Author: Josh Mull

Stop the presses, we might have some good news on the war in Afghanistan. Savor it:

Washington, D.C. – In a letter sent to President Barack Obama today, U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and U.S. Representatives Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Walter Jones (R-NC) urged him to set a flexible timetable for removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and transition to a sustainable counterterrorism strategy for the region.  The bipartisan group of legislators suggested that “rather than investing a disproportionate amount of our resources in Afghanistan, we need to shift resources to pursuing al Qaeda’s global network.”

What, only a letter urging something? It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s a positive sign that both parties are realizing the futility of Afghanistan. And they’re not turning against the war on their own, they’re listening to the American people. At a time when the CIA is writing memos on the best way to subvert democracies, it’s a good sign that at least our democracy is still working.

Last month, the anti-war movement got its 3 hour debate on H.Con.Res 248, and while the resolution itself ultimately failed, it did serve as a shot across the bow of the House leadership. While some may claim the movement is irrelevant, it proved we could still get even our wildest fantasies, like an immediate and complete withdrawal, all the way to the House floor for debate. Have the Repeal Obamacare folks done anything close to that? Nope, but it helps us keep this in perspective when we talk about which movements actually have real momentum and power, and which ones are just shameless partisan pandering. The movement to end the US conflict in Afghanistan does have momentum, and as we’ll see, it’s affecting both parties.

Now forgive me for playing stenographer to the politicians, but let’s take a look at the new letter in its entirety:

We are very concerned that the United States’ military strategy in Afghanistan is not in our best national security interest and makes us dependent upon an unreliable partner in the Afghan government, as recent events highlight.  An open-ended, military-centric nation-building campaign in Afghanistan is risky and not necessary to protect the United States, and it undercuts our ability to pursue al Qaeda’s global network.  Moreover, we are concerned that it may increase instability in Afghanistan, as well as Pakistan — where al Qaeda’s leadership is located — at the expense of other approaches that could conserve both lives and resources.  In this light, we urge you to set a flexible timetable for removing U.S. troops from Afghanistan and transition to a sustainable counterterrorism strategy for the region.

The attempted terrorist attack on Christmas Day serves as a reminder that we have not been adequately prioritizing the need to track down al Qaeda, especially in emerging safe havens such as Yemen.  Rather than investing a disproportionate amount of our resources in Afghanistan, we need to shift resources to pursuing al Qaeda’s global network.

Borrowing tens of billions of dollars to pay for military operations in Afghanistan has implications not only for our broader national security needs, but also here at home, particularly given current record deficits, high unemployment and proposed reductions in domestic spending.  Our domestic priorities, as well as our ability to address effectively our security needs, have suffered from this diversion of funds and resources.

Setting a timetable for the orderly withdrawal of U.S. troops does not mean ceasing our engagement in Afghanistan and the region.  Our continued commitment to assist the people of Afghanistan will remain important in supporting the emergence of responsive and capable government institutions that can address the socioeconomic and political issues destabilizing the country.  However, we need to recognize that corruption and lack of legitimacy in the Afghan government make our current approach unlikely to succeed.  While we appreciate your efforts to hold President Karzai accountable, his recent outbursts only raise more questions about his willingness to take the necessary steps to address corruption and security on which our current strategy relies.

We should not spend tens of billions of dollars or ask a hundred thousand U.S. service members to risk their lives unnecessarily.  Rather, we should transition to a sustainable counter-terrorism strategy for the region based on an orderly timetable.  Such a timetable could be flexible, but it would need to clearly specify any variables that would warrant its alteration.

We urge you to set forth a timetable for the redeployment of U.S. troops and appreciate your consideration.

This is worlds away from where we were just a month ago with the extremism of 248. This is a thoughtful examination of US national priorities and a reasonable request for a simple, flexible timetable. We don’t have to pull out tomorrow, but just give us a ballpark estimate of when you’re going to be done. Easy. It also includes plenty of wiggle room for other legitimate US concerns in the region, like development and governance, but it remains implicitly against continued military involvement. (more…)

It’s been a busy few weeks for diplomatic engagement in Afghanistan. First Karzai’s meeting with Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, then the US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue, and now this week French President Sarkozy is in Washington for a meeting with Obama, and the main topic of discussion will be Afghanistan. The AP reports:

The meeting may boil down to one question: Will Obama persuade Sarkozy to buck popular resistance and send more troops to Afghanistan?

Fortifying the international force in Afghanistan is a fresh concern for Obama after his first presidential trip to Kabul. And a key aim of Sarkozy’s trip to Washington is to show that France is a firm U.S. ally in fighting terrorism, from central Asia to North Africa and beyond.

But is “France” really committed to more war, or just Sarkozy? The article says he’d have to “buck popular resistance,” and also notes:

Sarkozy may not risk an unpopular decision with his own popularity at record lows, and with his conservative party suffering from fractures and badly beaten in recent regional elections.

Not only is the French public united against the war, but Sarkozy’s entire government might well collapse because of this opposition. But we already knew this was the kind of pressure Sarkozy was under, because we read it in the CIA memo conveniently leaked just days before the French president arrived in the US.

The memo says:

The fall of the Dutch Government over its troop commitment to Afghanistan demonstrates the fragility of European support for the NATO-led ISAF mission. Some NATO states, notably France and Germany, have counted on public apathy about Afghanistan to increase their contributions to the mission, but indifference might turn into active hostility if spring and summer fighting results in an upsurge in military or Afghan civilian casualties and if a Dutchstyle debate spills over into other states contributing troops.

[snip]

Public Apathy Enables Leaders To Ignore Voters. . . (C//NF)

The Afghanistan mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Berlin and Paris currently maintain the third and fourth highest ISAF troop levels, despite the opposition of 80 percent of German and French respondents to increased ISAF deployments, according to INR polling in fall 2009.

The language is pretty damning. Ignoring voters, disregarding popular opposition, escalating the war against the wishes of a full 80% of the public. But maybe, as Sarkozy said, “it is not easy to explain that French people are dying in Afghanistan.” I’m not sure if that means he thinks the French are stupid, or if he’s just bad at explaining things. After all, Obama sure had no trouble boiling down his reasons for war during his recent trip to Kabul:

Plots against our homeland, plots against our allies, plots against the Afghan and Pakistani people are taking place as we speak right here. And if this region slides backwards, if the Taliban retakes this country and al Qaeda can operate with impunity, then more American lives will be at stake. The Afghan people will lose their chance at progress and prosperity. And the world will be significantly less secure.

Obviously there’s a lot to pick apart in the argument, but for now let’s just assume that Obama is right; We need to stop terrorism launched from Afghanistan and Pakistan, and we need to help the Afghans build a stable country. It’s understandable why NATO would be sympathetic to those objectives, and the US solution. But besides France, the US is also meeting with another NATO ally who shares our objectives in Afghanistan. Is the only solution to those objectives ignoring democratic opposition and escalating a massive military occupation, as the US is suggesting to France? Not for Canada, apparently:

OTTAWA – Prime Minister Stephen Harper has dashed Washington’s dream of a closely allied future in Afghanistan, saying the only Canadians in the country past 2011 will be civilians working for peace.

In a 20-minute meeting Tuesday morning with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Conservative leader said not a soldier will remain on Afghan soil when the current Canadian mission comes to an end next year.

Looks like Canada is not only sticking to a firm timeline for military withdrawal, but will also be leaving peaceful civilian forces behind to help with development and reconstruction. And even that civilian peace mission will be subject to democratic controls, as Harper’s opposition explains:

“There has been discussion for a long time about civil, humanitarian work, all kinds of stuff,” said Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff.

“Even on that we have to be clear … All of this stuff is worthy of public debate and discussion. And it needs to come to Parliament. And this government needs to respect Parliament, respect the Canadian people, and say ‘here’s what we are prepared to do in Afghanistan after 2011.’ It’s not my job, it’s the government’s job.”

So even the specifics of the peace mission are up for public debate. And Harper still gets to talk tough about Afghanistan, just like he did in his own speech to the troops after taking office:

[C]utting and running is not your way. It’s not my way. And it’s not the Canadian way.

We don’t make a commitment and then run away at the first sign of trouble. We don’t and we won’t.

They’re not cutting and running, they’re simply changing to a peace mission. All together you have a NATO ally ending their military conflict, engaging and satisfying popular opinion, and still contributing to the causes of peace and development in Afghanistan. Meanwhile Obama and Sarkozy are planning to subvert democracy and escalate the war.

What does this tell us about our own push to end the war? The Canadian strategy is pretty clear: Get the timeline and the peace mission, then withdraw. So far, we’ve only called for a withdrawal in Congress, but we’ve been working here to rethink our approach and develop the rest of that strategy.

There are also members of the peace movement who are already actively deploying this strategy to end the other US war in Iraq. Peace Action’s website allows you to enter in your zip code to connect directly to your local representatives, and then offers you specific talking points on issues to address complete with a policy-ready timeline for complete military withdrawal from Iraq. Developing a peace mission for Afghanistan along with the withdrawal timeline shouldn’t be out of reach.

The peaceful strategy doesn’t even need to be definitive, as we saw in Hekmatyar’s peace plan and now in Canada’s peace force. The specifics of Harper’s peace force will be hashed out in negotiations in Parliament just as the specifics of Hekmatyar’s 15-points are negotiated in the Kabul peace talks. We need to push Congress to develop our own solutions to the problems in Afghanistan so the next time they call for withdrawal, they’ve got the peace plan to go along with it, just like the Canadians.

Want to help push for those solutions? Head over to our Rethink Afghanistan Facebook page and join thousands of other people working to end the war in Afghanistan.

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed here are my own.

 

Over the weekend, Tom Hayden had a great opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times where he pretty much destroys the whole idea of a “Long War” against global terrorism. Check this out:

Consider the audacity of such an idea. An 80-year undeclared war would entangle 20 future presidential terms stretching far into the future of voters not yet born. The American death toll in Iraq and Afghanistan now approaches 5,000, with the number of wounded a multiple many times greater. Including the American dead from 9/11, that’s 8,000 dead so far in the first decade of the Long War. And if the American armed forces are stretched thin today, try to conceive of seven more decades of combat.

The costs are unimaginable too. According to economists Joseph E. Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes, Iraq alone will be a $3-trillion war. Those costs, and the other deficit spending of recent years, yield “virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors,” according to a New York Times budget analysis in February. Continued deficit financing for the Long War will rob today’s younger generation of resources for their future.

No doubt after that: The Long War is all kinds of crazy and absurd. Nobody wants a forever war with “unimaginable” costs, a collapse of the domestic political agenda, and untold thousands of dead. It’s definitely disturbing that some in the Pentagon and their “fellow travelers” subscribe to such a loony doctrine, but not altogether surprising. After all, Neoconservatives dominated the Washington elite for 8 years of the Bush administration, it shouldn’t shock anyone that they’re still out there somewhere peddling their nonsense.

But Hayden isn’t only out to show us how stupid the Long War is. He’s got a plan:

It’s time the Long War strategy was put under a microscope and made the focus of congressional hearings and media scrutiny.

Whoa! The strategy is so ridiculous and so awful…that we should legitimize it by making it the subject of serious congressional debate? Do we really want the ignorant news actors on cable television giving the old “fair and balanced” treatment to the idea of planetary forever war against nobody in particular? How much credibility to we want to give this insignificant group of warmongers? It’s not like the Long War is really an option now. Hayden wrote:

President Obama has implied his own disagreement with the Long War doctrine without openly repudiating the term. He has pledged to remove all U.S. troops from Iraq by 2012, differing with those like Ricks who predict continuing combat, resulting in a Korean-style occupation. Obama also pledges to “begin” American troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by summer 2011, in contrast to those who demand we remain until an undefined victory. Obama told West Point cadets that “our troop commitment in Afghanistan cannot be open-ended, because the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.”

OK, great. The President is obviously not interested in any kind of endless war against the world. So, why do we put this on the table, even if it is our intention to defeat it? Hayden already knows this is a bad idea. He wrote about a similar situation a few weeks back, under the ominous headline “Congress Votes for Afghan War:”

A plain reading of yesterday’s vote on the Kucinich war powers resolution is that an overwhelming majority of the House has authorized the Afghanistan war, including a majority of Democrats. The war now has greater legitimacy. The vote was 356-65-9.

(If Rep. John Conyers had been present, the dissenting bloc would have been 66, including just five Republicans. Few members took the option of abstaining.)

Strong Kucinich supporters will feel vindicated that their hero took a lonely stand and forced the House to a moment of choice. Critics will note that a dubious war has been legitimized, and that it will be more complicated for those who voted “aye” to reverse course in the months ahead.

The outcome will make the anti-war forces appear weaker for now than they are, and appearances do matter.

As I said then, “exactly.” Even though the anti-war folks forced the public debate, they lost, and the President’s escalation plan was essentially vetted by the House. And as for the press, you’ll remember the awesome “media scrutiny” we got from CNN’s Senior Political Correspondent, who boiled it down to Democrats trying to make a sex scandal go away:

Now we want to know what she has to say about the Long War? No thanks.

But there are plenty of things we could be pushing in the media. Instead of obscure, discredited ideas like the Long War, we could ask for congressional hearings on, say, NATO trying to silence a journalist over the murder of innocent civilians:

Over the past few months, Starkey exposed two incidents where NATO initially claimed to have engaged and killed insurgents, when they’d in fact killed civilians, including school children and pregnant women. In both cases, when confronted with eye-witness accounts obtained by Starkey that clearly rebutted NATO’s initial claims, NATO resisted publicly recanting.

In the first case, NATO officials told him they no longer believed that the raid would have been justified if they’d known what they now know, but no official would consent to direct attribution for this admission.

In the second case, NATO’s initially made sensational claims that they’d discovered during the raid the bodies of pregnant women that had been bound, gagged and executed. Starkey’s reporting forcefully rebutted this claim. Instead of simply retracting their story, NATO went so far as to attempt to damage Starkey’s credibility by telling other Kabul-based journalists that they had proof he’d misquoted ISAF spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith. When Starkey demanded a copy of the recording, NATO initially ignored him and eventually admitted that no recording existed. NATO only admitted their story was false in a retraction buried several paragraphs deep in a press release that led with an attack on Starkey’s credibility.

Where is the media scrutiny on that? Or the fact that American troop casualties in Afghanistan are skyrocketing:

KABUL — The number of U.S. troops killed in Afghanistan has roughly doubled in the first three months of 2010 compared to the same period last year as Washington has added tens of thousands of additional soldiers to reverse the Taliban’s momentum.

Those deaths have been accompanied by a dramatic spike in the number of wounded, with injuries more than tripling in the first two months of the year and trending in the same direction based on the latest available data for March.

U.S. officials have warned that casualties are likely to rise even further as the Pentagon completes its deployment of 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and sets its sights on the Taliban’s home base of Kandahar province, where a major operation is expected in the coming months.

I’d like to hear what congress has to say about that. Or our military commander possibly admitting to war crimes in the New York Times:

“We have shot an amazing number of people, but to my knowledge, none has ever proven to be a threat,” said Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who became the senior American and NATO commander in Afghanistan last year. His comments came during a recent videoconference to answer questions from troops in the field about civilian casualties.

Even McChrystal is amazed at the amount of people we’ve massacred for no reason at all, that’s something that could use a whole lot more media scrutiny.

Hayden is right in his piece, it is time that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia) get media scrutiny and serious congressional hearings. But we should be very explicit in what we’re asking for. We don’t need to resurrect old neoconservative mythology to beat up on, there are real events happening in Afghanistan right now to talk about.

And achieving a focused, relevant anti-war debate is made even more urgent when we look at what kind of propaganda the warmakers themselves are working with. We can see it in this leaked CIA memo [PDF]:

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

They’re talking about using vulnerable, downtrodden Afghan women in order to sell us the war. To sell us killing an “amazing” number of innocent people, to sell us covering up the murder of pregnant women, to sell us the soaring number of dead American troops. And that’s just one of the deviant propaganda campaigns suggested in that document, there are plenty more.

If that’s the kind of sick stuff the proponents of war are up to, we’ve got to be meet them in the public arena with cold, hard facts. Real events, verifiable data. We don’t need to waste time legitimizing crazy ideas like the Long War doctrine, we need to have congressional hearings and media scrutiny on the actual events on the ground.

And we can do that. Contact your representative, put pressure on them however you like to get hearings on Afghanistan. Then head over to Rethink Afghanistan and join the thousands of other people working to end the war, Long or otherwise.

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan. The views expressed below are my own.

 

With all the controversy raging around the Tea Parties, the Republican party, and the recent terror attacks against members of congress, I thought it might be helpful if we extend a helping hand to the Tea Party folks, and show them what we’ve learned from the recent history of the anti-war movement. Although it’s difficult to draw a comparison between the quest to end aggressive wars and…whatever it is the tea parties stand for (more on that later), the principal actors, such as the media and politicians, in their campaign are much the same. With that, here are five quick lessons to help guide them along their way.

1. The Media Is Not Your Friend

You already know the obvious problems with the media coverage of your movement. They show tight shots of your protest marches, under-report the turnout, show the craziest signs and paint your entire group as ridiculous and ignorant. If someone in a crowd shouts something that hurts their feelings, they’ll warp it into the entire crowd shouting that. Maybe they report that the whole crowd was calling President Bush a “Nazi,” or hurling racial epithets at congressmen. It doesn’t matter, you know they want conflict, not facts. Like when you’re invited on television, you’ll face off against a hostile and aggressive host who’ll shout you down and demand to know why you hate America so much. But the institutional hatred of your movement goes even farther, all the way to the top.

At the supposedly liberal/progressive MSNBC, Phil Donahue was fired because of his anti-war views, as this leaked internal memo shows:

That report–shared with me by an NBC news insider–gives an excruciatingly painful assessment of the channel and its programming… But the harshest criticism was leveled at Donahue, whom the authors of the study described as “a tired, left-wing liberal out of touch with the current marketplace.”

The study went on to claim that Donahue presented a “difficult public face for NBC in a time of war……He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration’s motives.” The report went on to outline a possible nightmare scenario where the show becomes “a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity.”

So much for the liberal answer to FOX News, right? And what about FOX, the network that has so far played a major role in the promotion of the Tea Party movement. They’ll support you now, as long as you’re accomplishing their corporate political agenda. But if you go too far, and start talking about real, serious issues, it’s game over. Ask Bill O’Reilly. Glenn Greenwald wrote last year:

In essence, the chairman of General Electric (which owns MSNBC), Jeffrey Immelt, and the chairman of News Corporation (which owns Fox News), Rupert Murdoch, were brought into a room at a “summit meeting” for CEOs in May, where Charlie Rose tried to engineer an end to the “feud” between MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann and Fox’s Bill O’Reilly. According to the NYT, both CEOs agreed that the dispute was bad for the interests of the corporate parents, and thus agreed to order their news employees to cease attacking each other’s news organizations and employees.

Most notably, the deal wasn’t engineered because of a perception that it was hurting either Olbermann or O’Reilly’s show, or even that it was hurting MSNBC. To the contrary, as Olbermann himself has acknowledged, his battles with O’Reilly have substantially boosted his ratings. The agreement of the corporate CEOs to cease criticizing each other was motivated by the belief that such criticism was hurting the unrelated corporate interests of GE and News Corp.

What kind of corporate interests were they protecting? Only little things like selling sophisticated technology to Iran, nothing to be concerned about. The mainstream media is not your friend, they’re not trying to help you. They will only support you and treat you “fairly” as long as you serve them, their financial interests and their political agenda. Do not expect any different treatment for your movement, no matter how righteous the cause.

2. The Opposition Won’t Play Fair

Members of the anti-war movement were regularly lambasted as traitors, terrorist sympathizers, anti-soldier, all of the worst insults a citizen could think of to call another citizen. For the Tea Party movement, the opposition has decided that you’re all racists, domestic terrorists, and radical seditionists. To confuse things though, they’re going to have a lot of advice for you.

Anti-war folks were criticized for not ever mentioning the “good” parts of the war, which sounds reasonable at first, but it then puts the anti-war crowd in the awkward position of being against something that’s “good.” For the Tea Party folks, the opposition is asking you to “tone down the rhetoric,” which is right now one of the only tools you have to compel your movement. But what about the explosive talking points, won’t they think your movement is all domestic terrorists and militia men? Well, they already think that, and what’s worse, there is violence coming from your movement.

People in your movement are making threats and in some cases carrying out terrorist attacks on members of congress who supported the health care reform law. Not all of you, but some. That’s actually pretty common in the United States. Members of the anti-war movement carried out domestic terror attacks against military recruiting stations, and of course it was used to slander the entire anti-war movement as violent, anti-American terrorists. FOX reported:

Shattered windows and bomb scares are growing threats for recruiters working to find young men and women to join the U.S. military, according to a new report that claims attacks on military recruiting stations are on the rise.

The report, issued by a not-for-profit group that supports members of the military, calls the incidents — including the spray-painting of graffiti — “attacks,” and claims there have been more than 50 since March 2003.

“The peace protesters are not peaceful,” said Catherine Moy, executive director of Move America Forward, which released the report. “They are violent. They are causing havoc in an illegal manner on recruiting offices across the United States.”

There were no significant anti-war groups, individuals, or leaders who were calling for anything remotely close to bombing. They were however, calling for a “revolution,” or an “uprising,” moderately provocative terms used to rile up their base. Unfortunately, those terms can sound downright frightening when inaccurately attached to the unrelated terror attacks. But the opponents of the anti-war movement weren’t interested in trying to distinguish between a broad grassroots campaign and the illegal acts of a select few. The opponents of the Tea Party will be the same, refusing to see any nuance between your movement and the racist, lunatic fringe. They’re supposed to do that, they’re the opposition. You don’t need to spend effort trying to change their outlook, they’re out to destroy you, not do you any favors.

3. The Public Is Scared By Your Stunts

The anti-war crowds could sometimes get a little out of control. There were hanging, or sometimes burning, effigies of Bush and Cheney, crazy posters comparing the President and others to Nazis, Stalin, or even just the Devil. In the case of the Tea Parties, you have all the same problems in addition to some of your members actually bringing loaded firearms to political events. The imagery alone is incredibly disturbing, and will likely turn away most casual supporters. Weapons will definitely convince most undecided observers that your side is a bunch of outrageous radicals, nothing that they’d ever consider supporting. The Huffington Post reported last year:

A man carried a handgun strapped to his leg to a town hall meeting being held by President Obama in Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Tuesday.

It’s legal for him to have the gun as long as it is unconcealed, the police told MSNBC. The man was on private property — church ground on the roadway leading to the high school where Obama would speak. The church gave the man permission to be there. However, according to police officers, he is under constant surveillance and is not anywhere near where the president will speak.

The story got wall to wall coverage across the meainstream media and fed into the narrative of your movement as crazy. Even though it is completely within his constitutional rights to carry the gun, just like burning Bush in effigy and calling him a Nazi are constitutionally protected, it still manages to freak everyone out, and not in a good way. The anti-war movement had similar issues, but these issues were swiftly dealt with, and the extremist elements were marginalized out of existence. The Tea Parties must do the same.

Leave the guns, the effigies, and the Nazi posters at home, period.

4. The Politicians Will Abuse You

In 2006, the Netroots along with the anti-war movement delivered a decisive electoral mandate to politicians who were against the war in Iraq. Once they took office in 2007, the US immediately escalated the war in Iraq. In 2008, voters once again elected leaders who promised to end the wars. Only we’re still in Iraq, and we’ve escalated in Afghanistan. Now the Republican party is adopting Tea Party rhetoric in order to win their votes, but will they actually accomplish anything? It’s doubtful, even if they are shouting about it on the floors of congress. Let’s look at what Candidate Obama said about Iraq in 2007:

“I am here to say that we have to begin to end this war now,” the Illinois senator said in excerpts from a speech he was to deliver later in Iowa. The excerpts were released by his presidential campaign.

He said he would immediately begin to pull out troops engaged in combat operations at a pace of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of 2008.

Of course, Obama has been President over a year now, and we’re still in Iraq. Now take Mitt Romney, one of the politicians reaching out to the Tea Party movement:

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney hasn’t made up his mind whether he’ll run for president in 2012, but he already has a plan for how to overturn the Democratic-led health care program now before Congress, if it becomes law.

The key, he said, is having Republicans reclaim the White House and take majorities in the Senate and the House.

Then, “we can clamp down on this bill … by not funding it,” Romney said during a speech Thursday to hundreds of people gathered at the Hilton Anatole Hotel for the National Center for Policy Analysis’ distinguished lecture series.

Sounds like a promise that’s easy to make years away from the actual election, but it’s highly unlikely he’d ever go through with it, and that’s assuming he won in the first place. The politicians are going to talk like you, but that won’t mean anything if there isn’t a concentrated activist effort after the election. Obama was prematurely lionized as an anti-war hero purely because of his rhetoric, not for any actual accomplishment. The Tea Party movement should avoid the same pitfalls, and demand real legislative action, real policy, from their politicians, not empty too-good-to-be-true promises.

5. The Truth Is Always Effective

The anti-war movement had a very difficult time making its case with “no blood for oil” and rants against global imperialism. Those arguments are abstract and unwieldy, and even in the best case scenario only resulted in philosophical circle jerks. That immediately changed when the debate shifted to concrete, factual points like the growing insurgency, lack of administration planning, lies about the motives behind the war, profiteering and fraud by contractors, lack of adequate care and benefits for troops, the list goes on and on. The anti-war debate changed when the movement used facts. The Tea Party is suffering from the same messaging problem. The Politico reports:

A new poll of self-identified Republicans released Tuesday shows a large slice of the GOP believes President Barack Obama is a “socialist” who was not born in this country, should be impeached, wants the terrorists to win and only won the 2008 election because ACORN “stole” it for him.

According to the poll, 63 percent of Republicans believe Obama is a socialist; 39 percent think Obama should be impeached; 24 percent said Obama wants “the terrorists to win”; and 31 percent agreed with the statement that Obama is “a racist who hates white people.”

Those aren’t good numbers. Now let’s look at some contemporary anti-war messaging by Robert Naiman:

Every day the Afghanistan war continues is another day on which the United States Government plays Russian Roulette with the lives of American soldiers and Afghan civilians.

The British Government has more urgency than the U.S. government about ending the war – and is more supportive than the U.S. of a political solution to end the conflict – because in Britain there is greater public outcry.

If there were greater public and Congressional outcry in the U.S., we could be more like Britain, and get our government on board the train to a political solution, instead of prolonging the war indefinitely.

Nothing about impeaching President Obama or labeling him with some scary sounding “-ism.” No talk of his presidency being illegitimate, racist, or pro-terrorist. Instead you see an efficient command of the facts and an urgent call for public support. Not Republican support or Democratic support, pure liberal or true conservative support, but public support. Everyone’s help is needed to end the war, not just a few who pass the ideological purity test. Most importantly, the anti-war debate happens with facts, real, verifiable information. It was these facts that turned the public opinion against the war in Iraq, and are now turning them against the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Tea Party would be wise to adopt the same tactics of factual assertions and real policy, instead of conspiracy theories and outright lies.

Like I said, it’s difficult to draw a direct comparison between the anti-war movement and the tea parties, but the reactions to them by the media politicians, and the general public have been about the same. There’s probably a lot more to learn from those working to end the war, so why not head over to the Rethink Afghanistan Facebook page, and check out some of the other ways we’re using to meet our goals.

 

Check out this short piece from NBC on an Afghan orphanage.

Note that Afghanistan is referred to as a “dangerous” place with children “orphaned by war.” But that’s OK, the subject of the piece is running a “happy place.” Not only that, but she’s graciously being honored with some kind of award by the Washington establishment. Everybody gets to contribute to helping those poor, orphaned Afghans. Yay! And that’s it. 46 seconds. When originally broadcast, that snippet was followed up by several minutes of reporting on President Obama’s Nobel Prize donation to charity, because …he’s such a great guy and clearly more important?

But why is Afghanistan so dangerous? Why are all those children orphaned by war? What war? Didn’t the Washington establishment start that war? They’re giving awards to people who manage to round up all the surviving children from their bombing campaigns? If they had taken slightly longer than 46 seconds and provided the context to answer these questions, the whole affair would seem much more sickening and depraved, not something we should be happy about. Although it’s a lot more subtle than 2002, the media is still holding us back from having an honest debate on the wars we’re fighting.

This headline from the New York Times is instructive:

White House Weighs Talks With Taliban After Afghan Successes

It’s taken as fact that there have been “successes” in Afghanistan, and this story is just speculation on what might happen after those successes. There’s no discussion on whether or not you can count slaughtering more Afghan civilians than the Taliban as successfully protecting the population, or if installing a German expat who hasn’t been to Helmand in years is successful local governance, or even if capturing the moderate Taliban and radicalizing the remaining leadership will be successful at negotiating a withdrawal. Nope, just straight out “Afghan Successes” and what those successful war makers plan to do next.

We are forced into a position here of being for or against a successful war in Afghanistan. It’s never a good thing to be against something successful, so clearly the only rational choice is to be for the aggressive military violence against Afghanistan. How can you make a reasonable argument against the war when you’re trapped in the box of being against success? That’s not an honest debate.

Let’s look at another example, this time from an opinion piece by Michael O’Hanlon and Hassina Sherjon in the Washington Post. The only thing really honest in this piece is the headline, “Five myths about the war in Afghanistan,” although technically O’Hanlon manages to propagate way more than just five myths.

1. Afghans always hate and defeat their invaders.

The Afghans drove the British Empire out of their country in the 19th century and did the same to the Soviet Union in the 20th century. They do fight fiercely; many American troops who have been deployed both in Iraq and Afghanistan in recent years have asserted that the Afghans are stronger natural fighters.

Yet, the people of Afghanistan do not despise foreigners. Despite downward trends in recent years, Afghans are far more accepting of an international presence in their country than are Iraqis, for example, who typically gave the U.S. presence approval ratings of 15 to 30 percent in the early years of the war in that country. Average U.S. favorability ratings in recent surveys in Afghanistan are around 50 percent, and according to polls from ABC, the BBC and the International Republican Institute, about two-thirds of Afghans recognize that they still need foreign help.

So they debunk the racist myth that Afghans are xenophobic murder-machines (think “Graveyard of Empires”) by immediately affirming its validity; American troops say Afghans are “stronger natural fighters” than Iraqis. Great, so not all Afghans are genetically pre-disposed to killing all foreigners, just more so than Iraqis. Even so, they continue, “the people of Afghanistan do not despise foreigners.” Except for when they do. Got it.

But that last fragment there is probably the best example of how the American war debate operates. “About two-thirds of Afghans recognize that they still need foreign help,” they write, which would seem to mean that we should continue on with our mission. But there’s a difference between “foreign help” and a massive influx of foreign combat troops, secret prisons, robotic airstrikes, vast base complexes, and scores and scores of dead civilians.

So either you’re for the aggressive war against Afghanistan and Pakistan, or you’re against those poor, America-loving Afghans who need foreign assistance, a full two thirds of the population by their count. Golly, I don’t want to be against two-thirds of Afghanistan, so I guess we have to support the war!

Why are we stuck in these binary choices? Surely the anti-war movement is offering more nuanced, reasonable arguments to the debate? Sadly, we’re not. As we discussed on Friday, the biggest policy move so far has been H.Con.Res. 248, a bill which simply called for the immediate removal of troops from Afghanistan. Your choice is to be completely against any involvement in Afghanistan, or being for the current war strategy.

There are legitimate concerns over Afghanistan that Americans want to address with policy; human rights, counter-terrorism, narco-trafficking, good governance, development and reconstruction. The proponents of the war say we ought to use aggressive military power to deal with that, and opponents have no better solutions to offer, so they fail. Unlike the war makers, who benefit greatly from confusing and deceptive arguments, the anti-war movement is actually harmed by putting forth such irrational, binary choices.

As we talked about last week, we have to do more than just be against the war. We have to expand the debate and allow for other solutions to be discussed besides just removing the troops. Obviously, the media is not going to be any help at all, so we’re going to have to pick up the slack ourselves and help craft an honest, open debate on what to do about the Afghanistan war.

How do we deal with counter-terrorism without foreign occupation? Perhaps we could expand FBI resources and enhance domestic security measures. How do we provide development and reconstruction aid to Afghans without military aggression? I can’t seem to Google up any stories about the Red Cross or the World Food Program accidentally blowing up 14 civilians with rockets. Maybe we could use more of them than our military?

These are just random suggestions, but it’s still more than offering the unfair choice of being against the war or being for it. We can answer the war makers’ arguments with better solutions than military violence, we just haven’t tried yet.

So drop me a line in the comments, and head over to Rethink Afghanistan’s Facebook page and join the debate there. Help us develop a reasonable alternative policy for dealing with Afghanistan so that we don’t have to be trapped in a dishonest, closed debate. Ending the war is a given, but how do we address the remaining issues in Afghanistan?

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.

Tags: antiwar, Civilian Deaths, debate, HR 248, mainstream media, negotiations, Peace, Rethink Afghanistan, withdrawal

 

Gareth Porter has an excellent piece up on IPS, “Fiction of Marja as City Was U.S. Information War,” in which he breaks down the media disinformation campaign on the size of Marja:

Marja is not a city or even a real town, but either a few clusters of farmers’ homes or a large agricultural area covering much of the southern Helmand River Valley.

“It’s not urban at all,” an official of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), who asked not to be identified, admitted to IPS Sunday. He called Marja a “rural community”.

“It’s a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds,” said the official, adding that the homes are reasonably prosperous by Afghan standards.

Porter is right on, and you should read the whole thing for an idea on exactly how these disinfo campaigns are spread, but I’m afraid in the case of Marja, we might be missing the point. We’re complaining that Marja is only an excuse for a propaganda victory while at the same time complaining that the victory won’t be worth anything because it’s not a city. This food is terrible, and such small portions!

This shouldn’t be news to anyone, but Afghans live in rural communities! We’re supposedly there to protect Afghans from the Taliban after all. Rajiv Chandrasekaran described the strategy last year in the Washington Post:

The U.S. strategy here is predicated on the belief that a majority of people in Helmand do not favor the Taliban, which enforces a strict brand of Islam that includes an-eye-for-an-eye justice and strict limits on personal behavior. Instead, U.S. officials believe, residents would rather have the Afghan government in control, but they have been cowed into supporting the Taliban because there was nobody to protect them.

Great, so if the plan is to protect Afghans from the Taliban, then you’ll want to go where Afghans actually live, right? That would be in “a collection of village farms, with typical family compounds,” just like the anonymous ISAF official told IPS.

Big cities like Kabul and Herat don’t speak for the entirety of all Afghans, so focusing all of our attention on the major urban centers doesn’t do anything to extend the legitimacy and credibility of the government, much less provide security from the Taliban. President Karzai’s derisive nickname as the “Mayor of Kabul” was one small indicator of just how well the strategy of focusing on city centers, at the cost of conceding rural territory to the Taliban, was working. That is, not working at all. We also can’t discount the effect concentrating on cities had on the Taliban propaganda narrative of western-occupied Kabul (or Islamabad) oppressing the mostly-rural Pashtuns.

In this case, Marja being a small farming community might actually be a positive step. So, ISAF finally went to the population, but are they protecting them? From Military.com:

At least 35 civilians have been killed in the operation, according to the Afghan human rights commission. Spokesman Nader Nadery said insurgent bombs killed more than 10 people, while NATO rocket fire killed at least 14.

Not only are we failing to protect the civilians from the Taliban, but we seem to have killed more Afghans than the militants themselves. Perhaps the Afghans will show their legendary patience, and accept that the government had to massacre 14 of their friends and relatives with rockets in order to have a more peaceful, prosperous Afghanistan. Will they side with Karzai? From the same article above:

“Are you against me or with me?” Karzai asked the elders. “Are you going to support me?”

The men all raised their hands and shouted: “We are with you. We support you.”

But…

[Tribal Elders] complained – sometimes shouting – about corruption among former Afghan government officials. They lamented how schools in Marjah were turned into military posts by international forces. They said shops were looted during the offensive, and alleged that innocent civilians were detained by international forces.

But they still said they said they support Karzai, right?

Mohammad Naeem Khan, in his early 30s, said his loyalty is to whoever will provide for him.

“If the Taliban tap me on the shoulder, I will be with them, and if the government taps me on my shoulder I will be with them,” Khan said.

So we wind up with the exact same bloody stalemate we’ve had since about 2002. They’ll side with the government, except for when they side with the Taliban. That’s not a victory, propaganda or otherwise.

The problem is not the size of Marja, it could be a teeming industrial metropolis of millions, it still wouldn’t matter as long as we continue using military force and propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Until we have a strategy that doesn’t involve violently imposing our pet gangsters’ will on the Afghan people, we’ll have a hard time even distinguishing ourselves from the Taliban, much less convincing the citizens to take our side against them.

Had enough? Become a fan of the Rethink Afghanistan campaign on Facebook and join our fight to bring the Afghanistan war to an end.

I am the Afghanistan Blogging Fellow for The Seminal and Brave New Foundation. You can read my work on The Seminal or at Rethink Afghanistan.

Tags: Afghanistan, Gareth Porter, Hamid Karzai, Helmand Province, ISAF, Marjah, Taliban, war