Senator John McCain’s attempt to kill health care reform defeated
Update: Senator John McCain’s rank hypocrisy on Medicare cuts
Analysis of the Obama Af-Pak war strategy
Posted by AzBlueMeanie:
To begin with, I was impressed by the sober tone and frank assessment of the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan by President Obama. There was none of the jingoistic American cowboy crap for which the Bush-Cheney regime is infamous. He spoke to his audience of cadets and to Americans like intelligent adults. For this he is to be commended.
That said, one does not have to agree with every conclusion drawn by the president in his speech.
One certainly should not be swayed by the "post game show" media villagers and Beltway bloviators promoting their media conventional wisdom after the speech. Where were these newly minted cynics during the eight years they were actively cheerleading for the Bush-Cheney regime? And as if on cue, the right-wing media predictably went ballistic: "he didn't use the word victory," or "evildoers." Jingoism is their stock in trade.
The first part of the president's speech was a recitation of how we got into the war in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, the president began his timeline with the terrorist attacks on 9/11 for dramatic effect. America's role in Afghanistan is far more complex.
American involvement in Afghanistan goes back at least to the support of the Mujahideen against the pro-Soviet Afghan government in the 1970s, and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. This became known as the "Reagan Doctrine," under which the U.S. supported anti-Soviet resistance movements. Reagan himself called the Mujahideen "freedom fighters."
The Mujahideen attracted a number of foreign fighters from the Muslim world, including the son of a wealthy Saudi Arabian — Osama bin Laden. He became a prominent organizer and financier of an all-Arab islamist group of foreign volunteers known as "Afghan Arabs" in Afghanistan. Osama bin Laden was actually portrayed as an heroic figure in American media at the time. He was supported by the U.S.
The Soviet Union pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 after its puppet regime in Afghanistan was deposed. The Soviet Union itself collapsed in 1991 under the financial burden of its military adventurism (a lesson yet to be learned by the U.S.), and Mikhail Gorbachev's policies of perestroika (reconstruction) and glasnost (transparency in government, individual freedoms).
The Mujahideen turned to fighting each other for control of Afghanistan in a civil war. A new radical organization which became known as the Taliban was backed by Pakistan's intelligence agency (ISI). Pakistan sought to expand its sphere of influence in the region to Afghanistan in its never-ending conflict with India.
In 1996, the Taliban backed by Pakistan and Osama bin Laden's Afghan Arabs, now known as al Qaeda, defeated the Mujahideen militias, who later became known as the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.
As everyone knows by now, it was the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia to fight Iraq in the Gulf War (1991) that Osama bin Laden asserts turned him against the United States. Osama bin Laden's years of support for the eventual leaders of the Taliban government of Afghanistan, backed by Saudi money and Pakistan's intelligence agency (ISI), gave him a safe haven base of operations in Afghanistan.
What is important to remember is that after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. abandoned the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, setting the stage for the above events. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney was largely responsible for the policy of neglect towards Afghanistan. Had the U.S. engaged in "nation building" at that time – so despised by Dick Cheney – the course of recent history may have been dramatically different. In all fairness, the Clinton administration continued Cheney's policy of neglect towards Afghanistan in its first term, only turning its attention to al Qaeda as a terrorist organization during its second term.
For those who believe that the U.S. can simply "declare victory and leave," as it did after the Soviets left Afghanistan, this recent history demonstrates that neglect of this region can prove deadly.
The next portion of President Obama's speech is a recitation of the Bush-Cheney regime's failure in Afghanistan and the distraction of the unnecessary war of choice with Iraq. Remarks by the President:
Under the banner of this domestic unity and international legitimacy — and only after the Taliban refused to turn over Osama bin Laden — we sent our troops into Afghanistan. Within a matter of months, al Qaeda was scattered and many of its operatives were killed. The Taliban was driven from power and pushed back on its heels. A place that had known decades of fear now had reason to hope. At a conference convened by the U.N., a provisional government was established under President Hamid Karzai. And an International Security Assistance Force was established to help bring a lasting peace to a war-torn country.
Then, in early 2003, the decision was made to wage a second war, in Iraq. The wrenching debate over the Iraq war is well-known and need not be repeated here. It's enough to say that for the next six years, the Iraq war drew the dominant share of our troops, our resources, our diplomacy, and our national attention — and that the decision to go into Iraq caused substantial rifts between America and much of the world.
* * *
But while we've achieved hard-earned milestones in Iraq, the situation in Afghanistan has deteriorated. After escaping across the border into Pakistan in 2001 and 2002, al Qaeda’s leadership established a safe haven there. Although a legitimate government was elected by the Afghan people, it's been hampered by corruption, the drug trade, an under-developed economy, and insufficient security forces.
* * *
Now, throughout this period, our troop levels in Afghanistan remained a fraction of what they were in Iraq. When I took office, we had just over 32,000 Americans serving in Afghanistan, compared to 160,000 in Iraq at the peak of the war. Commanders in Afghanistan repeatedly asked for support to deal with the reemergence of the Taliban, but these reinforcements did not arrive. And that's why, shortly after taking office, I approved a longstanding request for more troops. After consultations with our allies, I then announced a strategy recognizing the fundamental connection between our war effort in Afghanistan and the extremist safe havens in Pakistan. I set a goal that was narrowly defined as disrupting, dismantling, and defeating al Qaeda and its extremist allies, and pledged to better coordinate our military and civilian efforts.
Since then, we've made progress on some important objectives. . .
This is a direct criticism of Dick Cheney who was the architect of the war with Iraq, and who is responsible more than any other individual for the failed policy in Afghanistan. President Obama also directly responded to Dick Cheney and his enablers in the right-wing media regarding his "dithering" on the decision regarding Afghanistan:
Now, let me be clear: There has never been an option before me that called for troop deployments before 2010, so there has been no delay or denial of resources necessary for the conduct of the war during this review period. Instead, the review has allowed me to ask the hard questions, and to explore all the different options, along with my national security team, our military and civilian leadership in Afghanistan, and our key partners. And given the stakes involved, I owed the American people — and our troops — no less.
This is a big "f#?k you, Dick."
Admiral Mike Mullen backed up President Obama's recitation of the Bush-Cheney regime's failure in Afghanistan and refuted criticism yesterday from that other architect of failure in Afghanistan, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. In testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Admiral Mullen said:
"In my view when you under-resource an effort for an extended period of time, when you, in many ways, starve an effort, the impact – and I don't just mean with forces, because we've done it with training, we've done it intellectually, we've done it diplomatically, politically, you name it – we were focused on the other war [in Iraq] and that was the priority." 'Countdown with Keith Olbermann' for Wednesday, December 2
This is a big "f#?k you, Don."
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