Glenn Greenwald points out that the "war on terror" is being carried out illogically. The U.S. has now dropped bombs on six Muslim countries that have had nothing to do with 9/11. We are currently obsessed with how to attack another Muslim country (Iran) that had nothing to do with 9/11. At the same time, we constantly reassert that our friendship with Saudi Arabia, a country with documented ties to 9/11.
Are the people who live in Aghanistan taking their protests to the streets because they resent our "freedom"? Are they angry merely because of isolated infractions by American soliders? Glenn Greenwald says no.
[J]ust imagine what would happen if a Muslim army invaded the U.S., violently occupied the country for more than a decade, in the process continuously killing American children and innocent adults, and then, outside of a prison camp it maintained where thousands of Americans were detained for years without charges and tortured, that Muslim army burned American flags — or a stack of bibles — in a garbage dump. Might we see some extremely angry protests breaking out from Americans against them? Would American pundits be denouncing those protesters as blinkered, primitive fanatics?We are spending $2 Billion dollars every week doing more of the same in Afghanistan, while claiming ten years of success in a campaign that lacks any discernible objectives other than serving as a make-work program for American military personnel and their high-priced private contractors. BTW, more than 400 of these American contractors died on the job last year. And then consider that the U.S. is propping up a massively corrupt regime in Afghanistan, we are (whether we like it or not) part of a system that distributes record amounts of opium and our own "infrastructure" money for Afghanistan has been largely wasted. To facilitate this unimaginably large waste of American taxpayer money, the U.S. military has fed Congress and the public an unceasing stream of lies that things are going well over there. When one also considers that dollars are fungible, and that these warmongering dollars could have been used to house, educate and feed Americans, the military occupation of Afghanistan ranks as one of the most immoral enterprises in the history of the United States.
Who is being killed by U.S. drones? Or to use the vernacular of the U.S. military, who is being bugsplat by U.S. drones? Human rights attorney Jennifer Robinson reports on her trip to Pakistan at Al Jazeera:
In Islamabad I took part in a jirga - the traditional Pashtun forum for public discussion and dispute settlement - where tribal elders and villagers from the Pakistan tribal areas (FATA) came to meet with us to explain their personal experiences of US drone attacks. Sitting just two rows behind me was a 16-year-old boy named Tariq Aziz. Listening to story upon story of the extrajudicial murder of innocent civilians and children, the heartache for loved ones lost and the constant terror instilled by the now familiar roar of drones overhead, I could not have imagined that Tariq and his family would soon suffer the same fate. . . . As I landed at Heathrow, thousands of miles away from the dirt road where Tariq and Waheed now lay dead, a CIA operative in northern Virginia will have reported "bugsplat". Bugsplat is the official term used by US authorities when humans are killed by drone missiles. The existence of children's computer games of the same name may lead one to think that the PlayStation analogy with drone warfare is taken too far. But it is deliberately employed as a psychological tactic to dehumanise targets so operatives overcome their inhibition to kill; and so the public remains apathetic and unmoved to act. Indeed, the phrase has far more sinister origins and historical use: In dehumanising their Pakistani targets, the US resorts to Nazi semantics. Their targets are not just computer game-like targets, but pesky or harmful bugs that must be killed.
Who would you trust more to report what is really going on in Afghanistan? High ranking generals spellbound by the sunk costs and warped to incoherence by their increasingly outrageous promises of success in this ten-year old war? Or would you trust a 17-year army veteran who has put his career in jeopardy by reporting his frank observations outside of his chain of command? Here is the detailed unclassified report of Lt. Colonel Daniel Davis. He has also provided a classified version to various members of Congress, as reported by Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone, in an article he has titled, "The Afghanistan Report the Pentagon Doesn't Want You to Read." Here is an excerpt from the unclassified report by Daniel Davis:
[A]s was repeated with frequency during the first quarter of 2011 senior ISAF leaders have explained that we killed a significant number of insurgent (INS) leaders and foot soldiers, we took away his former sanctuaries, cut off his supply routes, took away his freedom of movement, discovered a huge number of weapons and ammo caches, and captured hundreds of insurgent fighters. But if these things are so, the expectation of yet another all-time record of violence warned by the leaders was illogical. If I have tens of thousands of additional ISAF boots, and I kill hundreds of INS leaders thousands of his fighters, capture huge numbers of caches, take away his sanctuaries, and deny him freedom of movement, how could he then significantly increase his level of attacks as the Taliban did in the first half of 2011? By any rational calculation, our vastly increasing numbers combined with the enemy's dwindling pool of fighters and loss of equipment ought to have had precisely the opposite effect: they should have been capable of conducting considerably fewer attacks, emplacing a smaller number of IEDs, and their influence on the population should have been notably diminished. Yet none of those things came to pass. ISAF leaders, nevertheless continue to make bold and confident statement after statement that we are succeeding, that the insurgency is weakening, and that the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GoIRA) is gaining the confidence of its people though they offer almost no tangible evidence to that effect, while explaining away the considerable volume of evidence which logically should cause one to reach a very different conclusion.What is the truth about Afghanistan? Davis cites with approval from a 2011 report by Anthony Cordesman, on behalf of the Center for Strategic and International Studies (see pages 10 and 11): • US and ISAF won every major tactical clash, but lost much of the country; • ISAF denied the scale of the insurgency and the seriousness of its rise. Issued intelligence and other reports claiming success that did not exist; • The US and ISAF remained kinetic through 2009; the insurgent fought a battle of influence over the population and political attrition to drive out the US and ISAF from the start; • In June 2010, the Acting Minister of Interior told the press that only 9 of Afghanistan's 364 districts were considered safe; • No ISAF nation provides meaningful transparency and reporting to its legislature and people. But what about all of those optimistic reports from high ranking U.S. military brass? Davis cites with approval from a report written by Afghanistan NGO Safety Office (ANSO) and signed by ANSO Director, Nic Lee, examining "the security situation in Afghanistan in order to inform the greater NGO community about the risks they face when operating there."
More so than in previous years, information of this nature is sharply divergent from (International Military Forces) 'strategic communication’ messages suggesting improvements. We encourage (NGO personnel) to recognize that no matter how authoritative the source of any such claim, messages of the nature are solely intended to influence American and European public opinion ahead of the withdrawal, and are not intended to offer an accurate portrayal of the situation for those who live and work here.The report by Davis is compelling, detailed and damning of the propaganda issued by the U.S. regarding Afghanistan. His report is a must read in these times while we continue to spend $2 Billion per week on this fiasco. Now it's time for American journalists to step up and report the truth, though Davis is not optimistic that they will carry out their mission (see p. 28):
So long as our country’s top TV and print media continue to avoid challenging power for fear of losing access, there is every reason to expect many senior Defense Department leaders will continue to play this game of denial of access in order to effect compliant reports. As I’ve shown throughout this report, there is ample open source information and reports all over the internet that would allow any individual – or reporter – to find the truth and report it. But heretofore few have. As I note later in this report that there are a number of high ranking generals in the military today who are brilliant leaders and have the highest standards and integrity (giving me hope that there is a chance of reform in the future), so too there are some really fine journalists in both print and on-air media organizations. We need more experienced and honorable journos – and their parent organizations – to summon the courage to report wherever the truth leads and not simply regurgitate the bullet points handed out by some action officer. America needs you.Feb 15, 2012 - Michael Hastings of Rolling Stone discusses the report of Lt. Col. Daniel Davis with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now:
On Democracy Now, Ralph Nader criticized President Obama's stark militarism:
Responding to President Obama’s State of the Union address, longtime consumer advocate and former presidential candidate Ralph Nader says Obama’s criticism of income inequality and Wall Street excess fail to live up to his record in office. "[Obama] says one thing and does another," Nader says. "Where has he been for over three years? He’s had the Justice Department. There are existing laws that could prosecute and convict Wall Street crooks. He hasn’t sent more than one or two to jail." On foreign policy, Nader says, "I think his lawless militarism, that started the speech and ended the speech, was truly astonishing. [Obama] was very committed to projecting the American empire, in Obama terms."Nader argues that Iraq was not a victory (as Obama claimed), given that we have allowed one million Iraqis to die and essentially destroyed the country. He has sent American soldiers on "lawless militarism" and then draped them as though they were Iwo Jima heroes. Nader calls Obama a "political coward," because he was unwilling to even mention the Occupy movement, the major citizen movement of our time. Obama cannot utter the word "poverty," but refers only to the "middle class," which is shrinking into poverty. Nader asserts that Obama's claims that he will prosecute financial fraud are vapid, given that he hasn't done anything significant in this area for years, and he hasn't pushed for the necessary financing to staff a meaningful financial crimes unit.