Afghanistan violence should be a clear lesson in the futility of nation-building

On Tuesday Marine Gen. John Allen, the NATO commander in Afghanistan, told the House Armed Services Committee that the mission in Afghanistan is on track. If he really believed that, I think he'd be delusional.

Last month, the accidental burning of Korans at Bagram Air Force Base set off massive rioting. The thing is, the Korans were confiscated (and subsequently thrown into an incinerator by accident) because Afghan prisoners were writing military messages in them. The Korans that were supposedly "desecrated" by US troops had already been desecrated by the Afghans. So I really doubt that the riots--which caused at least 41 deaths--were all about the Koran burning. I think it had more to do with the fact that US troops have been occupying their country for the past ten years, and that we continue to prop up a corrupt and unpopular president who blatantly stole the last election. A common chant among protesters was "Death to America, death to Obama, death to Karzai." The Koran burning, it seems, was just the latest reason for anger toward their foreign occupiers.

On March 1, an American staff sergeant, who had served honorably during multiple tours in Iraq, broke down in Afghanistan and murdered 16 civilians, including women and children. Retired Army intelligence officer Ralph Peters says we should be surprised that this hasn't happened sooner and more often. Because of stop-loss policies, our troops are often serving multiple tours of duty--and in an environment where the mission has become less and less clear. It is indeed remarkable that more of them haven't cracked under such prolonged and outrageous stress.

Finally, since Gen. Allen still thinks that our mission is on track, one might ask him what exactly our mission in Afghanistan is at this point. The original mission, taking out the Taliban government who was supporting Al-Qaeda, was pretty much accomplished back in 2003. And yet US troops have stayed in Afghanistan for nine years since then, trying to set up a stable democratic government--in other words, nation-building. In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush said that "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building...if we don't stop extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions, then we're going to have a serious problem." Since then, thousands of US troops have been killed or maimed because Bush and Obama failed to listen to that advice.

In fact, the US record of success in nation-building missions over the last 100 years is fairly dismal. We have had two major successes, in Germany and Japan after World War II--but both those countries were fairly modern, industrialized, and had had a democratically elected legislature throughout most of the 1920's. But in Third World countries--Vietnam, Somalia, Haiti, several South American countries, Bosnia, Iraq, and Afghanistan--nation building has been largely a catastrophic failure. The scars of these wars are numerous: tens of thousands of dead and wounded (both American soldiers and local civilians) and tens of billions of dollars in spending added to the debt. Yet we never seem to learn from the past.

GOP, conservatives need to get priorities straight

Going into the election year of 2012, major polls (see here and here) highlight two issues as most important to voters. One is the economy (which includes unemployment/jobs) and the other is the budget deficit. The wave of Republicans who came into Congress in 2010 attempted to address these issues by insisting on spending cuts to reduce the deficit, resisting tax increases for fear of further damaging the economy. A number of bitter deadlocks ensued as President Obama insisted on tax increases and repeatedly balked at cutting spending.

Now, Obama has finally come up with $500 billion in spending cuts--but rather than celebrate, the editors of conservative magazine National Review attack him viciously. The reason? Obama wants to cut the Pentagon budget. In attacking the cuts, National Review calls Obama's plan a "retreat" and pulls out all the usual neocon arguments. They scold Obama for trying to return troop levels to where they were at the end of the Clinton administration--which was not coincidentally the last time we had a balanced budget.

Here is one quote: "At its Cold War peak, U.S. military strategy called for the peacetime ability to simultaneously fight and win two major theater wars and a “brushfire” conflict. The years after the Soviet collapse saw that capability pared down in the name of the “peace dividend,” just in time for the 9/11 decade to deliver . . . two major theater wars and a series of “brushfire” conflicts... But the president draws precisely the wrong conclusion from the challenges of those conflicts. Faced with our struggle to fight up to our own standards, he has elected to lower the bar."

Well, if "lowering the bar" means that less Americans die fighting for dubious causes in wars like Vietnam or Iraq, and our deficit is reduced as well, then I'm all for it. It seems to me that Obama drew exactly the right conclusion: don't start a war without an imminent threat to America and don't engage in prolonged nation-building.

Conservatives really need to realize that we can't do it all. We can't balance the budget, keep taxes low, maintain our infrastructure, keep an acceptable safety net, and continue even a stabilized version of Social Security and Medicare while continuing to act as the world's lone policeman. Not only that, but unless Republicans are willing to cut their favored programs, it would be disingenuous to ask Democrats to do the same.

Levin: Obama REQUESTED authority to detain US citizens

I would like to apologize for what appears to be a mistake in my last post.

I assumed that since Sens. John McCain and Carl Levin were the chief architects of the NDAA bill, and since McCain has been arguably the leading hawk in Congress for the past two decades, that they were responsible for writing the bill so that it would not exempt US citizens from indefinite detention. As for Obama, I assumed that withdrawing his veto threat was yet another example of his lack of courage--similar to delaying the Keystone decision or deferring entirely to Pelosi on the 2009 stimulus bill.

However, according to Carl Levin (see the video below), the original bill--which passed the committee--contained language that DID exempt US citizens from indefinite detention, but the Obama administration requested that that language be taken out. Unless Levin is lying through his teeth here, Obama is about to perpetrate the worst assault on civil liberties since McCarthyism and the Japanese internment.

And now I can only wonder why Obama--who was once so critical of the war on terror that he attempted to close Guantanamo and try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in civilian court--would basically take a blowtorch to the Sixth Amendment.

Congress passes act that could authorize indefinite detention of US citizens; Obama takes back veto threat

A new threat to civil liberties looms on the horizon. Congress recently passed the National Defense Authorization Act, which would open the door for indefinite detentions of anyone, including US citizens, that is considered to be "allied with al-Qaeda."

According to Forbes, the act allows for someone the government says is "a member of, or part of, al-Qaeda or an associated force" to be held in military custody without trial "until the end of the hostilities authorized by the Authorization for Use of Military Force." The hostilities it refers to are the conflict with al-Qaeda; in other words, the end of the hostilities is not in the foreseeable future. And there is nothing in the act that excludes US citizens from the authorization of military detention.

This is crazy. This act seems to completely throw away the protection of the Sixth Amendment in the name of security and the war on terror. Infinite detention of foreigners accused of terrorism is morally dubious; infinite detention of US citizens is appalling.

Earlier, Obama threatened to veto the act, which makes sense given his campaign promises to protect civil liberties and his earlier desire to close Guantanamo. But now Obama says he will not veto it. Instead of protecting civil liberties, Obama seems to be taking Bush's disregard for civil liberties even further. It is also saddening, but not surprising, that a majority of both houses of Congress voted for this bill. Congress' approval rating is in the single digits for a reason.

And finally, the sponsor of the bill? John McCain. I can only wonder if he would have gone even further with these draconian "security" measures had he won the 2008 election.

As a candidate, Obama opposed an individual health-care mandate

During the 2008 primaries, Obama actually came out against an individual health-care mandate with this very sensible argument:

"If a mandate was the solution, we could try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house. The reason they don't have a house is they don't have the money. So our focus has been on reducing costs, making it available."

Unfortunately, he abandoned this belief once he was elected, and signed a health care bill with an individual mandate that has been declared unconstitutional by several appeals courts. Perhaps someone needed to remind him of this quote during the Obamacare debates.

Speaking of presidents who abandoned previously stated positions, with decidedly negative results:

"Somalia...started off as a humanitarian mission then changed into a nation-building mission and that's where the mission went wrong...I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building."
--Candidate George W. Bush

As president, of course, Bush led us into two very costly nation-building exercises on a scale not seen since the 1940's and which have dragged on for almost a decade. 9/11 may have justified the initial attack on the Taliban, but I don't understand why Bush changed his mind so dramatically on the wisdom of nation-building.

Ten years after 9/11, has anybody won the war on terror?

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, it's safe to say that Al-Qaeda has lost the war on terror--after all, Bin Laden is dead and much of their leadership and global influence has all but disappeared. But the real question is, who won? New York magazine columnist Frank Rich argues that America is suffering from a number of problems today that can be traced directly to our government's response to 9/11. And if you can look past a few of Rich's more partisan comments, I feel that overall he makes a good point. It could be that the war on terror, like Vietnam and WWI before it, has been a conflict with no real winner.

9/11 had the potential to unite us, and for a short while it did. But eventually, as Bush started using it as an excuse to invade Iraq, the unity died. Instead, one was either with the White House or with the terrorists. Many have accused the mainstream media of cheerleading the war and not providing a balanced analysis of the rationale for the invasion. People who criticized the president or the Iraq War were attacked as "unpatriotic." Instead of unifying us, the Iraq invasion and its aftermath seems to have ignited the bitter partisanship that now seems to pervade Washington. Before Iraq, Democrats and Republicans could actually work together. Now, any politicians who attempt to compromise are viewed by their base as "surrendering." Bashing the president was not nearly as popular in the media before 2003 as it has been in the past eight years, no matter which party has controlled the White House. Trust in government has plummeted to all-time lows.

Perhaps a bigger problem was, as Rich puts it, the war was fought by a "largely out-of-sight, out-of-mind" army and paid for by a "magic credit card." As support for the war waned, the military resorted to widespread dishonest recruiting and unprecedented use of stop-loss policies to keep up troop levels. Washington also thought that they could pay for the war almost entirely through deficit spending. Taken together, the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the continuation of the Bush tax cuts, and the Medicare prescription drug entitlement are responsible for the majority of our national debt at this point, and played a huge role in the S&P credit downgrade.

The war on terror has clearly been a defeat for Al-Qaeda. But with bitter partisan divisions, massive debts, and a seemingly endless conflict in Afghanistan--all a result of the war on terror--can we really say that we have won?

House GOP insists on spending cuts to reduce the deficit...then balks at military spending cuts

As I stated in my previous post, the government has a spending problem, period. Spending is projected to rise to unprecedented levels and I believe the Republicans are correct to take income tax increases off the table and insist on getting spending under control.

If they want to take this stand, however, then how can they refuse to make any defense cuts whatsoever, and pass a $649.2 billion appropriations bill that includes $118.6 billion for wars overseas? Not only did the House GOP refuse to freeze Pentagon spending at 2011 levels, they even refused to cut funding for military bands or Pentagon sponsorship of NASCAR.

This is not only stupid, but frankly, hypocritical. Yes, entitlements comprise the bulk of the long-term budget problem. But how can you repeatedly make a case for the need to cut spending, then refuse to cut ANY spending from a huge number of programs that you happen to like? This is the kind of political brinkmanship that needs to disappear from Washington, ASAP.

And House Republicans would do well to remember this quote from President Eisenhower, who if I recall correctly was both a general and a Republican:

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed...Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron."

Does the US military have a clear purpose?

http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2011/0701/Does-the-US-military-have-a-clear-purpose

An important question to ask, at a time when we are mired in three conflicts, two of which have dragged on for over eight years and none of which have a clear end in sight. The US military budget is eight times the size of the next largest country and over the past decade that has been a major reason for the deficit explosion. And as the author says, what exactly are we defending ourselves against in Libya? At this point, what exactly are we defending ourselves against in Afghanistan, if Al-Qaeda can just move into other countries?

It's time to stop nation-building, as a presidential candidate by the name of George W. Bush ironically said in 2000. But few seem willing to say it.