The quagmire of Afghanistan becomes clearer each day as reports filter out that the grand surge in Helmand is stymied and Afghan townspeople are not so pleased with their “liberation.”
Yet, while an uproar in the UK over their casualties this week – 15 dead in 10 days – grows, (see “renowned British military historian Correlli Barnett … in the pages of the very conservative Daily Mail” (h/t Steve Hynd of Newshoggers)) Gen McChrystal continues to up the expectation that he will be asking for more US troops and more billions when he completes his strategic review:
The top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said Sunday that when he gives his assessment to the Obama administration next month of what is needed to defeat the Taliban , he won’t be deterred by administration statements that he cannot have more U.S. troops.
One of the central talking points justifying our ongoing war has always been talk about protecting or saving the women of Afghanistan. Both the right and the left have used this argument as a rationale for continuing – yet few ever listen to the wishes of actual Aghan women.
An interview with a man with his children in an Internally Displaced Person (refugee) camp quickly devolves into a father desperately trying to sell his smallest child to the cameraman. “For God’s sake, I want to sell this child but nobody wants her. What can I do?… For God’s sake, I am poor, otherwise I wouldn’t give her for one million. I know nobody wants to sell their daughter, but I have to. She is innocent, but I am poor. I have nothing.”
An old woman with amputated feet sits in a small mud hut, surrounded by five doe-eyed, dirty grandchildren. She is wailing about how their parents, her children, were killed in the bombings and now she is tasked with feeding, clothing, and providing water and shelter for these orphans in this camp. “They’re hungry, they’re thirsty, and I don’t know what to do with them… I ask my God, kill me and put me under the dirt, or change our lives.”
This is the kind of footage we saw, over and over again, as we cut and shaped the Rethink Afghanistan: Civilian Casualties segment. The first time I saw it, I was shocked. As a taxpayer, I was filled shame that these Afghans have to choose between living in fear of U.S. airstrikes in the rural areas or dying of hunger and cold in urban refugee camps. As a person of faith, my heart broke for the men who constantly fingered their prayer beads as they recalled the loved ones they had lost, and the parents and grandparents who cried out to God on behalf of their children and grandchildren.
Well-reasoned foreign policy results in more housing and jobs, better health care and education. When that policy consists of applying a military solution to a political problem, however, it results in death, destruction, and suffering. I witnessed the latter during my recent trip to Afghanistan–the devastating consequences of U.S. airstrikes on thousands of innocent civilians.
The footage you are about to see is poignant, heart-wrenching, and often a direct result of U.S. foreign policy. It came from a combination of filmmakers: Nazir, a man who tracked me down through Facebook, met me at the Kabul airport, and showed me segments of his exclusive look inside Afghan refugee camps; a stringer we hired who was arrested by the Taliban in filming a bombing victim in Kandahar; and my own interviews while in Kabul. Together, we bring you Rethink Afghanistan: Civilian Casualties.
Clearly we must help the refugees whose lives have been shattered by U.S. foreign policy and military attacks. Here’s how you can take action:
Digg this video: Just one click can help this video land on the Digg homepage, where it can reach tens of thousands of new people!
Provide aid through The Afghan Women’s Mission to the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan (RAWA), which is directly helping the refugees in these camps. We have partnered with these groups, and RAWA will go to the camps in this video to help those most in need. On their website, you can provide emergency relief to refugees, enable Afghans to visit the doctor, and help educate women and children to ensure women’s rights are respected.
Become a Peacemaker: Receive up-to-the-minute information through our new mobile alert system whenever there are Afghan civilian casualties from this war. Then take immediate action by calling our government and posting on social networking sites.
Here’s why it’s even more critical for you to take action now. Earlier this week, the House of Representatives narrowly approved $106 billion in wartime funding, despite an incredible progressive movement that inundated Congress with calls and helped move votes into the “No” column. This bill will escalate military operations in Afghanistan, which is all the more reason why we must help the civilians affected by U.S. airstrikes now, and help our government see the need for a more humanitarian foreign policy.
If George Orwell could see this he’d probably curse himself for not having thought of it. We are apparently about to see wars perpetuated by an exit strategy. How is this possible?
Well, the way Congress actually ends wars, the “exit strategy” that forces the troops and mercenaries to exit, is this one: you stop funding the wars. That’s what works. That’s what the Constitution foresaw. But nowadays we talk about crafting “exit strategies” while funding the continuation of wars. We even do so when the exit strategy is nothing but a one-sentence wish to someday have an exit strategy. And we even do so when the act of supporting a ridiculous “exit strategy” serves as cover for voting Yes on more war money.
A few things happened on Capitol Hill on Monday. First, it became clear that the Democratic Party (Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi) could not find the votes to pass $97 billion in war funding. Republicans were all opposing the bill because of IMF funding that had been added, and enough Democrats were opposing the IMF funding, the war funding, or both.
Here’s something everyone in Congress needs to see as they consider President Obama’s $83.4 billion supplemental war funding bill. National Priorities Project (NPP) just released The Cost of War in Afghanistan, a report examining the exorbitant human and economic costs of this rapidly expanding war, which estimates the war has currently cost taxpayers over $172 billion. When you factor in the projected costs of long-term military occupation, interest, and veterans’ benefits, we’re talking about a war that will cost close to $1 trillion. “All told,” the report concludes, “this is more than the size of the recent bailout of Wall Street and rivals the historic economic stimulus bill just passed by Congress.”
NPP is tracking the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq using an individual cost of war counter, calculating the state-level numbers and trade-offs of supplemental war spending. In my home state of Pennsylvania, for instance, taxpayers will have to pay $2.9 billion of the proposed $83.4 billion tab. Want to know what $2.9 billion could do instead of fund more war? NPP claims it could provide:
725,689 People with Health Care for One Year OR
3,533,713 Homes with Renewable Electricity for One Year OR
29,863 Affordable Housing Units OR
460,546 Head Start Places for Children for One Year OR
46,575 Elementary School Teachers for One Year OR
The list goes on and on. The fact is not nearly enough members of Congress are seriously considering the cost and impact of more troops, both in the U.S. and Afghanistan. According to NPP Executive Director Jo Comerford, “The purpose of this resource is to help people across the United States reflect on the current Afghanistan war and its proposed expansion.”
In 1964, President Johnson said of Vietnam that I don’t think it’s worth fighting for, and I don’t think that we can get out. It’s just the biggest damn mess I ever saw.” Yet Johnson escalated the conflict and America became bogged down in Southeast Asia for more than a decade. Former Senator George McGovern recently sat down with ANP and said that President Obama runs the risk, like Johnson’s Great Society, of hobbling his ambitious domestic goals if he continues to send troops into Afghanistan.
A couple of Rethink Afghanistan updates to report. A few weeks ago, Anna Almendrala and I told you about Brave New Foundation’s Easter activism in Washington DC and New York, using colorful Easter eggs to draw attention to critical questions surrounding the war in Afghanistan. Well check out the video taken by our volunteer activists who got involved with this campaign in both cities.
And speaking of getting involved, the Cumberland Center for Justice and Peace in Sewanee, Tennessee, recently gathered to screen parts one and two of Rethink Afghanistan. Lots of members of the community attended, and University of the South vice chancellor Dr. Samuel Williamson and journalist Henry Hamman led a discussion following the screening. Williamson, an expert on foreign and national security issues, is the author of The Origins of the U.S. Nuclear Strategy, 1945-53. And Hamman set up a relief program for Afghan refugees after the Soviet invasion, in addition to covering the negotiations that led to the Soviet withdrawal.
If your organization or school is interested in screening the first few parts of Rethink Afghanistan, e-mail us at info@bravenewfilms.org.
Almost like clockwork, the reports float up to us from thousands of miles away, as if from another universe. Every couple of days they seem to arrive from Afghan villages that few Americans will ever see without weapon in hand. Every few days, they appear from a world almost beyond our imagining, and always they concern death — so many lives snuffed out so regularly for more than seven years now. Unfortunately, those news stories are so unimportant in our world that they seldom make it onto, no less off of, the inside pages of our papers. They’re so repetitive that, once you’ve started reading them, you could write them in your sleep from thousands of miles away.
Like obituaries, they follow a simple pattern. Often the news initially arrives buried in summary war reports based on U.S. military (or NATO) announcements of small triumphs — so many “insurgents,” or “terrorists,” or “foreign militants,” or “anti-Afghan forces” killed in an air strike or a raid on a house or a village. And these days, often remarkably quickly, even in the same piece, come the challenges. Some local official or provincial governor or police chief in the area hit insists that those dead “terrorists” or “militants” were actually so many women, children, old men, innocent civilians, members of a wedding party or a funeral.
In response — no less part of this formula — have been the denials issued by American military officials or coalition spokespeople that those killed were anything but insurgents, and the assurances of the accuracy of the intelligence information on which the strike or raid was based. In these years, American spokespeople have generally retreated from their initial claims only step by begrudging step, while doggedly waiting for any hubbub over the killings to die down. If that didn’t happen, an “investigation” would be launched (the investigators being, of course, members of the same military that had done the killing) and then prolonged, clearly in hopes that the investigation would outlast coverage of the “incident” and both would be forgotten in a flood of other events.
Forgotten? It’s true that we forget these killings easily — often we don’t notice them in the first place — since they don’t seem to impinge on our lives. Perhaps that’s one of the benefits of fighting a war on the periphery of empire, halfway across the planet in the backlands of some impoverished country.
One problem, though: the forgetting doesn’t work so well in those backlands. When your child, wife or husband, mother or father is killed, you don’t forget.
WASHINGTON, (IPS) – President Barack Obama and other top officials in his administration have made it clear that there can be no military solution in Afghanistan, and that the non-military efforts to win over the Afghan population will be central to its chances of success.
The reality, however, is that U.S. military and civilian agencies lack the skills and training as well as the institutional framework necessary to carry out culturally and politically sensitive socio-economic programmes at the local level in Afghanistan, or even to avoid further alienation of the population.
In fact, the U.S. government does not even have a minimum corps of people capable of speaking Pashto, the language of the 14 million ethnic Pashtuns who represent about 42 percent of the population of Afghanistan. It is in the Pashtun southern and eastern regions of the country that the complex insurgency that has come to be called the Taliban has been able to organise and often effectively govern at the village level in recent years.
We bring you Cost of War, part three of our Rethink Afghanistan documentary, which delves into the financial costs of this broadening war.
As we pay our tax bills, it seems an appropriate time to urge everyone to Rethink Afghanistan, a war that currently costs over $2 billion a month but hasn’t made us any safer. Everyone has a friend or relative who just lost a job. Do we really want to spend over $1 trillion on another war? Everyone knows someone who has lost their home. Do we really want spend our tax dollars on a war that could last a decade or more? The Obama administration has taken some smart steps to counter this economic crisis with its budget request. Do we really want to see that effort wasted by expanding military demands?
Watch Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and journalists, military and foreign policy experts, leading economists, and many more explain just how much the war in Afghanistan will cost us over how many years. View both the trailer and full segment of Cost of War, part three of the Rethink Afghanistan documentary.
Last week, we delivered a petition to Sen. John Kerry and Rep. Howard Berman, demanding oversight hearings. These hearings could raise the critical questions about costs and many other issues. Now, we want to know what questions you would ask in such hearings. Would you want to know how exactly the war is weakening the U.S. economy? What about whether more troops can solve Afghanistan’s problems or the escalating instability in Pakistan, subjects explored in parts one and two of this documentary?
Record your questions on your webcam and send them to us! Simple instructions for doing this can be found here. It’s easy!
Post your video to our Facebook page! Go to our Facebook page, click in the “Write something” box, and then click the video link.
We must urge Congress to raise key questions about this war at once. As FireDogLake blogger Siun recently wrote, “Once again we are planning a surge with no exit plan and a continued lack of concern for the most basic protection of the civilians in the land we claim to liberate.”
