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believe_it
Oct 31 2009, 08:36 AM
QUOTE
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10302009/transcript4.html
TRANSCRIPT

October 30, 3009

[...] BILL MOYERS: Watching the CBS Evening News on Afghanistan this week I thought for a moment that I might be watching my grandson playing one of those video war games that are so popular these days.
REPORTER: An American military convoy traveling northwest..

BILL MOYERS: Reporting on the attacks that killed eight Americans, CBS turned to animation to depict what no journalists were around to witness. This is about as close to real war as most of us ever get, safely removed from the blood, the mangled bodies, the screams and shouts.

October, as you know, was the bloodiest month for our troops in all eight years of the war. And beyond the human loss, the United States has spent more than 223 billion dollars there. In 2010 we will be spending roughly 65 billion dollars every year. 65 billion dollars a year.

The President is just about ready to send more troops. Maybe 44 thousand, that's the number General McChrystal wants, bringing the total to over 100 thousand. When I read speculation last weekend that the actual number needed might be 600 thousand, I winced.

I can still see President Lyndon Johnson's face when he asked his generals how many years and how many troops it would take to win in Vietnam. One of them answered, "Ten years and one million." He was right on the time and wrong on the number-- two and a half million American soldiers would serve in Vietnam, and we still lost.

Whatever the total for Afghanistan, every additional thousand troops will cost us about a billion dollars a year. At a time when foreclosures are rising, benefits for the unemployed are running out, cities are firing teachers, closing libraries and cutting essential maintenance and services. That sound you hear is the ripping of our social fabric.

Which makes even more perplexing an editorial in THE WASHINGTON POST last week. You'll remember the "Post" was a cheerleader for the invasion of Iraq, often sounding like a megaphone for the Bush-Cheney propaganda machine. Now it's calling for escalating the war in Afghanistan. In a time of historic budget deficits, the paper said, Afghanistan has to take priority over universal health care for Americans. Fixing Afghanistan, it seems, is "a 'necessity'"; fixing America's social contract is not.

But listen to what an Afghan villager recently told a correspondent for the "Economist:" "We need security. But the Americans are just making trouble for us. They cannot bring peace, not if they stay for 50 years."

Listen, too, to Andrew Bacevich, the long-time professional soldier, graduate of West Point, veteran of Vietnam, and now a respected scholar of military and foreign affairs, who was on this program a year ago. He recently told "The Christian Science Monitor," "The notion that fixing Afghanistan will somehow drive a stake through the heart of jihadism is wrong. …If we give General McChrystal everything he wants, the jihadist threat will still exist."

This from a warrior who lost his own soldier son in Iraq, and who doesn't need animated graphics to know what the rest of us never see.

So here's a suggestion. In a week or so, when the president announces he is escalating the war, let's not hide the reality behind eloquence or animation. No more soaring rhetoric, please. No more video games. If our governing class wants more war, let's not allow them to fight it with young men and women who sign up because they don't have jobs here at home, or can't afford college or health care for their families.

Let's share the sacrifice. Spread the suffering. Let's bring back the draft.

Yes, bring back the draft -- for as long as it takes our politicians and pundits to "fix" Afghanistan to their satisfaction.

Bring back the draft, and then watch them dive for cover on Capitol Hill, in the watering holes and think tanks of the Beltway, and in the quiet little offices where editorial writers spin clever phrases justifying other people's sacrifice. Let's insist our governing class show the courage to make this long and dirty war our war, or the guts to end it.

BILL MOYERS: That's it for this week. Log onto our website at pbs.org and click on "Bill Moyers Journal." You'll find a web exclusive conversation with the political analyst Glenn Greenwald of Salon.com. There's also more from economist James Galbraith and the Journal's complete coverage of the financial meltdown and bailout.

That's all at pbs.org. I'm Bill Moyers and I'll see you next week.

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rla
Oct 31 2009, 09:24 AM
If the AfPac War is necessary, then reinstitute the Draft. Anything else is pure chick $hit on the part of all of our politicians, including President Obama...
believe_it
Nov 1 2009, 02:33 PM
QUOTE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYOcgcO2xK0

BILL MOYERS JOURNAL
Bill Moyers Essay: Restoring Accountability for Washington's Wars| PBS (4:31)
Posted by PBS
October 30, 2009


Link from:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ress=385x397113
Bill Moyers Calls for Draft if Obama Escalates in Afghanistan
Sun Nov-01-09 03:27 PM
believe_it
Nov 7 2009, 07:24 PM
QUOTE
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/07/opinion/...tml?_r=1&hp



November 7, 2009
Op-Ed Contributor

The Forever War of the Mind

By MAX CLELAND

EVERY day I was in Vietnam, I thought about home. And, every day I’ve been home, I’ve thought about Vietnam.” So said one of the millions of soldiers who fought there as I did. Change the name of the battlefield and it could have been said by one of the American servicemen coming home from Iraq or Afghanistan today. Wars are not over when the shooting stops. They live on in the lives of those who fight them. That is the curse of the soldier. He never forgets.

While the authorities say they cannot yet tell us why an Army psychiatrist would go on a shooting rampage at Fort Hood in Texas, we do know the sorts of stories he had been dealing with as he tried to help those returning from Iraq and Afghanistan readjust to life outside the war zone. A soldier’s mind can be just as dangerous to himself, and to those around him, as wars fought on traditional battlefields.

War is haunting. Death. Pain. Blood. Dismemberment. A buddy dying in your arms. Imagine trying to get over the memory of a bomb splitting a Humvee apart beneath your feet and taking your leg with it. The first time I saw the stilled bodies of American soldiers dead on the battlefield is as stark and brutal a memory as the one of the grenade that ripped off my right arm and both legs.

No, the soldier never forgets. But neither should the rest of us.

Veterans returning today represent the first real influx of combat-wounded soldiers in a generation. They are returning to a nation unprepared for what war does to the soul. Those new veterans will need all of our help. After America’s wars, the used-up fighters are too often left to fend for themselves. Many of the hoboes in the Depression were veterans of World War I. When they came home, they were labeled shell-shocked and discharged from the Army too broken to make it during the economic cataclysm.

So it is again, with too many stories about veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan ending up unemployed and homeless. Figures from the Department of Veterans Affairs show that 131,000 of the nation’s 24 million veterans are homeless each night, and about twice that many will spend part of this year homeless.

We know of the recent failures at Walter Reed Medical Center, where soldiers were stranded in substandard barracks infested with rats while awaiting treatment. I was in Walter Reed myself at that time seeking counseling for post-traumatic stress disorder, which, ignited by a barrage of Iraq headlines and the loss of my United States Senate seat, had simply consumed me.

I never saw it coming. Forty years after I had left the battlefield, my memories of death and wounding were suddenly as fresh and present as they had been in 1968. I thought I was past that. I learned that none of us are ever past it. Were it not for the surgeons and nurses at Walter Reed, I never would have survived those first months back from Vietnam. Were it not for the counselors there today, I do not think I would have survived what I’ve come to call my second Vietnam, the one that played out entirely in my mind.

When I was wounded, post-traumatic stress disorder did not officially exist. It was recognized as a legitimate illness only in 1978, during my tenure as head of the Veterans Administration under President Jimmy Carter. Today, it is not only recognized, but the Army and the V.A. know how to treat it. I can offer no better testament than my own recovery.

Weeks before the troubles at Walter Reed became public in 2007, my counselor put it to me simply. “We are drowning in war,” she said. The problems at Walter Reed had nothing to do with the dedicated doctors and nurses there. The problems had to do with the White House and Congress and the Department of Defense. The problems had to do with money.

When we are at war, America spends billions on missiles, tanks, attack helicopters and such. But the wounded warriors who will never fight again tend to be put on the back burner.

This is inexcusable, and it comes with frightening moral costs. There are estimates that 35 percent of the soldiers who fought in Iraq will suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. I’m sure the numbers for Afghanistan are similar. Researchers have found that nearly half of those returning with the disorder have suicidal thoughts. Suicide among active-duty soldiers is on pace to hit a record total this year. More than 1.7 million soldiers have served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Imagine that some 600,000 of them will have crippling memories, trapped in a vivid and horrible past from which they can’t seem to escape.

We have a family Army today, unlike the Army seen in any generation before. We have fought these wars with the Reserves and the National Guard. Fathers, mothers, soccer coaches and teachers are the soldiers coming home. Whether they like it or not, they will bring their war experiences home to their families and communities.

In his poem “The Dead Young Soldiers,” Archibald MacLeish, whose younger brother died in World War I, has the soldiers in the poem tell us:“We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.” Until we help our returning soldiers get their lives back when they come home, the promise of restoring that meaning will go unfulfilled.

Max Cleland, the secretary of the American Battle Monuments Commission, was a Democratic senator from Georgia from 1997 to 2003. He is the author, with Ben Raines, of "Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove.”

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believe_it
Nov 7 2009, 07:42 PM
QUOTE
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11062009/profile.html



November 6, 2009




VIDEO


As America prepares to observe Veterans Day and President Obama weighs sending more troops to fight in Afghanistan, BILL MOYERS JOURNAL broadcasts a powerful documentary about the impact on soldiers of learning to kill – or be killed. THE GOOD SOLDIER follows four veterans – one from World War II, two from Vietnam, and the fourth from Iraq – as they reveal how the experiences of battle changed their lives. Watch a preview at link.

Find out more about the film and theatrical release locations and dates at: http://thegoodsoldier.com/

PLEASE NOTE: Due to rights restrictions we will not be able to stream THE GOOD SOLDIER in its entirety online.

THE GOOD SOLDIER
On November 6, 2009, the JOURNAL broadcasts THE GOOD SOLDIER, a film which follows four veterans — one from World War II, two from Vietnam, and the fourth from Iraq — as they reveal how the experiences of battle changed their lives.

RESOURCES FOR VETERANS
Online resources for vets and their families.: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11062009/profile2.html

HONORING VETERANS: ORAL HISTORY INSTRUCTIONS
Learn how to keep veteran's achievements alive by participating in the National Veterans Oral History Project: http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11062009/profile4.html


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believe_it
Nov 7 2009, 07:57 PM
QUOTE
http://thegoodsoldier.com/reviews.html



REVIEWS - THE GOOD SOLDIER

An astounding film, “The Good Soldier” directed by Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys should be mandatory viewing for every President and member of Congress who is willing to make the decision to send men and women into war. In a culture where many veterans do not speak back home of what they witnessed and participated in battle, this film portrays five combat veterans from different wars ranging from WWII to Vietnam to the Gulf War to Iraq who emotionally lay it on the line. The sheer humanity of such inhumane situations is astounding and riveting and heartbreaking. The courage it takes for these soldiers to speak of their darkest moments and moral dilemmas with such brutal honesty is to be commended and brings up questions of our government supporting those they would send to die who did not die but came home. “Life is more difficult than death,” one comments.

“War puts you at odds with what is right and wrong,” one veteran explains. Their training as soldiers is to become killers without remorse, but as one asks, “How do you turn that off? One day you’re killing then the next you’re sitting at a bar in New York City.” In wars where the enemy looks just like the innocent civilian, “collateral damage” leaves its mark on the psyche of the soldiers which haunts them for the rest of their lives. As one veteran who is a founder of Veterans for Peace states, “War is not the way to settle a disagreement.”
- HipHamptons.com Must See Films: Hamptons International Film Festival - Conflict and Resolution Section


"You've got a wonderful film here. I watched it tonight, totally absorbed. The testimonies of the five soldiers bring the issue of war to the viewer with great emotional power. It was a brilliant idea to hear veterans of the various wars - World War II, Vietnam, the first Gulf War, the Iraq War - because the net effect is to deal, not just with one odious war, but with the phenomenon of war as a universal evil. It is especially important, if we are to ditch forever the idea of 'good' wars, to tackle head on the war which is generally considered morally unassailable - World War II. Thanks so much for letting me see this. I hope it will get the attention it deserves."
- Howard Zinn, author of A People's History of the United States


"It's hard to imagine watching a more affecting movie than The Good Soldier … it may be as affecting a movie as I've ever seen. It took one seemingly simple question—What makes a good soldier?—and reduced the answer to its essence. That being, the ability to kill other human beings. Using the voices of veterans from WWII, Vietnam, the Gulf War, and Iraq, each gave this exact same answer, and they all spoke not only of their guilt and regret, but also of how at some point during their time in the military they needed to kill. Their reasons were different, but the training that gave them the skills and permission was not. I found it both hard to watch and hard to turn away from, and I know I'll never look at the words 'collateral damage' in the same way again. Really powerful stuff.

-- I wanted to follow-up on my thoughts on The Good Soldier: Reading over it, I felt like I might have implied that the soldiers featured were monsters. All of them were visibly haunted by their pasts, and have found ways to come to grips with the tasks they were required to perform. In some cases by regularly protesting, and in the case of Will Williams, by founding the Madison Area Peace Coalition. These were all good men who were deeply affected by the fallout from their wars, and each has done whatever they can to make a difference. I cannot get the image out of my mind of Iraq veteran Jimmy Massey standing alone on a street corner in North Carolina in battle fatigues holding a sign that said: 'I killed innocent civilians for our government,' as someone pulled up next to him and yelled: 'You shouldn't be protesting our government wearing that uniform!' "
- Jason Albert, theOnion.com


"The Good Soldier"... is a powerful documentary in which filmmakers Lexy Lovell and Michael Uys present a cadre of highly decorated soldiers who'd fought valiantly in America's wars - World War II, Vietnam, the Gulf War and Iraq - and, in doing so, came to the conclusion that warfare was neither a righteous nor effective way to resolve differences of opinion, ideology and/or national interests. As Chief Warrant Officer Perry Parks, who flew helicopter combat missions in Vietnam, says, "A young person who is considering a life in the military needs to know that it is not just the job, the education, the travel - the glorious parts they show you. Your real bare bones job is to go out and kill people. Every man is an infantryman. Every soldier's priority is to conduct the war."

Taking it further, Captain Michael McPhearson, who grew up on Fort Bragg, changed his mind about the military after fighting in the Gulf War. "Soldiers serve the public; they serve our society. I am saying do with me what you will. I am giving you my mind and my body. When I go to war, my body can be broken, my mind can be broken, or I don't come back. I give you permission to do this. I swear to uphold the Constitution, which includes the Bill of Rights. It is a generally just document. When leaders break that, then I believe a soldier has the right to break their agreement.

McPhearson, resigned his commission and has become the Executive Director of Veterans for Peace. He now faces the anguish of having a son in the military. "I also believe that a soldier has a right to decide they don't want to kill anybody anymore. They have a right to break that too, because I have to live with taking somebody's life. You don't," he says in the film.

This profoundly provocative film has the potential to change society's attitude towards and acceptance of war. It is extremely important that it be presented by festivals and other venues and seen as widely as possible. "The Good Soldier" has been picked up for distribution by Artistic License, so look for its theatrical release in the near future. It's a beautifully crafted and extremely important film.
- Jennifer Merin, About.com

More...
believe_it
Nov 8 2009, 08:24 AM
QUOTE
http://www.truthout.org/1106096

How Patriotism Can Save America
Friday 06 November 2009

by: Capt. Paul K. Chappell, US Army, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed

As a soldier in the United States Army, I have often pondered what it means to be patriotic, what it means to serve our country and what it means to love America. In "Will War Ever End?" I described a dangerous misconception of patriotism that I witnessed while deployed in Baghdad.

When I was deployed in Iraq and had a chance to watch American news channels, I heard commentators say that if we question or criticize our government, we do not love America and are being unpatriotic. They believed that patriotism meant waving a flag and being blindly obedient, but this is not what it means to love our country.

What does it mean to truly love our country? We can better understand love of country by realizing what it means to love a child. Parents who love their children will try to correct a child caught stealing, abusing people or being dishonest. For parents who do not truly love their children, apathy will cause them not to care, enabling their children to get away with anything. In this same way, if we love our country we will do our best to improve it. We will try to make America a better place for everyone, as courageous citizens have always done.

Since our country's founding, brave patriots have worked to give us the many freedoms we enjoy today. Although I am part African-American and part Asian, I had the opportunity to graduate from West Point and I have the freedom to write these words, because patriotic Americans loved their country, and were therefore willing to improve it.

These liberties were not achieved overnight. Two hundred years ago in America, anyone who was not a white male landowner suffered oppression. During this era, the majority of people lacked the right to vote, and many Americans lived as slaves. Our country is much more humane today than it was then. This happened because courageous citizens such as Martin Luther King Jr., Mark Twain, Helen Keller, Susan B. Anthony, Woody Guthrie, Smedley Butler, Henry David Thoreau and many others struggled to make our country a better place for all people.

Because of the countless responsible Americans who loved and were therefore willing to question, constructively criticize and improve their country, America has made a lot of progress. When my father was drafted into the Army as an African-American in 1949, the military was segregated because the government upheld an official policy that viewed African-Americans as inferior and subhuman. Fifty years before then, the government would not allow women to vote, and only fifty years prior to that, the government supported and protected slavery.

To overcome the injustice that still persists, patriotism is a labor of love that requires us to question our government and think critically so that America can become a more humane and peaceful country for all of its citizens and a role model for the rest of the world. Although we have a long way to go before America truly becomes a symbol of justice and peace for the rest of the world, we have also journeyed a long way in this democratic experiment because of patriotic Americans who loved and constructively criticized their country.

Martin Luther King Jr. said:
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken: the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.... A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.... A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just."

This form of national progress is necessary for our country's survival, and it requires us to pursue the truth. The truth can hurt sometimes, but we must keep in mind that discomfort is not always a bad thing. For example, lifting weights at the gym, running and other forms of physical exercise are uncomfortable. But this discomfort is necessary to make us healthy and strong. In this same way, a change in our country's moral perception of war, economic inequality and environmental destruction can also be uncomfortable, but this discomfort is necessary to make us healthy and strong as a nation.

In the past two hundred years, we have seen a change in our country's moral perception of slavery, the oppression of women and racial segregation. As a result, our country is much healthier today than the America that drafted my father into a segregated Army, the America that would not allow women to vote, the America that supported slavery and the America that oppressed all people except white male landowners.

With the survival of our planet now at stake, our country needs patriotic Americans to question, think critically and continue to pioneer this democratic experiment. Now more than ever, our country needs us to help it become a beacon of hope that exports peace instead of war. Only patriotism, not blind obedience or flag waving, can make America healthy and strong. Only patriotism can save America from itself.

Capt. Paul K. Chappell is currently serving in the Army on active duty. He graduated from West Point in 2002 and he was deployed to Baghdad during 2006 and 2007. He is the author of "Will War Ever End?: A Soldier's Vision of Peace for the 21st Century" and the upcoming book, "The End of War: New Ideas for Achieving World Peace." His Web site is www.willwareverend.com .

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believe_it
Nov 9 2009, 07:09 PM
QUOTE
http://therealnews.com/t/index.php?option=...amp;jumival=467

Don't repeat Vietnam in Afghanistan
Daniel Ellsberg: The counter-insurgency plan in Afganistan is similar to Viet Nam

3 PART VIDEO
November 7, 2009
.


QUOTE
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/110709b.html

Dan Ellsberg on the Urgency of Truth

By TheRealNews.com
November 7, 2009

At a recent conference honoring whistleblowers, Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg commented (video above) about the need for government officials to act in a timely fashion to confront the criminal wrongdoing of unnecessary war, rather than to wait.

Ellsberg noted how one of the honorees, Larry Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, recognized how his work in George W. Bush’s administration had served U.S. imperial ambitions. Ellsberg said Wilkerson must have bit his lip for years before he went public with his disagreements.

Ellsberg also commented on the case of former U.K. Ambassador Craig Murray, who exposed torture in a key “war on terror” ally, Uzbekistan, despite knowing that it would destroy his career. [For Murray’s personal story, see Consortiumnews.com’s “How a Torture Protest Killed a Career.”]


QUOTE
http://www.truthout.org/1102096

Ellsberg: Obama Fears Military Revolt

Monday 02 November 2009
by: Sari Gelzer, t r u t h o u t | Report


(Photo Illustration: Troy Page / t r u t h o u t)

Ellsberg: Leaked Pentagon Papers from Vietnam give clues to why Obama will most likely grant military requests to send more troops to Afghanistan.

Paul Jay, senior producer of The Real News Network, interviewed former military analyst and Pentagon whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg about the common thread between the conflict in Afghanistan and the war in Vietnam.

Like Vietnam, Ellsberg said "no victory lies ahead [for the US] in Afghanistan" and President Barack Obama knows it.

Still, Ellsberg believes Obama will "go against his own instincts as to what's best for the country and do what's best for him and his administration and his party in the short run facing elections, which is to avoid a military revolt."

That means the president will likely authorize a sizable increase of US forces in the region, Ellsberg said, because Obama fears that top US military commanders will stage a revolt if he rejects their requests for additional soldiers.

Ellsberg predicted that Obama will cave in to Gen. Stanley McCrystal's request for as many as 40,000 US troops in order to, "prevent his military from making a political case to his public and to the Congress that he has been weak, unmanly, indecisive, and weak on terrorism, and has endangered American troops."

The Pentagon Papers, which Ellberg leaked to The New York Times in 1971, made public the decision-making details behind the Vietnam War. Ellsberg chose to leak the highly-sensitive papers because they revealed that the government was continuing the Vietnam War despite knowing it would not likely be won.

As revealed in the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg said that President Lyndon B. Johnson chose to go along with increasing US troops in Vietnam: "To keep the military from resigning and going public with complaints that he had abandoned a winnable war."

President Obama's decision to shield himself from a military revolt, as Johnson chose to do in 1965, will take place at the expense of US troops and Afghani civilians, said Ellsberg.

"Many Americans, many Afghans will die in order to protect the president from that kind of blame," Ellsberg said.

Ellsberg, who used to write about what is now known as counterinsurgency theory, critiqued General McChrystal's approach to Afghanistan. Sending more troops to Afghanistan, said Ellsberg, will only increase the Taliban's strength. Ellsberg said:
"The more troops we put in Vietnam, the more Vietcong were recruited. And, the more troops we put in Afghanistan, the curve shows very clearly from 2005 on, the Taliban has come back having been, as you say, despised and reviled by most of the country. How can it be that they get the degree of support that they do now? One reason only: the number of troops, of US troops that they are fighting."


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rla
Nov 9 2009, 08:54 PM
When Obama sends the additional troops or if he fails to get a strong public option through congress is
when I start campaigning against him for 2012...
believe_it
Nov 11 2009, 08:31 AM
Posted with sorrow:

QUOTE
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091111/ap_on_...day_the_injured

Military sees increase in wounded in Afghanistan

By KIMBERLY HEFLING, Associated Press Writer Kimberly Hefling, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 48 mins ago

WASHINGTON – Far from winding down, the numbers of wounded U.S. soldiers coming home have continued to swell. The problem is especially acute among those who fought in Afghanistan, where nearly four times as many troops were injured in October as a year ago.

Amputations, burns, brain injuries and shrapnel wounds proliferate in Afghanistan, due mostly to crude, increasingly potent improvised bombs targeting U.S. forces. Others are hit by snipers' bullets or mortar rounds.

With Veterans Day on Wednesday, wounded veterans from the recent conflicts consider the toll of these injuries, and the rough road ahead for the injured. Of particular concern are the so-called hidden wounds, traumatic brain injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder that can have side effects such as irritability and depression.

Since 2007, more than 70,000 service members have been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury — more than 20,000 of them this year, according to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center. Most of the injuries are mild but leave symptoms such as headaches and difficulty concentrating.

Vince Short, 42, a former Army specialist who suffered brain injuries in a 2003 roadside bomb attack in Iraq, said he can't help but feel for the soldiers coming home from Afghanistan with similar wounds.

"I cry out for them. It's tough. It's hard to put it in words," Short, who served with the District of Columbia Army National Guard, said in an interview at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Washington, where he receives weekly physical and mental therapy.

Thanks to the therapy, he said, he's in a good place. But in the early years of his recovery, he said, he found it difficult to return to work, and his marriage fell apart. Short said he was confident and motivated before he was injured. Now, he has memory problems and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

"At that point, there was still a lot of panicking going on inside of me because it's like, 'What's going to happen to me?'" said Short. "I used to have a career. I used to have a good solid marriage. I was doing really good, and now look at me."

In Afghanistan, spinal injuries have increased significantly, due mostly to the powerful explosives used in the improvised bombs that rattle U.S. troops inside heavily armored vehicles. For those injured by these bombs, recovery can mean a year or more at a military medical hospital like Walter Reed Army Medical Center, followed by months, years or even a lifetime of therapy and coping with disability.

At least 1,800 troops were wounded in Afghanistan in the first 10 months of this year, about 40 percent of all the wounded U.S. troops in Afghanistan since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Nearly 1,000 of those injuries occurred in the last three months.

In Iraq, more than 600 troops have been wounded so far this year.

By far, improvised explosive devices are the biggest killer of U.S. troops in both countries.

In Afghanistan in the last four months, the volume of explosives used to make IEDs, as well as the number of IEDs, have increased, Col. Wayne Shanks, chief of public affairs for the International Security Assistance Forces in Afghanistan, said in an e-mail.

Spinal injuries account for one in six of the wounds treated in the Afghanistan battle theater, Shanks said. Of those injuries, about 15 percent involved motor or sensory changes such as a broken back or spinal cord injury, Shanks said.

He said the military has a "concerted counter-IED" effort and is working with the local population to encourage their help.

Garry J. Augustine, deputy national service director of Disabled American Veterans, said improved protective gear and advancements in battlefield medicine have helped — but they also have resulted in higher survival rates for those with extreme wounds that often proved fatal in previous wars.

"Getting over the initial injury is one thing, but going about dealing with your life, the rest of your life, with these injuries is quite another," Augustine said.

Sgt. Dirk Bryant, 28, of Creston, Ill., a member of the Illinois Army National Guard, credits those advancements for his survival. He was on patrol near Kandahar, Afghanistan, on Jan. 30 when a bullet cut into his hip and left a softball-sized wound. The experience left him emotional and, at times, depressed as he wondered if he'd be able to walk again.

Through rehab and determination, he said, he has made a near-full recovery. He's currently a student at Northern Illinois University, aspiring to become a museum curator or historian, and could very well go back to Afghanistan to fight.

"I just feel very fortunate," Bryant said. "There's a lot of people that weren't as lucky as I was."

Dr. Joel Scholten, associate chief of staff of rehab services at the VA Medical Center in Washington, said experts are keeping an eye on injury patterns in the war zones so medical treatments can be adjusted as necessary.

"When the war's over, the veterans will still have issues related to service that we'll need to be here for them," Scholten said.

Even when injuries don't involve combat, the recovery process can be a time of reflection and bonding with others in the hospital wards, said retired Lt. Col. Kurt Kosmatka, 50, who came down with a disease while in Iraq in 2007 that's weakened his immune system and left him with respiratory problems. He spent more than a year at Walter Reed and has been at the VA hospital in Washington since January.

He said he feels for those who are getting wounded who don't have strong family connections to help them through the process.

"It was pretty tough on some guys and girls," Kosmatka said.

On the Net:
Paralyzed Veterans of America: http://www.pva.org/
Disabled American Veterans: http://www.dav.org/
Veterans Affairs Department: http://www.va.gov/

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Link from: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ess=389x6988871

I was reminded of the following hard-to-find article which I originally read here:
QUOTE
http://www.truthout.org/article/theyre-bur...ring-with-death

They're burned, or blinded, or sparring with death

The story of the U.S. military hospital in Germany where 16,000 troops wounded in Iraq have passed through.

by Matthew Mcallester
September 27, 2004

Landstuhl, Germany - The medical team that accompanied the soldier on the Thursday morning flight from Iraq had worked the whole way to keep him alive, his body burned and lacerated by the fire and metal of a roadside bomb.

They were low on oxygen by the time the green military ambulance reached the front door of the hospital.

"Get me more O2," shouted out a visibly upset nurse, Maj. Pat Bradshaw. She had been up and working for 28 hours, ferrying the wounded out of Iraq.

"She's stressed," said Capt. George Sakakini, a physician in charge of the team that greets the wounded. He watched from the curbside through the early-morning drizzle, keeping an eye on his highly trained squad of doctors, nurses and chaplains. "Someone's trying to die on her."

Full green oxygen tank in place, its contents filtering into the unconscious man's lungs, the team lowered the soldier on his stretcher to the ground. His scorched face was a painter's palette of the colors of pain: yellow, mauve, bright red.

In the intensive care unit, nurses quickly worked to make sure his wounds were as clean as possible. An infection could kill him. A couple of rooms over, more nurses worked on another young soldier, also unconscious, burned and sparring with death. Another roadside bomb victim. Dabbing gently, they spread thick white antimicrobial cream on the raw flesh of his forearms. Twenty percent of his body was burned.

It was an average morning at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which has become the American military's museum of pain and maiming, doubt and anger. The planes from Iraq land every day, sometimes two or three of them.

Like his staff, who brim with frustration at what they see as the irresponsible disinclination of the American people to understand the costs of the war to thousands of American soldiers, the hospital's chief surgeon feels that most Americans have their minds on other things.

"It is my impression that they're not thinking about it a whole lot at all," said Lt. Col. Ronald Place. As he spoke, the man who has probably seen more of America's war wounded than anyone since the Vietnam War sobbed as he sat at a table in his office.

First stop for injured
Nowhere is it less possible to escape the horrors of the war in Iraq for American soldiers than Landstuhl. Nestled among the tall trees of a forest on the outskirts of this small town in southwestern Germany, the largest American military hospital outside the United States is the first stop for nearly all injured American personnel when they are flown out of Iraq or Afghanistan. Dedicated and compassionate doctors, nurses and support staff push aside curtains of fatigue and what the hospital's psychologists call "vicarious trauma" to patch up and tend to soldiers before they fly to the United States for longer-term care.

This month, politicians focused on the unwelcome tally of the 1,000th American soldier to die in Iraq. Landstuhl has its own set of figures, numbers that flesh out the suffering occurring on the battlefields of Iraq and in homes across the United States.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, more than 18,000 military personnel have passed through the hospital from what staff refer to as "down range": Iraq and Afghanistan. Of those, nearly 16,000 have come from Iraq.

Last month, 23 percent of those were casualties from combat, slightly higher than most months; the rest had either accidental or disease-related complaints.

Thirteen have died at the hospital.

Each day, an average of 30 to 35 patients arrive on flights from Iraq. The most on a single day was 168.

More than 200 personnel have come in with either lost eyes or eye injuries that could result in sight loss or blindness.

About 160 soldiers have had limbs amputated, most of them passing through the hospital on their way home to more surgery.

And it's not just their bodies that come in needing fixing. More than 1,400 physically fit personnel have been admitted with mental health problems.

Then there are the Pentagon's figures that touch on all casualties from the war in Iraq: 1,042 dead; 7,413 injured in action, including 4,026 whose injuries have prevented them from returning to duty. In Afghanistan, there have been 366 injuries and 138 deaths.

One other number tells a slightly different tale, a story of selflessness in the face of suffering: one third. That's about how much money surgeons at Landstuhl make compared to what they could make if they chose to work in the civilian world.

"There is nothing more rewarding than to take care of these guys," said Place, the skin around his eyes reddening with the tears that he failed to hold inside. "Not money, not anything."

Every day starts in the same way at Landstuhl. The staff get up early to greet the buses and ambulances that come from nearby Ramstein air base, where the planes from Iraq touch down as early as 6 a.m. Most soldiers can walk off the buses, with broken bones or noncombat illnesses. But those who come in ambulances, like the two blast-injured soldiers, go straight to the ICU.

On Thursday morning, the 20-bed ICU was a busy, but not rushed, place. As so often these days, the staff there were dealing with the effects of roadside bombs rather than bullets. That means taking care of scorched, lacerated bodies that may have less obvious internal injuries.

Col. Earl Hecker sat outside the room where nurses were applying the white antimicrobial cream to one of the burned soldiers. Twenty-seven-years-old, Hecker remarked, looking at the patient's notes. (Hospital officials were not able to get these patients' consent to be named or photographed because of their medical conditions.)

Hecker, at 70, is a few generations older than his patient. A surgeon who had retired from the Reserves but recently rejoined, he has forsaken his private practice in Detroit for now to help at Landstuhl, working past his assigned 90-day tour to stay nearly 150 days.

This experience "has changed my whole life," he said, his jovial demeanor fading to introspection. "I'm never going to be the same."

The day before, Hecker had been taking care of an 18-year-old soldier who, thanks to an Iraqi bullet, will forever be quadriplegic.

Hecker sat gazing through the window at the burned soldier and thought of the kid he had sent off to the States the day before. "Terrible, terrible, terrible," he said, staring into the distance. "When you talk to him he cries."

A month ago, Hecker took four days off to fly home to see his family. He needed a break. They went out for dinner at a nice restaurant. Hecker realized during dinner that he was suddenly seeing the world differently. He looked around at the chattering people, eating their fine food, drinking good wine and he thought to himself: "They have no idea what's going on here. Absolutely none."

He doesn't think people want to see it. He thinks the nation is still scarred by Vietnam and would prefer not to see the thousands of injured young men coming home from Iraq.

"I just want people to understand - war is bad, life is difficult," he said.

Maybe it was the stress, maybe it's because Hecker has no military career to mess up by speaking out of line, but it just came out: "George Bush is an idiot," he said, quickly saying he regretted the comment. But then he continued, criticizing Bush as a rich kid who hasn't seen enough of the world. "He's very rich, you'd think he'd get some education," Hecker said.

"He's my president. I'll follow him in what he wants to do," he continued, "but I'm here for him." Hecker leaned forward and pointed through the glass at the unconscious soldier fighting for his life 2 yards away.

'It's just not right'
Not all of the staff can get away with criticizing their commander-in-chief or his decisions, but many use more opaque ways of communicating their unease.

"It's not right," said Maj. Cathy Martin, 40, head nurse of the ICU, when asked how she felt seeing so many soldiers pass through her unit. She paused. "It's just not right."

She declined to elaborate on what exactly she meant. Comments such as Hecker's about the president can lead to severe consequences for those with careers ahead of them. But Martin did add: "People need to vote for the right people to be in office and they need to be empowered to influence change."

What she did feel comfortable saying, echoing the head surgeon, Hecker and others, was that people back home just don't get it.

"Everyone's looking but no one's seeing," added Staff Sgt. Royce Pittman, 32, who works with her. "I had no idea this was going on. ... What we see every day is not normal. There's nothing normal about this."

In private, some hospital workers said they wished they could openly air their feelings about the war. And if reporters could somehow quote people's facial expressions, a number of those staff members would probably be facing disciplinary hearings. Only one staff member interviewed expressed solid support for the war.

"I do believe, I truly do believe that those that are fighting and defending for liberty and freedom ... that that is a truly worthy cause," said Maj. Kendra Whyatt, head nurse of inpatient orthopedics.

Is it all worth it? the head surgeon was asked. "That's not for me to say, but I'll be here for them," Place said.

The staff do talk among themselves, said Maj. Stephen Franco, chief of the clinical health psychology service at the hospital. He recalled one doctor's comments after attending a memorial service for a young soldier who had died. "I wish some of the lawmakers could attend some of these more often so they can think a little more about their decisions," Franco recalled the doctor telling him.

But like all the staff in the hospital, politics comes second to healing with Franco. He has a lot of it to do.

"It's probably the biggest challenge to mental health since Vietnam," said his boss, Col. Gary Southwell, chief of psychology services.

Soldiers come in carrying guilt about leaving their unit behind, haunting visions of seeing friends dying, nightmares, frayed nerves and deep anxieties about their future, Franco said. Place noted that for a single man facial disfigurement, for example, can be particularly traumatizing. Who's going to want someone with a face like this? the young men wonder.

Care taken not to sugarcoat
Franco and his colleagues - the number of psychologists and psychiatrists has doubled since the Iraq war began, reflecting large staff increases throughout the hospital - make a point of visiting all new patients to see how they're doing.

"We provide assurance, look to the future," he said. "We're careful not to sugarcoat anything."

Franco doesn't attempt quick miracle fixes for traumatized soldiers, most of whom are flown to the United States after a few days. "When your world is rocked like that it's not a smooth process necessarily to get that to make sense," he said.

On Sept. 18, Army Sgt. 1st Class Larry Daniels' world was rocked. So was his wife's.

With other men from his platoon, Daniels was standing on a bridge over a highway near Baghdad International Airport while an Iraqi contractor fixed a fence by the side of the road. Daniels, 37, was waving Iraqi vehicles past the three American Humvees while the contractor worked as quickly as possible to fix the wire fence.

An orange and white Chevy Caprice, a type of car usually driven as a taxi in Baghdad, veered toward the soldiers. It exploded; a suicide car bomb.

"I felt my body went up in the air," said Daniels, in his Texas drawl. "I was upside down looking back at where the car had been and landed on the ground. Three seconds later it hit me what happened."

Lying on the pavement, Big Daddy Daniels, as his men call him, had the presence of mind to keep ordering his soldiers around, even though he couldn't move. Another unit arrived soon and ferried the survivors to safety. Two were dead.

Two days later, Daniels was flown to Landstuhl. Both of his arms have multiple fractures. Steel pins and thick casts keep his bones in place. Part of his hand is missing. And as he puts it, he's got "holes from my ankle to my ear." The doctors have taken some of the shrapnel out. Some fragments are still there.

Wife's opinion has changed
Daniels is an experienced, professional soldier. He's been in the Army for 17 years. His dad was a draftee in the Vietnam War. He can trace his family's military history back to the Civil War. So perhaps it's not surprising that he says he wishes he were still in Iraq with his men.

His wife, Cheryl, has had enough. While the staff at Landstuhl move the injured on, usually after five days, the families of the wounded have to face up to the long-term consequences of the violence in Iraq. Many are embittered.

From a military family herself, the mother of two had been changing her mind about a lot of things even before her husband became so badly injured that he can't do even the most basic of tasks for himself.

She supported the war and voted for Bush. Now, she says, she wants to pull the troops out of Iraq. "I will vote for Kerry. Not because I prefer Kerry over Bush but because I don't want Bush back in office."

Her 12-year-old son has been saying he wants to go to West Point. Her 8-year-old daughter wants to be a military veterinarian. She's stopped encouraging those ambitions.

Speaking alone, without her husband, she said she knew that the Army wasn't going to like what she had to say. Like Hecker, she hasn't got much to lose by speaking her mind, which she did, calmly and thoughtfully.

"I don't feel we have any business being there," she said Friday. "I think this is an area of the world that has been fighting for thousands of years, and I don't think our presence will change anything. If anything, we've given them a common target to focus on. Rather than fight each other, they're fighting us. I don't see why my husband has to lose two soldiers or question why he's here or see his other guys that are hurt. The minute we pull out, things will go back to the culture that is established."

Cheryl Daniels is looking at a tough future. She has to parent her kids, hold down a job at Fort Hood Army base in Texas, where the family lives, and finish the management degree she is studying for at night. Soon her disabled husband will be home, and she finds it hard to believe, as the doctors have told her, that "in a year or two he's going to be back to normal. I can't see that right now because he's got nerve damage in his arms."

She doesn't feel that her country, her military, is giving her enough support. She had to pay her own way to Germany and her own way back. The Army was doing almost nothing for her, she said.

"I feel like we've paid our dues," she said. "And I'm done."

.


While scouring the web for an online version of my printout of the article above, this comprehensive overview turned up, including links to over 100 articles.:

QUOTE
http://dissidentvoice.org/deathtoll/
The Military Death Toll While Enforcing the Occupation of Iraq

A Data Sheet of US-UK Military Fatalities Post-May 1, 2003 / Last updated 20 March 2008

by Paul de Rooijcolo
believe_it
Nov 11 2009, 06:07 PM
QUOTE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...1118432_pf.html

U.S. ambassador dissents on Afghan troop increase
Strongly worded cables urge a pause until Kabul government shifts course

By Greg Jaffe, Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 11, 2009 6:11 PM

The U.S. ambassador in Kabul sent two classified cables to Washington in the last week expressing deep concerns about sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan until Afghan President Hamid Karzai's government demonstrates that it is willing to tackle the corruption and mismanagement that has fueled the Taliban's rise, said senior U.S. officials.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry's memos were sent in the days leading up to a critical meeting Wednesday between President Obama and his national security team to consider several options prepared by military planners for how to proceed in Afghanistan. The proposals, which mark the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for between 20,000 to 40,000 more troops and a far broader American involvement of the war.

The last-minute dissent by Eikenberry, who commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007, has rankled his former colleagues in the Pentagon -- as well as Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, said defense officials. McChrystal has bluntly stated that without an increase of tens of thousands of troops in Afghanistan in the next year, the mission there "will likely result in failure."

Eikenberry retired from the military in April 2009 as a senior general in NATO and was sworn in as ambassador the next day. His position as a former commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan is likely to give added weight to his concerns. It will also likely fan growing doubts about U.S. prospects for Afghanistan among an increasingly pessimistic public.

Although Eikenberry's extensive military experience was one of the main reasons he was chosen by Obama for the top diplomatic job in Afghanistan, the former general had been reluctant as ambassador to weigh in on military issues. Some officials who favor an increase in troops said they were befuddled by last-minute nature of his strongly worded cables.

In his communications with Washington, Eikenberry has expressed deep reservations about Karzai's erratic behavior and Afghan government corruption, particularly in the senior ranks of the Karzai government, said U.S. officials familiar with the cables. Since Karzai was officially declared re-elected last week, U.S. diplomats have seen little sign that the Afghan president plans to address the problems of corruption they have raised repeatedly with him.

U.S. officials were particularly irritated by a interview this week in which a defiant Karzai said that the West has little interest in Afghanistan and that its troops are there only for their own reasons. "The West is not here primarily for the sake of Afghanistan," Karzai told PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. "It is here to fight terrorism. The United States and its allies came to Afghanistan after September 11. Afghanistan was troubled like hell before that, too. Nobody bothered about us."

Karzai expressed indifference when asked about the withdrawal of most of the hundreds of U.N. employees from Afghanistan following a bombing late last month in Kabul. The blast killed six foreign U.N. officials.

"They may or may not return," Karzai said of the departing U.N. employees. "I don't think Afghanistan will notice it."

In the cables, Eikenberry also expressed frustration with the relative paucity of money set aside for spending on development and reconstruction this year in Afghanistan, a country wrecked by three decades of war. Earlier this summer he asked for $2.5 billion in nonmilitary spending for 2010, a 60 percent increase over what Obama had requested from Congress. But the request has languished even as the administration has debated spending tens of billions of dollars on new troops.

The ambassador also has worried that sending tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops would increase the Afghan government's dependence on U.S. support at a time when its own security forces should be taking on more responsibility for fighting. Prior to serving as the commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, Eikenberry was in charge of the Afghan army training program.

Eikenberry's cables emerged as military planners presented Obama with several options for how to proceed in Afghanistan on Wednesday afternoon that at a minimum would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops. The proposals, marking the last stage of a months-long strategy review, all call for a broader American involvement in the war.

Obama received the options Wednesday afternoon in a Situation Room meeting with his national security team, and he will consider each on his nine-day trip to Asia that begins Thursday. Each strategy is accompanied by precise troop figures and the estimated annual costs of the additional deployments, which run into the tens of billions of dollars.

Facing a nation increasingly pessimistic about U.S. prospects in Afghanistan, Obama is considering a set of options that would all draw America deeper into the war at a time of economic hardship and rising fiscal concerns at home. His own party is largely opposed to expanding the war effort after eight years, and the extended review has revealed a philosophical division within his administration over how to proceed.

The internal deliberations have been shaped in large part by the hard skepticism of his civilian counselors, led by Vice President Biden, who have argued for a more narrow counterterrorism strategy that would not significantly expand the U.S. combat presence in Afghanistan.

But Obama's senior military advisers, supported by such influential Cabinet members as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, have said that only a "jump" in U.S. forces can turn back the Taliban and prevent Afghanistan from once again becoming a haven for al-Qaeda.

Obama has been seeking a middle ground, along with his national security adviser, James L. Jones, a four-star general described as skeptical that a large additional troop deployment would help stabilize the country. The review has already concluded that the Taliban cannot be eliminated as a military and political force, only weakened to the extent that it no longer poses a threat to the weak central government in Kabul.

The options range from a modest deployment of new troops combined with a focus on counterterrorism operations to a broader and probably longer-running counter-insurgency program. Whichever course he chooses, Obama will probably have to explain a recalibrated set of U.S. goals in Afghanistan and Pakistan nine months after he first articulated his administration's interests there.

Obama is taking into consideration the potential length of an additional American commitment, the effectiveness of Afghan President Hamid Karzai and the preparedness of Afghanistan's security forces, according to officials familiar with the review. He is also considering the uncertain support of neighboring Pakistan, and his own conclusions about what is realistically achievable against a rising indigenous insurgency.

A senior administration official involved in the review, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the internal deliberations, said "the troop level is only a way of measuring each of these equities against each other."

"Do we have any assurances of what Pakistan will do?" asked the official, who is identified with the group of Obama advisers skeptical of the merits of a large additional troop deployment. "At least in Iraq, you had some functioning government there at the time of the surge. In Afghanistan, there is no government there."

Obama and his senior advisers are also considering the cost of an additional years-long troop deployment, which would require an expensive new base construction program in Afghanistan to accommodate extra personnel.

Administration officials say it costs approximately $1 billion a year to support 1,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, a country whose gross domestic product is roughly $900 million. The recently passed defense-spending bill already includes $120 billion for U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for the coming fiscal year, but any additional resources would have to be approved by Democratic congressional leaders who generally favor few, if any, additional combat troops.

"Everybody's sensitive to costs, for obvious reasons, because we don't have unlimited resources," said a second senior administration official briefed frequently on the internal deliberations. "But the idea is to get the strategy right, determine what's achievable, then select the resources needed. That will drive the cost decisions."

Obama asked for the troop options last month in a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Tuesday that he would receive four proposals.

But officials said it is unclear whether Pentagon planners will include an option that calls for an additional deployment of 10,000 to 15,000 troops, the lowest number originally under consideration. The proposal holds little merit for military planners because, after building bases to accommodate 10,000 or so additional soldiers and Marines, the marginal cost of adding troops beyond that figure would rise only slightly.

The most ambitious option Obama is set to receive Wednesday calls for 40,000 additional U.S. troops and mirrors the counterinsurgency strategy outlined by Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, commander of U.S. and international forces in Afghanistan, in his stark assessment of the war filed at the end of August.

Military planners put the additional annual cost of McChrystal's recommendation at $33 billion, although White House officials say the number is probably closer to $50 billion.

McChrystal called for significantly more U.S. troops to protect Afghan civilians in the country's 10 to 12 largest urban areas, and to take the fight to the Taliban quickly to turn back recent insurgency gains within the next 18 months. Under the best of circumstances, military planners and White House officials say, a deployment of that size would not be completed until 2011.

Although that plan was originally favored by senior military officials, a second option now appears to have Gates's backing and is said to be the Pentagon's preferred choice, according to military planners.

The strategy, referred to by military planners as the "Gates Option," would deploy an additional 30,000 to 35,000 U.S. troops to carry out McChrystal's strategy. It would also rely on the administration's NATO allies to make up the 5,000- to 10,000-troop difference between the U.S. deployment and McChrystal's requested force size.

Of the roughly 100,000 international forces in Afghanistan, 68,000 are American. Obama dispatched 21,000 additional troops in March, a deployment that is just now arriving in full.

Last month, NATO defense ministers endorsed McChrystal's strategy during a meeting in Slovakia, although they did not pledge any additional forces. The war, like the conflict in Iraq, is seen by much of the European public as an unpopular U.S. project.

According to Pentagon and White House officials, Gates will appeal for more troops from the governments of Britain and Canada, in particular. Canada's parliament has ordered the country's 2,800 soldiers in Afghanistan out by the end of 2011.

The Dutch government is also scheduled to pull its more than 2,000 troops from Afghanistan next year. White House officials point out that, if Canada and the Netherlands carry out the scheduled withdrawals, one additional U.S. combat brigade sent to Afghanistan would simply be replacing the allies' departing forces, resulting in no net gain on the ground.

Obama has reached out to European allies since taking office, emphasizing the alliances neglected for years by the Bush administration. European leaders have praised the diplomacy, and Gates believes it is time for them to show their support with tangible commitments.

But advisers say that Obama, while supportive of Gates's appeal in theory, is skeptical he can succeed given the depth of European opposition to the war. Military planners estimate that the Gates option would cost $27 billion a year.

The third option, known by military planners as "the hybrid," would send 20,000 additional U.S. troops to shore up security in the major population areas.

In the rest of the country, the military would adopt a counterterrorism strategy targeting al-Qaeda operatives, using Predator drones and other tactics that leave a light U.S. footprint on the ground. The military puts the annual cost at $22 billion.

Although McChrystal identifies between 10 to 12 population areas that need U.S. protection, White House officials say the number could be lower.

Obama asked for a province-by-province analysis of the country to determine where local leaders could be counted on to ensure security, information he is using in part to determine how long U.S. forces might have to remain in the country and at what level.

One senior administration official noted that roughly 68 percent of the Afghan population lives in Kabul, Kandahar, Herat and Mazar-e-Sharif, adding that "all of them have some need of protection."

"What do you have to protect to ensure that the Afghan government stays in power?" asked one senior administration official. "You need a level of control over the population that legitimately represents Afghanistan. Whether that's three or five or 10 cities is still part of the debate."

.
believe_it
Nov 11 2009, 06:37 PM
PETITION
QUOTE
http://rethinkafghanistan.com/



An Afghanistan War veteran will travel to D.C. to deliver this message to the White House. Make sure your voice is heard.

Dear President Obama,

News reports indicate that you plan to send between 34,000 and 40,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

We urge you to reconsider this decision.

Expanding the war in Afghanistan will make Americans less safe, not more so.

Less than 100 members of Al Qaeda remain in Afghanistan. The Karzai government we once supported is controlled by warlords and is riddled with corruption. Pakistan’s stability will be gravely imperiled by an expansion of the war. Hundreds if not thousands of troops will be killed, along with countless civilians. Anti-American sentiment throughout the Muslim world will be inflamed by civilian bloodshed, facilitating recruitment by terrorist organizations.

The war will cost billions of dollars when we can least afford it, and will stymie your domestic agenda.

The cost of sustaining a military force in Afghanistan is $1 million per soldier per year – that’s close to $100 billion dollars annually with the troop increase. With the economy in shambles, the deficits generated by these enormous costs will compromise your domestic legislative agenda both fiscally and politically.

The United States has no vital interest in Afghanistan. If you choose to further escalate troop levels in Afghanistan, you will be making the biggest mistake of your presidency.

Please reject General McChrystal’s troop requests and begin the process of exiting U.S. forces from Afghanistan.

Signed,


QUOTE


WATCH THE DOCUMENTARY
believe_it
Nov 12 2009, 10:02 AM
MUST READ
QUOTE
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston



How the US Funds the Taliban
By Aram Roston

This article appeared in the November 30, 2009 edition of The Nation.

November 11, 2009

On October 29, 2001, while the Taliban's rule over Afghanistan was under assault, the regime's ambassador in Islamabad gave a chaotic press conference in front of several dozen reporters sitting on the grass. On the Taliban diplomat's right sat his interpreter, Ahmad Rateb Popal, a man with an imposing presence. Like the ambassador, Popal wore a black turban, and he had a huge bushy beard. He had a black patch over his right eye socket, a prosthetic left arm and a deformed right hand, the result of injuries from an explosives mishap during an old operation against the Soviets in Kabul.

But Popal was more than just a former mujahedeen. In 1988, a year before the Soviets fled Afghanistan, Popal had been charged in the United States with conspiring to import more than a kilo of heroin. Court records show he was released from prison in 1997.

Flash forward to 2009, and Afghanistan is ruled by Popal's cousin President Hamid Karzai. Popal has cut his huge beard down to a neatly trimmed one and has become an immensely wealthy businessman, along with his brother Rashid Popal, who in a separate case pleaded guilty to a heroin charge in 1996 in Brooklyn. The Popal brothers control the huge Watan Group in Afghanistan, a consortium engaged in telecommunications, logistics and, most important, security. Watan Risk Management, the Popals' private military arm, is one of the few dozen private security companies in Afghanistan. One of Watan's enterprises, key to the war effort, is protecting convoys of Afghan trucks heading from Kabul to Kandahar, carrying American supplies.

Welcome to the wartime contracting bazaar in Afghanistan. It is a virtual carnival of improbable characters and shady connections, with former CIA officials and ex-military officers joining hands with former Taliban and mujahedeen to collect US government funds in the name of the war effort.

In this grotesque carnival, the US military's contractors are forced to pay suspected insurgents to protect American supply routes. It is an accepted fact of the military logistics operation in Afghanistan that the US government funds the very forces American troops are fighting. And it is a deadly irony, because these funds add up to a huge amount of money for the Taliban. "It's a big part of their income," one of the top Afghan government security officials told The Nation in an interview. In fact, US military officials in Kabul estimate that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.

Understanding how this situation came to pass requires untangling two threads. The first is the insider dealing that determines who wins and who loses in Afghan business, and the second is the troubling mechanism by which "private security" ensures that the US supply convoys traveling these ancient trade routes aren't ambushed by insurgents.

A good place to pick up the first thread is with a small firm awarded a US military logistics contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars: NCL Holdings. Like the Popals' Watan Risk, NCL is a licensed security company in Afghanistan.

What NCL Holdings is most notorious for in Kabul contracting circles, though, is the identity of its chief principal, Hamed Wardak. He is the young American son of Afghanistan's current defense minister, Gen. Abdul Rahim Wardak, who was a leader of the mujahedeen against the Soviets. Hamed Wardak has plunged into business as well as policy. He was raised and schooled in the United States, graduating as valedictorian from Georgetown University in 1997. He earned a Rhodes scholarship and interned at the neoconservative think tank the American Enterprise Institute. That internship was to play an important role in his life, for it was at AEI that he forged alliances with some of the premier figures in American conservative foreign policy circles, such as the late Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick.

Wardak incorporated NCL in the United States early in 2007, although the firm may have operated in Afghanistan before then. It made sense to set up shop in Washington, because of Wardak's connections there. On NCL's advisory board, for example, is Milton Bearden, a well-known former CIA officer. Bearden is an important voice on Afghanistan issues; in October he was a witness before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where Senator John Kerry, the chair, introduced him as "a legendary former CIA case officer and a clearheaded thinker and writer." It is not every defense contracting company that has such an influential adviser.

But the biggest deal that NCL got--the contract that brought it into Afghanistan's major leagues--was Host Nation Trucking. Earlier this year the firm, with no apparent trucking experience, was named one of the six companies that would handle the bulk of US trucking in Afghanistan, bringing supplies to the web of bases and remote outposts scattered across the country.

At first the contract was large but not gargantuan. And then that suddenly changed, like an immense garden coming into bloom. Over the summer, citing the coming "surge" and a new doctrine, "Money as a Weapons System," the US military expanded the contract 600 percent for NCL and the five other companies. The contract documentation warns of dire consequences if more is not spent: "service members will not get food, water, equipment, and ammunition they require." Each of the military's six trucking contracts was bumped up to $360 million, or a total of nearly $2.2 billion. Put it in this perspective: this single two-year effort to hire Afghan trucks and truckers was worth 10 percent of the annual Afghan gross domestic product. NCL, the firm run by the defense minister's well-connected son, had struck pure contracting gold.

Host Nation Trucking does indeed keep the US military efforts alive in Afghanistan. "We supply everything the army needs to survive here," one American trucking executive told me. "We bring them their toilet paper, their water, their fuel, their guns, their vehicles." The epicenter is Bagram Air Base, just an hour north of Kabul, from which virtually everything in Afghanistan is trucked to the outer reaches of what the Army calls "the Battlespace"--that is, the entire country. Parked near Entry Control Point 3, the trucks line up, shifting gears and sending up clouds of dust as they prepare for their various missions across the country.

The real secret to trucking in Afghanistan is ensuring security on the perilous roads, controlled by warlords, tribal militias, insurgents and Taliban commanders. The American executive I talked to was fairly specific about it: "The Army is basically paying the Taliban not to shoot at them. It is Department of Defense money." That is something everyone seems to agree on.

Mike Hanna is the project manager for a trucking company called Afghan American Army Services. The company, which still operates in Afghanistan, had been trucking for the United States for years but lost out in the Host Nation Trucking contract that NCL won. Hanna explained the security realities quite simply: "You are paying the people in the local areas--some are warlords, some are politicians in the police force--to move your trucks through."

Hanna explained that the prices charged are different, depending on the route: "We're basically being extorted. Where you don't pay, you're going to get attacked. We just have our field guys go down there, and they pay off who they need to." Sometimes, he says, the extortion fee is high, and sometimes it is low. "Moving ten trucks, it is probably $800 per truck to move through an area. It's based on the number of trucks and what you're carrying. If you have fuel trucks, they are going to charge you more. If you have dry trucks, they're not going to charge you as much. If you are carrying MRAPs or Humvees, they are going to charge you more."

Hanna says it is just a necessary evil. "If you tell me not to pay these insurgents in this area, the chances of my trucks getting attacked increase exponentially."

Whereas in Iraq the private security industry has been dominated by US and global firms like Blackwater, operating as de facto arms of the US government, in Afghanistan there are lots of local players as well. As a result, the industry in Kabul is far more dog-eat-dog. "Every warlord has his security company," is the way one executive explained it to me.

In theory, private security companies in Kabul are heavily regulated, although the reality is different. Thirty-nine companies had licenses until September, when another dozen were granted licenses. Many licensed companies are politically connected: just as NCL is owned by the son of the defense minister and Watan Risk Management is run by President Karzai's cousins, the Asia Security Group is controlled by Hashmat Karzai, another relative of the president. The company has blocked off an entire street in the expensive Sherpur District. Another security firm is controlled by the parliamentary speaker's son, sources say. And so on.

In the same way, the Afghan trucking industry, key to logistics operations, is often tied to important figures and tribal leaders. One major hauler in Afghanistan, Afghan International Trucking (AIT), paid $20,000 a month in kickbacks to a US Army contracting official, according to the official's plea agreement in US court in August. AIT is a very well-connected firm: it is run by the 25-year-old nephew of Gen. Baba Jan, a former Northern Alliance commander and later a Kabul police chief. In an interview, Baba Jan, a cheerful and charismatic leader, insisted he had nothing to do with his nephew's corporate enterprise.

But the heart of the matter is that insurgents are getting paid for safe passage because there are few other ways to bring goods to the combat outposts and forward operating bases where soldiers need them. By definition, many outposts are situated in hostile terrain, in the southern parts of Afghanistan. The security firms don't really protect convoys of American military goods here, because they simply can't; they need the Taliban's cooperation.

One of the big problems for the companies that ship American military supplies across the country is that they are banned from arming themselves with any weapon heavier than a rifle. That makes them ineffective for battling Taliban attacks on a convoy. "They are shooting the drivers from 3,000 feet away with PKMs," a trucking company executive in Kabul told me. "They are using RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] that will blow up an up-armed vehicle. So the security companies are tied up. Because of the rules, security companies can only carry AK-47s, and that's just a joke. I carry an AK--and that's just to shoot myself if I have to!"

The rules are there for a good reason: to guard against devastating collateral damage by private security forces. Still, as Hanna of Afghan American Army Services points out, "An AK-47 versus a rocket-propelled grenade--you are going to lose!" That said, at least one of the Host Nation Trucking companies has tried to do battle instead of paying off insurgents and warlords. It is a US-owned firm called Four Horsemen International. Instead of providing payments, it has tried to fight off attackers. And it has paid the price in lives, with horrendous casualties. FHI, like many other firms, refused to talk publicly; but I've been told by insiders in the security industry that FHI's convoys are attacked on virtually every mission.

For the most part, the security firms do as they must to survive. A veteran American manager in Afghanistan who has worked there as both a soldier and a private security contractor in the field told me, "What we are doing is paying warlords associated with the Taliban, because none of our security elements is able to deal with the threat." He's an Army veteran with years of Special Forces experience, and he's not happy about what's being done. He says that at a minimum American military forces should try to learn more about who is getting paid off.

"Most escorting is done by the Taliban," an Afghan private security official told me. He's a Pashto and former mujahedeen commander who has his finger on the pulse of the military situation and the security industry. And he works with one of the trucking companies carrying US supplies. "Now the government is so weak," he added, "everyone is paying the Taliban."

To Afghan trucking officials, this is barely even something to worry about. One woman I met was an extraordinary entrepreneur who had built up a trucking business in this male-dominated field. She told me the security company she had hired dealt directly with Taliban leaders in the south. Paying the Taliban leaders meant they would send along an escort to ensure that no other insurgents would attack. In fact, she said, they just needed two armed Taliban vehicles. "Two Taliban is enough," she told me. "One in the front and one in the back." She shrugged. "You cannot work otherwise. Otherwise it is not possible."

Which leads us back to the case of Watan Risk, the firm run by Ahmad Rateb Popal and Rashid Popal, the Karzai family relatives and former drug dealers. Watan is known to control one key stretch of road that all the truckers use: the strategic route to Kandahar called Highway 1. Think of it as the road to the war--to the south and to the west. If the Army wants to get supplies down to Helmand, for example, the trucks must make their way through Kandahar.

Watan Risk, according to seven different security and trucking company officials, is the sole provider of security along this route. The reason is simple: Watan is allied with the local warlord who controls the road. Watan's company website is quite impressive, and claims its personnel "are diligently screened to weed out all ex-militia members, supporters of the Taliban, or individuals with loyalty to warlords, drug barons, or any other group opposed to international support of the democratic process." Whatever screening methods it uses, Watan's secret weapon to protect American supplies heading through Kandahar is a man named Commander Ruhullah. Said to be a handsome man in his 40s, Ruhullah has an oddly high-pitched voice. He wears traditional salwar kameez and a Rolex watch. He rarely, if ever, associates with Westerners. He commands a large group of irregular fighters with no known government affiliation, and his name, security officials tell me, inspires obedience or fear in villages along the road.

It is a dangerous business, of course: until last spring Ruhullah had competition--a one-legged warlord named Commander Abdul Khaliq. He was killed in an ambush.

So Ruhullah is the surviving road warrior for that stretch of highway. According to witnesses, he works like this: he waits until there are hundreds of trucks ready to convoy south down the highway. Then he gets his men together, setting them up in 4x4s and pickups. Witnesses say he does not limit his arsenal to AK-47s but uses any weapons he can get. His chief weapon is his reputation. And for that, Watan is paid royally, collecting a fee for each truck that passes through his corridor. The American trucking official told me that Ruhullah "charges $1,500 per truck to go to Kandahar. Just 300 kilometers."

It's hard to pinpoint what this is, exactly--security, extortion or a form of "insurance." Then there is the question, Does Ruhullah have ties to the Taliban? That's impossible to know. As an American private security veteran familiar with the route said, "He works both sides... whatever is most profitable. He's the main commander. He's got to be involved with the Taliban. How much, no one knows."

Even NCL, the company owned by Hamed Wardak, pays. Two sources with direct knowledge tell me that NCL sends its portion of US logistics goods in Watan's and Ruhullah's convoys. Sources say NCL is billed $500,000 per month for Watan's services. To underline the point: NCL, operating on a $360 million contract from the US military, and owned by the Afghan defense minister's son, is paying millions per year from those funds to a company owned by President Karzai's cousins, for protection.

Hamed Wardak wouldn't return my phone calls. Milt Bearden, the former CIA officer affiliated with the company, wouldn't speak with me either. There's nothing wrong with Bearden engaging in business in Afghanistan, but disclosure of his business interests might have been expected when testifying on US policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After all, NCL stands to make or lose hundreds of millions based on the whims of US policy-makers.

It is certainly worth asking why NCL, a company with no known trucking experience, and little security experience to speak of, would win a contract worth $360 million. Plenty of Afghan insiders are asking questions. "Why would the US government give him a contract if he is the son of the minister of defense?" That's what Mahmoud Karzai asked me. He is the brother of President Karzai, and he himself has been treated in the press as a poster boy for access to government officials. The New York Times even profiled him in a highly critical piece. In his defense, Karzai emphasized that he, at least, has refrained from US government or Afghan government contracting. He pointed out, as others have, that Hamed Wardak had little security or trucking background before his company received security and trucking contracts from the Defense Department. "That's a questionable business practice," he said. "They shouldn't give it to him. How come that's not questioned?"

I did get the opportunity to ask General Wardak, Hamed's father, about it. He is quite dapper, although he is no longer the debonair "Gucci commander" Bearden once described. I asked Wardak about his son and NCL. "I've tried to be straightforward and correct and fight corruption all my life," the defense minister said. "This has been something people have tried to use against me, so it has been painful."

Wardak would speak only briefly about NCL. The issue seems to have produced a rift with his son. "I was against it from the beginning, and that's why we have not talked for a long time. I have never tried to support him or to use my power or influence that he should benefit."

When I told Wardak that his son's company had a US contract worth as much as $360 million, he did a double take. "This is impossible," he said. "I do not believe this."

I believed the general when he said he really didn't know what his son was up to. But cleaning up what look like insider deals may be easier than the next step: shutting down the money pipeline going from DoD contracts to potential insurgents.

Two years ago, a top Afghan security official told me, Afghanistan's intelligence service, the National Directorate of Security, had alerted the American military to the problem. The NDS delivered what I'm told are "very detailed" reports to the Americans explaining how the Taliban are profiting from protecting convoys of US supplies.

The Afghan intelligence service even offered a solution: what if the United States were to take the tens of millions paid to security contractors and instead set up a dedicated and professional convoy support unit to guard its logistics lines? The suggestion went nowhere.

The bizarre fact is that the practice of buying the Taliban's protection is not a secret. I asked Col. David Haight, who commands the Third Brigade of the Tenth Mountain Division, about it. After all, part of Highway 1 runs through his area of operations. What did he think about security companies paying off insurgents? "The American soldier in me is repulsed by it," he said in an interview in his office at FOB Shank in Logar Province. "But I know that it is what it is: essentially paying the enemy, saying, 'Hey, don't hassle me.' I don't like it, but it is what it is."

As a military official in Kabul explained contracting in Afghanistan overall, "We understand that across the board 10 percent to 20 percent goes to the insurgents. My intel guy would say it is closer to 10 percent. Generally it is happening in logistics."

In a statement to The Nation about Host Nation Trucking, Col. Wayne Shanks, the chief public affairs officer for the international forces in Afghanistan, said that military officials are "aware of allegations that procurement funds may find their way into the hands of insurgent groups, but we do not directly support or condone this activity, if it is occurring." He added that, despite oversight, "the relationships between contractors and their subcontractors, as well as between subcontractors and others in their operational communities, are not entirely transparent."

In any case, the main issue is not that the US military is turning a blind eye to the problem. Many officials acknowledge what is going on while also expressing a deep disquiet about the situation. The trouble is that--as with so much in Afghanistan--the United States doesn't seem to know how to fix it.

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If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.

Aram Roston is an investigative journalist and the author of The Man Who Pushed America to War: The Extraordinary Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi (Nation Books). More...
believe_it
Nov 12 2009, 10:09 AM
QUOTE
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/11/12/taliban

As US Ambassador Casts Doubt on Troop Increase in Afghanistan, New Report Reveals US Indirectly Funding the Taliban

November 12, 2009

VIDEO

In a last-minute dissent ahead of a critical war cabinet meeting on escalating the Afghan war, US Ambassador Karl Eikenberry has cast doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems. Meanwhile, a report reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting. Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack.

The U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan is warning against sending more troops to fight in the Afghan war. In a last-minute dissent, Ambassador Karl Eikenberry sent two cables this week casting doubt on a troop escalation until the Afghan government can address corruption and other internal problems.

Well today we turn to a new report that reveals how the US government is financing the very same insurgent forces in Afghanistan that American and NATO soldiers are fighting.
“How the US Funds the Taliban” is the cover story of the latest issue of The Nation magazine: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091130/roston

Investigative journalist Aram Roston traces how the Pentagon’s civilian contractors in Afghanistan end up paying insurgent groups to protect American supply routes from attack. The practice of buying the Taliban’s protection is not a secret. US military officials in Kabul told Roston that a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon"s logistics contracts consists of payments to the Taliban.

That translates into millions of dollars being funneled to the Taliban. This summer, anticipating a surge of US troops, the military expanded its trucking contracts in Afghanistan by 600 percent to a total of over two billion dollars.

Well, Aram Roston joins us now here in the firehouse studio. He"s the author of the book “The man who pushed America to War: The Life, Adventures, and Obsessions of Ahmad Chalabi.” His latest piece “How the US Funds the Taliban” was supported by the investigative fund at The Nation Institute.

TRANSCRIPT later today.
believe_it
Nov 12 2009, 11:11 AM
More discussion here:

QUOTE
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ess=389x6998778

DemocracyNow: New Report Reveals U.S. Indirectly Funding the Taliban
Thu Nov-12-09 10:50 AM

.
Indianhead
Nov 12 2009, 04:56 PM
The ambassador in Afghanistan reports to Mrs. Clinton, who answers to Mr. Obama.
If anyone thinks this is generated in a philosophical vaccuum - think again.

I'm sorry, but I didn't read far enough into the long lines of articles to find "The Draft"
as mentioned in the subtitle. Do you support or reject The Draft?

It was interesting that you included a link to subscribe to The Nation. I'll stay with CGCS.
believe_it
Nov 12 2009, 07:09 PM
The long lines of articles all pertain to the same general theme of dissatisfaction with escalation approached from different angles -
  • unfairness of burden;
  • shortage of soldiers;
  • harm to soldiers, their families and communities;
  • fiscal costs to taxpayer;
  • dissent by both veterans and prominent foreign policy analysts, past and present;
  • apparently unavoidable and intractable corruption involving massive amounts of taxpayer dollars.
Does nothing resonate? Why not?

Please try to hear the interview in post #14 or peruse the article in post #13. Play the video while multitasking if you must. It's worth it. I haven't watched the free documentary, RETHINK AFGHANISTAN, from post #12 yet but plan to soon.

Ambassador Karl W. Eikenberry commanded U.S. troops in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007. Daniel Ellsberg (video above with retired Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson) urges whistleblowers to speak out sooner rather than later, as he says he did. He expresses guilt at failing to act on his knowledge before many lives were unnecessarily lost. You've been very eloquent here yourself about acts of conscience and higher duty. I can't believe you seem to be scornful of Eikenberry's actions. I need to dig up the resignation letter of the diplomat who recently resigned over the handling of Afghanistan to add to the thread. All of these individuals are exhibiting moral bravery and together comprise a critical mass which should give you pause.
believe_it
Nov 18 2009, 08:38 AM
Traveling, very slow internet, but I had to post this,

QUOTE
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/1...=home_headlines

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Retired Gen. Clark calls for exit strategy in Afghanistan

By Tom LoBianco

Ret. Gen. Wesley K. Clark urged members of Congress Tuesday to adopt an exit strategy for American forces in Afghanistan.

Speaking to the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Clark said American leaders should strengthen the national partnership with Pakistan -- including sharing intelligence regarding al Qaeda operations -- and promote economic development in Afghanistan to undercut the drug trade fueled by growing poppies.

Gen. Clark, a former Democratic presidential candidate, praised President Barack Obama for taking his time in developing an Afghanistan strategy and said that any troop increase should wait until a firm endgame has been establsihed for U.S. Involvement in the country.

"The legacy of Vietnam really looms over these discussions," said Gen. Clark, reflecting on his experience in Vietnam and the arc of one of the nation's most painful wars.

"It's particularly painful for me to see where we are in Afghanistan," he said.

American forces commander Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal has requested up to 60,000 more American troops to support international forces. Pressure has built over the last three months on Mr. Obama to decide whether to support that call.

.


Link from http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ess=102x4150550
believe_it
Nov 18 2009, 09:58 PM
QUOTE
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/18/m...e_n_363171.html

Matthew Hoh, Daniel Ellsberg Discuss Aghanistan, Vietnam Wars (VIDEO)

First Posted: 11-18-09 09:11 PM | Updated: 11-18-09 10:00 PM

Matthew Hoh and Daniel Ellsberg, recently sat down for a conversation about the war in Afghanistan.

Matthew Hoh made headlines late last month when he resigned from the U.S. State Department. Hoh, 36, became the first known U.S. official to resign in protest over the war in Afghanistan. Ellsberg, gained notoriety in 1971, after he leaked parts of the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times as part of an effort to end the Vietnam War, a war that he argued was "a wrongful war."

Below are two clips from Hoh and Ellsberg's exchange documented by Brave New Films.

Both wonder what the US is doing in Afghanistan, arguing that American hubris is one of the things keeping the country from learning the lessons of the Soviets' War in Afghanistan.
.


QUOTE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...9102603394.html
U.S. official resigns over Afghan war
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 27, 2009

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/hp/ss...ST2009102603447
Hoh Resignation Letter
.
believe_it
Nov 18 2009, 10:23 PM
Full video here (30:45 minutes):

QUOTE
http://bravenewconversations.com/index.php/episodes/

Daniel Ellsberg and Matthew Hoh
November 19th

As an introduction to Brave New Conversations, we are inviting you to view the first half of this historic Conversation - a full 30 minute episode.

In this special episode, Daniel Ellsberg (the man who helped end the Vietnam War when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and Matthew Hoh (the first known US official to resign in protest of the Afghan war) stop by our studios for a Conversation about the war in Afghanistan.

Watch Part I of the discussion between these two extraordinary men right now. Then Join the Conversation to see the rest of this incisive talk!

.


(annoying to be coerced into donating even if that would be my impulse anyway)
believe_it
Nov 18 2009, 11:04 PM
30:45 minute video FREE:

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
QUOTE
http://bravenewconversations.com/index.php/episodes/

Daniel Ellsberg and Matthew Hoh
November 19, 2009



As an introduction to Brave New Conversations, we are inviting you to view the first half of this historic Conversation - a full 30 minute episode - free.

In this special episode, Daniel Ellsberg (the man who helped end the Vietnam War when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times) and Matthew Hoh (the first known US official to resign in protest of the Afghan war) stop by our studios for a Conversation about the war in Afghanistan.

.
believe_it
Nov 20 2009, 11:04 PM
ESSENTIAL
QUOTE
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11202009/watch.html



November 20, 2009

VIDEO AND TRANSCRIPT

Bill Moyers considers a President's decision to escalate troop levels in a military conflict.

Through LBJ's taped phone conversations and his own remembrances, Bill Moyers looks at Johnson's deliberations as he stepped up America's role in Vietnam. Explore a multimedia timeline.

.
believe_it
Nov 21 2009, 08:22 PM
QUOTE
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2009...p;twt=nytimestv

November 20, 2009, 5:56 pm

Bill Moyers to Leave Weekly Television

By ELIZABETH JENSEN

The PBS mainstay Bill Moyers said he was retiring from weekly television and would end his Friday night public affairs show, “Bill Moyers Journal,” on April 30, 2010. That date will also be the last for “Now on PBS,” which has been canceled.

Mr. Moyers said he had been planning for some time to retire the program on Dec. 25, but was asked by PBS to raise the funds to continue through April, which he did.

“I am 75 years old,” he said of the decision to end the series, which began in April 2007. The program has recently been having a “good run of it,” he added in a telephone interview on Friday, “so I feel it’s time.” He said he was not quitting television work, although he has no new projects planned.

“Now” began in January 2002, and was originally hosted by Mr. Moyers. John Siceloff, the executive producer, said the program, hosted now by David Brancaccio, had been “a unique voice at a time when outlets for insightful journalism are diminishing. We’re all looking for places to continue that work.”

PBS said in a statement that it was in the middle of a “review and reinvention” of its news and public affairs programming, and that it would announce plans for its lineup in January.

.


Link from http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...ess=102x4155558
65 Comments
believe_it
Nov 21 2009, 09:45 PM
QUOTE
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/47885

Specter Opposes Adding Troops in Afghanistan

Submitted by Chip on Sat, 2009-11-21 16:32.
By Spencer Ackerman | Washington Independent

On a blogger conference call this afternoon, Sen. Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) announced he can’t support a potential addition of U.S. troops in Afghanistan. “We ought not to add troops in Afghanistan,” Specter said, adding that he questioned “even staying” in Afghanistan unless the administration demonstrates that continuing the war is “indispensable to our fight against al-Qaeda.” His position, he said, came as a result of extensive consultations with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the heads of the intelligence community, as well as antipathy to the government of Hamid Karzai.

I asked Specter if he wanted to see the Obama administration embrace an exit strategy for the eight-year war. “I think there ought to be an exit strategy,” Specter said, which ought to be “geared toward our expectations as to what we’re looking to accomplish.” But he demurred on seeking a timeline for winding down the war. “I would want to see the administration’s proposals, and see what people on the ground over there think,” Specter said. “It’s hard to answer that with any specificity.” He added that he endorsed the Obama administration’s style of decisionmaking, defending the “very thoughtful” president against charges of “dithering” lodged by former Vice President Cheney. Read more.
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