That's it?
Last edited by Winehole23; 06-29-2011 at 02:37 AM.
I'm not arguing that we stay in Iraq. I think we should completely withdraw.
We have done what we said we would do, and the Iraqis seem to be capable of fending for themselves at this point.
As to what is efficient, that is a pretty fair point to make. The hard thing is that it is so difficult to evaluate.
It is hideously expensive to maintain the logistic pipeline required, a cost that is made worse by the constant destruction of materiel passing through Pakistan.
If it were just a question of the first order consequences, it would be fairly simple.
The main first order consquence with a full-scale withdrawal is that there really is no government, and the ignorant central asian version of rednecks that cons ute what we conceive of as the taliban would simply drift back in.
It would be far cheaper in this case to simply lob a dozen cruise missles a month at any camps that we might find out about for years. Granted.
Among the second order consequences are that we would play into the narrative our enemies have set out. "America doesn't have the guts", "we beat them and all their might", bla bla bla.
We also would be giving up any gains we might have made towards bringing that part of the world out of the Iron Age and into the modern world. That would be a direct betrayal of those who have trusted us and worked with us, and risked so much to do so.
Both of these would feed the cynicism and paranoid conspiracy theories that make the AQ ideology so attractive.
There is more to it, as we can't even predict things beyond that.
I dunno, it isn't all that clear cut to me that we stay there. I just see it as the "least bad" alternative. The frustrating thing for me is that we would be much closer to getting the out with a functioning government in place if the Bush administration hadn't ed it up so badly by starving it of required resources. We don't have resources that I consider adequate there now.
I make these arguments for staying, but it is ultimately a gut check. My gut says its better if we stay.
Number Of Contractors In Afghanistan Will Surge As U.S. Troops Withdraw
http://thinkprogress.org/security/20...ractors-surge/
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As always, THEY'RE LYING TO US. And contractors certainly get paid/cost $Bs more than US military personnel.
Last edited by boutons_deux; 06-29-2011 at 10:02 AM.
........and apparantly there's some pipeline we're supposed to be worried about, the reasons for which boutons-bot has yet to elaborate on.
oh, and lol thinkprogress. lol boutons.
Paying the contractors those six figure numbers annually must be the democrats way of stimulating the economy.
Have you seen the State Department appropriation? Iraq is gonna be, like, 2/3 of it's entire budget as of now. I am not sanguine.
The inefficiency of occupying Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time isn't a hard call.
Don't worry. There won't be a full scale withdrawal. And we'll still bomb their asses if they get out of line.
Face it, they beat us. They're on the other side of the negotiating table. They stay and they play. We leave.Among the second order consequences are that we would play into the narrative our enemies have set out. "America doesn't have the guts", "we beat them and all their might", bla bla bla.
The objective wasn't realistic, and adequate resources were not brought to bear. Where's Afghanistan's Marshall plan?
Beg pardon, but so what?
My gut says the opposite. We overstayed our welcome. By about six or seven years.
Last edited by Winehole23; 06-29-2011 at 02:45 PM.
4 Trillion Dollars? New Report Shows the Hidden Costs of War
A new report just published by Brown University's Watson Ins ute for International Studies measures the categories of cost to make the point that the pay out is miniscule, if there's any at all. The report uses September 11 as a paradigm for cost and return: "Nineteen hijackers plus other al Qaeda plotters spent an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 on the plane attacks that killed 2,995 people and caused $50 billion to $100 billion in economic damages. What followed were three wars in which $50 billion amounts to a rounding error. For every person killed on September 11, another 73 have been killed since." Catherine Lutz, co-director of the study and head of the anthropology department at Brown said "We decided we needed to do this kind of rigorous assessment of what it cost to make those choices to go to war," she said. "Politicians, we assumed, were not going to do that kind of assessment."
The report found that:
While we know how many US soldiers have died in the wars (just over 6000), what is startling is what we don’t know about the levels of injury and illness in those who have returned from the wars. New disability claims continue to pour into the VA, with 550,000 just through last fall. Many deaths and injuries among US contractors have not been identified.
At least 137,000 civilians have died and more will die in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan as a result of the fighting at the hands of all parties to the conflict.
The armed conflict in Pakistan, which the U.S. helps the Pakistani military fight by funding, equipping and training them, has taken as many lives as the conflict in neighboring Afghanistan.
Putting together the conservative numbers of war dead, in uniform and out, brings the total to 225,000.
Millions of people have been displaced indefinitely and are living in grossly inadequate conditions. The current number of war refugees and displaced persons -- 7,800,000 -- is equivalent to all of the people of Connecticut and Kentucky fleeing their homes.
The wars have been accompanied by erosions in civil liberties at home and human rights violations abroad.
The human and economic costs of these wars will continue for decades, some costs not peaking until mid-century. Many of the wars’ costs are invisible to Americans, buried in a variety of budgets, and so have not been counted or assessed. For example, while most people think the Pentagon war appropriations are equivalent to the wars’ budgetary costs, the true numbers are twice that, and the full economic cost of the wars much larger yet. Conservatively estimated, the war bills already paid and obligated to be paid are $3.2 trillion in constant dollars. A more reasonable estimate puts the number at nearly $4 trillion.
As with former US wars, the costs of paying for veterans’ care into the future will be a sizable portion of the full costs of the war.
The ripple effects on the U.S. economy have also been significant, including job loss and interest rate increases, and those effects have been underappreciated.
While it was promised that the US invasions would bring democracy to both countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, both continue to rank low in global rankings of political freedom, with warlords continuing to hold power in Afghanistan with US support, and Iraqi communities more segregated today than before by gender and ethnicity as a result of the war.
Serious and compelling alternatives to war were scarcely considered in the aftermath of 9/11 or in the discussion about war against Iraq. Some of those alternatives are still available to the U.S.
http://www.alternet.org/module/print...ndviews/626650
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OBL is laughing his ass off, having suckered UCA into two foreign wars without end or benefit to Human-Americans, and with serious, multi-dimensional harm to Human-Americans. Of course, the VRWC/UCA financial sector is and will be a much bigger threat to Human-Americans, and nobody can stop it.
Honestly, the more I have thought about it in the last few days, the less and less convinced I am that we really try to ride this out. Gotta get going for today, but will try to get to this later today/weekend.
Stepping back and having to outline it, I think the underlying assumptions for staying in force in Afghanistan are fairly weak.
oh eff
Last edited by Winehole23; 07-04-2011 at 02:32 AM. Reason: just roll the credits of "The Devil's Rejects"
Gotta keep guarding those poppy fields so the CIA can fund their funny business.
"we must stay and keep dying to honor those who have already died" -- dubya
Afghan Reconciliation Efforts Have Failed
Three months ago I met Haji Ismael, the head of Khost’s Program Tahkim Sulh (commonly referred to as the PTS, the government’s former National Program for Reconciliation), set up in 2005 to reconcile and reintegrate insurgents with the objective of “healing national wounds.” The program failed, due to poor funding and a lack of political support, which meant that opportunities to bring in Taliban were squandered. The Afghan Peace and Reintegration Program (APRP) now proposes to integrate the existing capacities of the PTS into its framework, although it is unclear how, with the added risk that this will simply revive former failed efforts under a new name.
“I regret joining this process; all of my brothers regret it as well,” one of them told me. “We have received no assistance from the government, nothing that they promised. We gave up everything in Miram Shah [the capital of Pakistan’s North Waziristan agency, and a center of Taliban-affiliated groups] and now we have nothing, we can’t get jobs. Our six families share a single room. Not even animals live the way we do now. We receive threatening calls from Miram Shah, that we will be found and killed and our home attacked.”
http://www.truthdig.com/eartothegrou...+the+Headlines
Government in Afghanistan Nears Collapse
last year’s parliamentary election was so chaotic and flawed that it resulted in the near-total disenfranchisement of Afghanistan’s Pashtun ethnic minority, which makes up a healthy 40 percent of the population. Many Pashtuns either didn’t vote, because of sympathy or support for the Taliban and dislike of the Afghan government, or couldn’t vote, because of Taliban threats and violence. As a result, in some provinces in the south and east where Pashtuns dominate, not a single Pashtun was elected to parliament. For Karzai, that was a disaster, especially since he’s trying to reach out to his Pashtun base as part of his search for a deal with the Taliban and its allies. Earlier this year, a special court appointed by Karzai ruled that 62 members of parliament, mostly non-Pashtuns, were elected fraudulently, a step toward installing Pashtun members in their place. Not surprisingly, Karzai’s opponents in parliament, especially Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who oppose Karzai’s outreach to the Taliban, cried foul, challenged the cons utionality of the court, and demanded the impeachment of Karzai.
If the war in Afghanistan ever made any sense at all, this stuff makes it clear that it's close to hopeless
http://www.thenation.com/print/blog/...se-afghanistan
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There's no govt or country there for the US to prop up. Just like in Viet Nam.
I am of the general opinion that improving the lot of the impoverished areas of the world is the way to make the US more secure in the long run, and that hasn't changed.
That said, I have come to agree about staying.
I think the objectives were realistic, but vastly under-resourced by a corrupt and incompetant Bush administration.
It is time to cut our losses in the area.
If the Paki's don't want to play ball, the Indians will, and, quite frankly, India is far more important in the long run.
I just don't see the long term value any more, as much as I loathe giving an inch to the fundamentalist rednecks of the area. We have gotten some measures of success but the cost is now far outweighing the benefits.
"Iraq is gonna be, like, 2/3 of it's entire budget as of now"
I saw a calculation where defense budget + State dept budget + etc is more like $1.5T/year to support The Great American Empire's policy of making the world safe for US corporations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/29/wo...er=rss&emc=rssThe former officials said that four to eight Taliban representatives had traveled to Qatar from Pakistan to set up a political office for the exiled Afghan insurgent group.
The comments suggested that the Taliban, who have not publicly said they would engage in peace talks to end the war in Afghanistan, were gearing up for preliminary discussions.
American officials would not deny that meetings had taken place, and the discussions seemed to have at least the tacit approval of Pakistan, which has thwarted previous efforts by the Taliban to engage in talks.
The Afghan government, which was initially angry that it had been left out, has accepted the talks in principle but is not directly involved, a potential snag in what could be a historic development.
same“Currently there are no peace talks going on,” said Maulavi Qalamuddin, the former minister of vice and virtue for the Taliban who is now a member of the High Peace Council here. “The only thing is the negotiations over release of Taliban prisoners from Guantánamo, which is still under discussion between both sides in Qatar. We also want to strengthen the talks so we can create an environment of trust for further talks in the future.”
The State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland has said only that Marc Grossman, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, had “a number of meetings” related to Afghanistan when he visited Qatar last week.
The U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan had planned to use his latest foray to the region to build Afghan government support for the nascent U.S. effort to kindle peace talks with the Taliban.
Instead, Ambassador Marc Grossman found himself last week putting out a fire ignited by a meeting between four U.S. Congress members and Afghan opposition leaders in Germany. At that meeting, the American lawmakers discussed cons utional reforms that would devolve power from Afghanistan's central government to the provinces — triggering su ions that the United States was secretly plotting to par ion Afghanistan along ethnic lines.
The U.S. Embassy said there was no such plan and immediately denounced the reports. But the damage had been done.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai was "incredibly angry," said a former Afghan official who maintains close contact with the presidential palace and who, like others interviewed by McClatchy Newspapers, requested anonymity. Karzai's ire was on display in a Jan. 21 speech to Parliament in which he denounced "foreigners" for using Afghanistan "to do their political experiments."
The episode dealt a setback to the U.S. bid to launch peace talks, which began with the opening of a Taliban political office in Qatar this month. It also reinforced just how difficult it will be for the Obama administration to broker a settlement that's robust enough to allow U.S. and allied combat troops to complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan by 2014 as planned.
State Department halves it's embassy staff. Turns out we're less welcome in Iraq than we anticipated.
The swift realization among some top officials that the diplomatic buildup may have been ill advised represents a remarkable pivot for the State Department, in that officials spent more than a year planning the expansion and that many of the thousands of additional personnel have only recently arrived.
Michael W. McClellan, the embassy spokesman, said in a statement, “Over the last year and continuing this year the Department of State and the Embassy in Baghdad have been considering ways to appropriately reduce the size of the U.S. mission in Iraq, primarily by decreasing the number of contractors needed to support the embassy’s operations.”
Mr. McClellan said the number of diplomats — currently about 2,000 — was also “subject to adjustment as appropriate.”
I think it's that their politicians are learning from ours. Have to try to appease all the people if possible, find that middle ground. You still have Iraqi's who want our presence and those who don't.
what a frightening thought
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