of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi. A New York Times account has both men claiming not to know even the courier’s nom de guerre, which actually may have counted as a kind of confirmation by omission in this case. That says something about the limits of brute force in interrogation.

Torture May Have Slowed Hunt for Bin Laden, Not Hastened It — Dan Froomkin

It now appears likely that several detainees had information about a key al Qaeda courier — information that might have led authorities directly to bin Laden years ago. But subjected to physical and psychological brutality, “they gave us the bare minimum amount of information they could get away with to get the pain to stop, or to mislead us…”

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– Paul Krugman (Princeton University)

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Both the Democrats and the Republicans have found it to be convenient to borrow now and pay it back later.

It’s difficult for a “film salesman” like me to hypothesize what our country’s financial situation would be, had we not been involved in wars such as Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, or spent as much as we have spent for F-35’s and F-22’s and such. I also wonder what would have happened to our once great nation, had we taxed the rich a little more in order to “pay as we go.”  

I am “my history,” and I use this “history” to gain at least some sort of perspective on things currently taking place. These are two examples. They probably don’t belong here, but I just love their silliness.

It was in the late ’70s that the “new management” of Columbia Pictures Industries instituted a “Travel and Entertainment Policy Guideline.” As an “operating” executive, it caused my sales division enormous problems. My then-President told me that the new policy would save the company $200,000 per year. He was not at all pleased when I suggested to him that I “spilled” $200,000 a year.

In the early ’80s, the Polygram North American President — who had presided over a $200-million loss in the prior year — suggested to “his” four divisional Presidents that they fly business class instead of first class. We had a humungous business problem, and all he could suggest was to fly business class.

The Columbia and Polygram managements knew nothing about the businesses that they were responsible for. Rather then look to increase business, they tried to reduce expenses an infinitesimal amount.

It appears to me that the President and the Congress are just playing political games as our once great nation slips away from 21st-century relevance. Please note the following:

According to the CBO analysis released on Sept. 7, by the end of the current fiscal 2010 year, which ended with the closure of September, there is another deficit of at least $1.3 trillion – what the CBO labeled, “the second-largest shortfall in the past 65 years,” second to last year’s deficit of 9.9 percent of GDP. Even if all the Bush tax cuts were repealed, the CBO concludes that the deficit will still be nearly $1.1 trillion in 2011.

The cumulative deficit from 2010 to 2019 under the president’s proposals will total $9.3 trillion. Washington projects a 2020 end-of-decade debt to top $24.5 trillion, even exceeding the Gross Domestic Product projection for 2019 of $22.8 trillion.

The $1.24 billion in program cuts proposed by the GOP-run House Appropriations Committee included $650 million in highway money for states provided in the fiscal 2010 budget, $250 million for a Striving Readers program that Obama wanted to eliminate next year, and $75 million in election assistance grants for states, also slated for elimination in the President’s budget. The earmarks Republicans would eliminate range from $1 million for a Customs and Border Patrol solar-powered batteries program to $341 million for Army Corps of Engineers construction.

The Republicans shrugged off an analysis by a Goldman Sachs economist that the $61 billion in cuts, if enacted, could slow economic growth this year by up to 2 percentage points.

When President George W. Bush was elected, he inherited a $230-billion surplus. In eight years of “fiscally conservative” Republican rule, the national debt went from $5 trillion to $12 trillion. President Obama continues to increase the national debt. At some point, it needs to stop.

Nevertheless: It’s disturbing to watch the Republican Congress running roughshod over programs that should not be reduced or eliminated. The “courageous” GOP are trying to reduce or eliminate funding for PBS and NPR and are going after funding for Planned Parenthood. I suspect that when they go after PBS and NPR the Republicans will be pleased to silence what they believe to be a “voice from the left,” and by eliminating Planned Parenthood they would reduce legal abortions.

Now consider the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to date:

One Trillion, 160 Billion, 258 Million Dollars

How many PBSs, NPRs, and Planned Parenthoods would this fund?

Everything written above is about money. How about our boys and girls DYING there?

Where are ABC, CBS, and NBC News on this story?

Someone’s children are killed protecting exactly what?

President Obama, where are you?

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