Clinton on Afghanistan politics: “There are warlords and there are warlords”

Previously Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other administration officials had been pressing to clean up the rampant corruption and cut Afghan President Karzai’s ties to local warlords, some of whom traffic in opium.

Clinton is now attempting to erase the doubts about Karzai’s  legitimacy raised by his fraud-tainted re-election. In a recent interview with Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Clinton said that Karzai had demonstrated “good faith” and added: “Well, there are warlords and there are warlords.”

“Based on a certification of accountability and transparency,” Clinton said on Face the Nation, there are “certain ministries … American money will not be going to.”

A senior U.S. defense official told McClatchy that the administration, which remains skeptical of Karzai, will “work around him”

All-out counterinsurgency campaign in Afghanistan requires 600,000 troops

McClatchy Newspapers reports that the U.S. Army’s recently revised counterinsurgency manual estimates that an all-out counterinsurgency campaign in a country with Afghanistan’s population would require about 600,000 troops.

Yet President Obama’s recent escalation means we’ll “only” have 100,000 troops there.

With this in mind, David Sirota writes:

Therefore, either:

1) The administration believes we can conduct the kind of counterinsurgency with one sixth of the troop levels counterinsurgency experts say are necessary, or

2) The administration is escalating the war with no intention of halting an escalation, but instead an intention of continuing to escalate to much higher troop levels irrespective of the vague promise to try to bring troops home in 2011.

No withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2011

President Obama’s top national security adviser, who has played a key part in designing the new Afghanistan and Pakistan strategy, has been trying to clear up some confusion about the exit strategy.  Gen James Jones said in an interview that “in no manner, shape or form” would the US withdraw from Afghanistan in 2011.

This after President Obama mentioned in his Tuesday speech , “these additional American and international troops will allow us … to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

Gen Jones was deeply involved in designing the new strategy, attending all 10 meetings between the president and his top advisers at which the strategy was discussed.

He has  stated for the record, “This is not a withdrawal of the United States from Afghanistan in 2011, it is a decision to turn over to the Afghans some of the responsibility where they are ready to accept that responsibility. But in no manner, shape or form is the United States leaving Afghanistan in 2011.”

BBC

European Union to recognize East Jerusalem as capital of Palestinian state

European Union foreign ministers are expected to officially call next week for the division of Jerusalem, to serve as the capitals of both Israel and Palestine. Jerusalem is waging a diplomatic campaign to keep the EU from issuing such an endorsement, but diplomats close to the EU deliberations believe it is virtually inevitable.

EU foreign ministers are scheduled to meet on December 7 for a two-day meeting in Brussels on the peace process, after which a statement outlining the body’s Mideast policy is expected.

A Swedish draft represents the first official EU articulation of a solution for one of the core issues of the final-status arrangement between Israel and the Palestinians. The goal, it states, is “an independent, democratic, contiguous and viable state of Palestine, comprising the West Bank and Gaza and with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

Taliban vow to step up the violence in Afghanistan

The Taliban have vowed to step up resistance against the extra 30,000 American troops US President Barack Obama has ordered to Afghanistan, having made statements including:

“This is a colonizing strategy which is securing the colonizing interests of American investors and it shows that America has dirty plans not only for Afghanistan but for the region.”   …  “Their hope to control Afghanistan by military means will not become reality.”  …   “Obama will witness lots of coffins heading to America from Afghanistan.”

The statement said the Americans would face the same fate as Russian and British soldiers previously — during the 19th century British invasion of Afghanistan, and that by Soviet troops in the 1980s.

The Taliban insurgency, which includes an increasing number of suicide bombings once unheard of in the destitute nation, has gained pace every year, with 2009 now the deadliest since US and NATO troops deployed.

AFP

1000 U.S. Soldiers and $300 Million for every one al-Qaeda fighter in Afghanistan

Fact: 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan at a cost of $30 billion a year.

Fact: U.S. intelligence officials have concluded there are only about 100 al Qaeda fighters in the entire country.

On the latter point, Obama’s National Security Adviser, Gen. James Jones, put the number at “fewer than a hundred” in an October interview with CNN. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., also referred to the number at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee in October, saying “intelligence says about a hundred al Qaeda in Afghanistan.”

At a Senate hearing, the former CIA Pakistan station chief, Bob Grenier, testified al Qaeda had already been defeated in Afghanistan. “So in terms of ‘in Afghanistan,’ ” asked Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., “they have been disrupted and dismantled and defeated. They’re not in Afghanistan, correct?”

“That’s true,” replied Grenier.

So with 100,000 troops in Afghanistan at an estimated yearly cost of $30 billion, it means that for every one al Qaeda fighter, the U.S. will commit 1,000 troops and $300 million a year.

The Cost of conducting Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

The war in Afghanistan will cost the same as providing a comprehensive health plan for all Americans.

Should we now believe that escalating the war will save more than 45,000 Americans a year, which is the number of Americans who die every year for lack of health insurance?

Each American soldier in Afghanistan costs at least $1 million per annum, according to the US Congress Research Service. Thirty thousand more US troops will thus cost $30 billion in additional war costs,  on top of the $200 billion annual cost of garrisoning Iraq and Afghanistan–now the second most expensive wars in US history.

Much of this money will have to be borrowed from China and Japan.

Meanwhile, Washington has deferred the $1 trillion to-date-costs of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars by simply adding them to the national debt, and paying interest on the balance owing.

Few Americans feel the real financial costs of these present wars. Future generations will get stuck with the bill.

Cost of War: Weapons, Mercenaries and the ruin of an Empire

Washington spends $25 billion funding foreign armies, the bulk of which goes to the Mideast, Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan. Aid to Islamabad will rise to $15 billion over the next five years, including secret ‘black’ payments.

The US supports 168,000 ‘contractors’ in Iraq, many of them gunmen. CIA runs another 74,000 mercenaries in Afghanistan.

The new fortified, 104-acre US Embassy in Baghdad will cost $700 million; the new embassy in Islamabad, $800 million. Islamic militants call them ‘crusader castles.’

Add to these costs the expense of maintaining fleets in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, and military bases in the Gulf and Diego Garcia to support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan; hugely expensive military airlift; $400 per gallon fuel delivered to US forces in Afghanistan; and, of course, financial inducements to many smaller nations to send handfuls of troops to Afghanistan and Iraq. Also an important part of the annual $93 billion in veterans benefits.

All told, the real cost of Afghanistan and Iraq is much higher than $200 billion annually. It seems clear that Obama has fallen increasingly under the influence of America’s powerful military-industrial-financial complex and neoconservative war party.

Unaffordable wars have been the ruin of many an empire, and the American Raj seems headed in the same direction.

Obama on Afghanistan, al-Qaeda and Taliban

President Barack Obama’s own top national security adviser has stated that there are fewer than 100 al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan and that they are not capable of launching attacks. What superheroes they must be, then, to require 100,000 U.S. troops to contain them.

The president handled that absurdity by conflating al-Qaeda with the Taliban.

We have decided to prop up a hopelessly corrupt Afghan government because, as Obama argued, “although it was marred by fraud, [the recent] election produced a government that is consistent with Afghanistan’s laws and constitution.”

To quote Matthew Hoh, a former Marine captain In his letter of resignation as a foreign service officer in charge of one of the most hotly contested areas in Afghanistan: “ I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.”

Concluding: “In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan … I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purpose of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan.”

Full story

So much for the “Rights of the Child” in Afghanistan

At a news conference marking the 20th anniversary of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, officials said children’s rights were being neglected despite vast flows of Western aid into the country.

Afghan refugees who fled the war-torn south of the country have claimed they are so neglected by government in Kabul that their children are dying from hypothermia for want of the most basic supplies. Living in a make-shift camp on the edge of Kabul, residents say that no government official has ever come to see how they have been forced to live.

“Afghanistan has the highest infant mortality rate in the world,” said Catherine Mbengue, country representative for the UN children’s fund Unicef. “Seventy per cent of the population has no access to safe drinking water. Thirty percent of children are involved in child labor. Forty-three per cent of girls are married under-age,” she said.

More than one in four children born in Afghanistan die before the age of five, according to Unicef estimates.

Al Jazeera