Down with the Warfare State!

Why should warfare-for-all be off-budget if Medicare-for-All isn't?

Senior House Democrats have introduced legislation that would impose a surtax beginning in 2011 to cover the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bill was unveiled late Thursday by David R. Obey of Wisconsin, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, and has the backing of John P. Murtha of Pennsylvania, chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, and John B. Larson of Connecticut, chairman of the Democratic Caucus.

The three lawmakers said in a joint statement:

For the last year, as we've struggled to pass health care reform, we've been told that we have to pay for the bill -- and the cost over the next decade will be about a trillion dollars.

Now the president is being asked to consider an enlarged counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan, which proponents tell us will take at least a decade and would also cost about a trillion dollars. But unlike the health care bill, that would not be paid for. We believe that's wrong.

The only people who've paid any price for our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan are our military families. We believe that if this war is to be fought, it's only fair that everyone share the burden

Discussing the idea earlier this month, Murtha said he knew the bill would not be enacted and that advocates of a surtax were simply trying to send a message about the moral obligation to pay for the wars.

The bill would require the president to set the surtax so that it fully pays for the previous year's war cost. But it would allow for a one-year delay in the implementation of the tax if the president determines that the economy is too weak to sustain that kind of tax change. It also would exempt military members who have served in combat since Sept. 11, 2001, along with their families, and the families of soldiers killed in combat.

Malalai Joya In her Own Words

 A Profile in Courage

Among those voices raised in opposition to American escalation is that of a very young and very articulate Afghan woman.

The story of Malalai Joya turns everything we have been told about Afghanistan inside out. In the official rhetoric, she is what we have been fighting for. Here is a young Afghan woman who set up a secret underground school for girls under the Taliban and – when they were toppled – cast off the burka, ran for parliament, and took on the religious fundamentalists.

Joya was four days old when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. On that day, her father dropped out of his studies to fight the invading Communist army, and vanished into the mountains.

Word reached the family that Joya's father had been blown up by a landmine – but he was alive, after losing a leg. Her illiterate mother she took her kids to refugee camps across the border in Iran. In those filthy tent-cities lying on the old Silk Road, Afghans huddled together and were treated as second-class citizens by the Iranian regime.

Joya's mother was determined her daughters would receive the education she never had. So they fled again, to camps in western Pakistan. There, Joya began to read – and was transformed.

As her political consciousness increased, she returned to Afghanistan and worked for the Organisation for Promoting Afghan Women's Capabilities (OPAWC). In a very short time she was appointed OPAWC's director.

After 9/11, the Taliban retreated only to be replaced by the warlords who had ruled Afghanistan immediately before. Joya says that, at this point,

I realised women's rights had been sold out completely... Most people in the West have been led to believe that the intolerance and brutality towards women in Afghanistan began with the Taliban regime. But this is a lie. Many of the worst atrocities were committed by the fundamentalist mujahedin during the civil war between 1992 and 1996. They introduced the laws oppressing women followed by the Taliban – and now they were marching back to power, backed by the United States. They immediately went back to their old habit of using rape to punish their enemies and reward their fighters.

Warlords have ruled Afghanistan ever since. A showcase parliament has been created for the benefit of the US in Kabul ... [real power] is with these fundamentalists who rule everywhere outside Kabul ...

Frustrated by the post-Taliban regime's efforts to squelch OPAWC, Joya decided to fight this fundamentalism by running in the election for a Loya jirga ("meeting of the elders") which was to draw up the new Afghan constitution. This girl who wanted to build a clinic was elected.

In 2005, as the youngest person elected to the Loya jirga, she saw herself surrounded by

... a long row with some of the worst abusers of human rights that our country had ever known – warlords and war criminals and fascists ... It's the same donkey, with a new saddle.

At first Joya felt nervous. But then, she says, when her turn came, she stood, looked around at the blood-soaked warlords, her fears and anxiety turned into anger and rage. She began to speak.

Why are we allowing criminals to be present here? They are responsible for our situation now... It is they who turned our country into the centre of national and international wars. They are the most anti-women elements in our society who have brought our country to this state and they intend to do the same again... They should instead be prosecuted in the national and international courts.

These warlords – who brag about being hard men – could not cope with a slender young woman speaking the truth. They began to shriek and howl, calling her a "prostitute" and "infidel", and throwing bottles at her. One man tried to punch her in the face. Her microphone was cut off and the jirga descended into a riot. A fundamentalist mob turned up a few hours later at her accommodation, announcing they had come to rape and lynch her. She had to be placed under immediate armed guard – but she refused to be protected by American troops, insisting on Afghan officers.

But the US and Nato occupiers, experts as they were in democracy, instructed Joya that she must show "politeness and respect" for the other delegates. When Zalmay Khalilzad, the US Ambassador, said this, she replied:

If these criminals raped your mother or your daughter or your grandmother, or killed seven of your sons, let alone destroyed all the moral and material treasure of your country, what words would you use against such criminals that will be inside the framework of politeness and respect?

When she ran for Parliament, she had to choose a surname for herself, to protect her family's identity. Joya won in a landslide.

I would return again to face those who had ruined my country ... and I was determined that I would stand straight and never bow again to their threats.

But the male-dominated parliament simply voted to kick her out of her elective office. President, Hamid Karzai, supported the ban.

She says there is no difference for ordinary Afghans between the Taliban and the equally fundamentalist warlords.

Which groups are labelled 'terrorist' or 'fundamentalist' depends on how useful they are to the goals of the US. You have two sides who terrorise women, but the anti-American side are 'terrorists' and the pro-American side are 'heroes'.

And it is "false" to say Afghan culture is inherently misogynistic. By the 1950s, there was a growing women's movement in Afghanistan, demonstrating and fighting for their rights. I have a story here ... from The New York Times in 1959. Here! The headline is 'Afghanistan's women lift the veil'. We were developing an open culture for women – and then the foreign wars and invasions crushed it all. If we can regain our independence, we can start this struggle again.

Any Afghan democrat today is

... trapped between two enemies. There are the occupation forces from the sky, dropping cluster bombs and depleted uranium, and on the ground there are the fundamentalist warlords and the Taliban, with their own guns. ....With the withdrawal of one enemy, the occupation forces, it [will be] easier to fight against these internal fundamentalist enemies.

If all foreign troops were to leave immediately, she says that it is wrong to expect Afghanistan will simply collapse into civil war:

What about the civil war now? Today, people are being killed – many, many war crimes. The longer the foreign troops stay in Afghanistan doing what they are doing, the worse the eventual civil war will be for the Afghan people.

Many people in Afghanistan were hopeful, she says, about Barack Obama, but

... he is actually intensifying the policy of George Bush... I know his election has great symbolic value in terms of the struggle of African-Americans for equal rights, and this struggle is one I admire and respect. But what is important for the world is not whether the President is black or white, but his actions. You can't eat symbolism ..... I say to Obama – change course, or otherwise tomorrow people will call you another Bush.

But US policy is driven by geopolitics, she says, not personalities.

Afghanistan is in the heart of Asia, so it's a very important place to have military bases – so they can control trade very easily with other Asian powers such as China, Russia, Iran and so on.

Last July, Joya addressed the English people in her column in the Guardian,

On behalf of the long-suffering people of my country, I offer my heartfelt condolences to all in the UK who have lost their loved ones on the soil of Afghanistan. We share the grief of the mothers, fathers, wives, sons and daughters of the fallen. It is my view that these British casualties, like the many thousands of Afghan civilian dead, are victims of the unjust policies that the Nato countries have pursued under the leadership of the US government.

..... I have a different message to the people of Britain. I don't believe it is in your interests to see more young people sent off to war, and to have more of your taxpayers' money going to fund an occupation that keeps a gang of corrupt warlords and drug lords in power in Kabul.

What's more, I don't believe it is inevitable that this bloodshed continues forever. Some say that if foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be.

What I have been saying for some time, now.

Last Stop Before Obamastan

I've been out of town and on the road for the last several days. My regular readers can only imagine my off-line frustrations at having access only to the retail news offerings of the MSM: it doesn't serve any useful purpose to throw one's shoes at your hosts' TV's. I do not understand how anyone more intelligent than I, like my sons, can take this clustered stuff passively. Their immune system is stronger than mine.

Fort Hood

Afghanistan: Newz & Viewz from the Front

The United Nations has announced that it will temporarily remove 600 of its foreign workers from Afghanistan. The decision comes as a result of last week's deadly attack against the international organization that killed five UN employees and three Afghans.

Despite reassurances that the UN is not pulling out of Afghanistan, the Geneva Lunch, an online newspaper for the international community, reports that the UN special representative in Kabul, Kai Eide, has offered a stern warning to the Hamid Karzai government amid ailing security conditions in Afghanistan.

There is a belief among some, that the international community [presence] will continue whatever happens because of the strategic importance of Afghanistan. I would like to emphasize that that's not true.

In other words, the fig-leaf facade of legitimacy for Western presence in Afghanistan - elections - has completely eroded.

Five U.K. Soldiers Fragged at Afghan Police Base

Five U.K. soldiers were killed yesterday in a shooting at an Afghan police base in southern Helmand province, making this the deadliest year for British troops in more than two decades.

The soldiers are believed to have been shot by a “rogue” Afghan policeman who opened fire in a police compound in the Nad-e’Ali district. Six soldiers and two Afghan policemen were wounded in the incident. The gunman and a possible accomplice escaped and a search is under way.

Opposition Conservatives and former military officials accuse Brown of failing to provide enough helicopters and vehicles to defeat the Taliban.

Kim Howells' Statement

Professor Kim Howells (MP), has been serving as chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, a Committee of Parliamentarians that oversees the work of Britain's intelligence and security agencies. Professor Howells writes that it's time to pull out of Afghanistan and spruce-up internal security in Britain:

I backed the war, but the chance looks squandered. Local agencies battling terrorism need the funds being spilt in Helmand.

For the best part of seven years the British public appeared to accept the argument that, if we didn't deploy our troops to fight al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan, we might be forced to fight them on the streets of Britain. In recent months ... The public may be asking whether deploying large numbers of British forces to Afghanistan at great cost, in lives lost as well as in pounds sterling, is actually the most effective way of preventing Islamic terrorist murders in the UK ... like me, they are considering that there may be more effective alternatives to the deployment and wondering why there has been little discussion about them ....

Seven years of military involvement and civilian aid in Afghanistan have succeeded in subduing al-Qaida's activities in that country, but have not destroyed the organisation or its leader, Osama bin Laden. Nor have they succeeded in eliminating al-Qaida's protectors, the Taliban. There can be no guarantee that the next seven years will bring significantly greater success and, even if they do, it is salutary to remember that Afghanistan has never been the sole location of terrorist training camps.

If we accept that al-Qaida continues to pose a deadly threat to the UK, and if we know that it is capable of changing the locations of its bases and modifying its attack plans, we must accept that we have a duty to question the wisdom of prioritising, in terms of government spending on counter-terrorism, the deployment of our forces to Afghanistan. It is time to ask whether the fight against those who are intent on murdering British citizens might better be served by diverting into the work of the UK Border Agency and our police and intelligence services much of the additional finance and resources swallowed up by the costs of maintaining British forces in Afghanistan.

It would be better, in other words, to bring home the great majority of our fighting men and women and concentrate on using the money saved to secure our own borders, gather intelligence on terrorist activities inside Britain, expand our intelligence operations abroad, co-operate with foreign intelligence services, and counter the propaganda of those who encourage terrorism.

Such a shift in focus would have the benefit of exposing far fewer British servicemen and women to the deadly threats of Taliban snipers and roadside bombs, but would also have momentous implications for UK foreign and defence policy ....

Life inside the UK would have to change. There would be more intrusive surveillance in certain communities, more police officers on the streets, more border officials at harbours and airports, more inspectors of vehicles and vessels entering the country, and a re-examination of arrangements that facilitate the "free movement" of people and products across our frontiers with the rest of the EU.

Some of these changes will generate great opposition, but many of them will be welcomed. If media reports are true, the British public is becoming increasingly hostile to the notion that any of our service personnel should be killed or wounded in support of difficult outcomes and flawed regimes in faraway countries.

.... Lieutenant General Jim Dutton, the highly respected British deputy commander of Nato's International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, said recently that the ideal number required to turn the tide in a country like Afghanistan, with its 28 million people, is around half a million .... I doubt whether the presence, even of another 40,000 American troops – brave and efficient though they are – will guarantee that the Taliban and their allies will no longer be able to terrorise and control significant stretches of countryside, rural communities and key roads. Recent attacks in Kabul and other centres suggest that the present balance of territorial control is at best likely to remain – or, more likely, to shift in favour of the Taliban.

.....

Bin Laden, along with his admirers and followers, won't wait around for the future of Afghanistan to be resolved. Their preparation and training for terrorism hasn't stopped, and Britain has no choice but to continue to seek out his bombers and those of other terrorist organisations. Our police forces, intelligence and border agencies have mammoth tasks. Their budgets already are much larger than they were in the years prior to the attacks on New York and London in 2001 and 2005, but they will have to grow larger still if they are to prevent further atrocities, not least when the eyes of the world will be on London during the 2012 Olympics.

The public will want to know, of course, where the money to pay for all this will come from. It won't be easy but it is time to tell them that it will come from the savings that will accrue from not having to pay for the war in Afghanistan. Sooner rather than later a properly planned, phased withdrawal of our forces from Helmand province has to be announced. If it is an answer that serves, also, to focus the minds of those in the Kabul government who have shown such a poverty of leadership over the past seven years, then so much the better.

Keeping Afghanistan Safe from Democracy

Robert Scheer:

The most idiotic thing being said about America’s involvement in Afghanistan is that the best way to protect the 68,000 U.S. troops there now is by putting an additional 40,000 in harm’s way.

People who argue for that plan clearly have not read Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s report pushing for escalation. The general is as honest as he is wrong in laying out the purpose of this would-be expanded mission, which is to remold Afghanistan in a Western image by making U.S. troops far more vulnerable, rather than less so.

He is honest in arguing that American troops would have to be deployed throughout the rugged and otherwise inhospitable terrain of rural Afghanistan, entering intimately into the ways of local life so as to win the hearts and minds of a people who clearly wish we would not extend the favor. He is wrong in indicating, without providing any evidence to support the proposition, that this very costly and highly improbable quest to be the first foreign power to successfully model life in Afghanistan would be connected with defeating the al-Qaida terrorists.

.... Obama must know the truth of Matthew Hoh's words and should heed them before he marches down the disastrous path pursued by another Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson—who, we now know from his White House telephone tapes, sacrificed the youth of this country in a war that he always knew never made sense.

Hillary in Lahore

At the superficial level from whence I observe Pakistani politics, I feel at a loss as far as getting my bearings. The more I read about Pakistani politics, the more reluctant I am to say anything about it, because I am likely to be proven wrong the next minute. Like I have often half-jokingly repeated, Americans learn their political geography by going to war with countries. That is, only most reluctantly do we scrutinize others - only when our back is up against the wall. (I currently feel my back is against a wall.) We have never been at war with Pakistan. So we don't understand Pakistanis. In this instance, therefore, I am saying, we have to study-up pronto, in proactive mode, because we are rapidly becoming major stakeholders in a functioning Pakistani state.