security

Afghanistan Policy Not Working, There and Here

Armand Biroonak — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 10:31:24 -0400

As today marks the eighth anniversary of the tragic September 11th attacks, it is also a reminder of the calamitous road of foreign policy that the Bush administration took us down shortly after. The Iraq War was of course an outright disaster, but Obama’s recent troop escalation into Afghanistan should worry progressives equally.

American strategy after nearly eight years in Afghanistan has achieved little. According to U.S. Commander of Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, “conditions on the ground are serious” while the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Mike Mullen warned, “the situation has deteriorated.” Meanwhile, troops are greeted to a resurgent Taliban in all parts of Afghanistan. This helps explain why the past August was the deadliest month for troops since the war began over seven years ago.

Yet, with a big troop surge in Afghanistan already announced by Obama earlier this year, hints of an even greater troop increase may be on the way. This should prompt progressives to ask the larger question, what is victory for the U.S.?

American leadership has yet to put forward an exit strategy for our troops. In fact, last month Ambassador Richard Holbrooke quipped that success in Afghanistan can be defined as, “we’ll know it when we see it.” More troubling for U.S. strategy, Bruce Riedel, former advisor on Afghanistan to President Obama, puts bluntly that even with sufficient troop numbers, “Anyone who thinks that in 12 to 18 months we’re going to be anywhere near victory is living in a fantasyland.”

A military solution then is not the answer. What Afghans truly desire is stability and development. Ravaged by war for decades, Afghans are unfortunately all too familiar with world powers turning their soil into a battlefield. The key is for an American presence in Afghanistan to act not as a military occupying force, but rather as a partner ( with the international community) for reconstruction and economic development. Studies support this approach, such as the RAND Corporation’s conclusion that

“the United States would be more effective and less dependent on large-scale use of military power to counter insurgency by correcting major deficiencies: civil competence and capacity to build effective and legitimate local government...[and] capabilities to organize, train, equip, and advise local military and police forces.”

Ironically, according to military experts, the Taliban is doing just this. Despite repressive practices, they have gained credibility by providing services to the people. In fact, Adm. Mullen explained how the “Taliban is getting pretty effective at [governance]. They’ve set up functional courts in some locations, assess and collect taxes, and even allow people to file formal complaints against local Talib leaders.”

And shifting back home, progressives know past strategy should no longer live in the present, that our priorities have been misplaced for too long. Focus abroad the past eight years has jeopardized our ability to address threats here at home. Due to the War in Iraq, the National Guard was unable to respond more effectively during Hurricane Katrina. While needed investments such as fixing our crumbling infrastructure are placed on the backburner, with over $1 trillion spent for the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan instead.

It is clear then that the progressive movement will have to push harder and demand an exit strategy for Afghanistan from the Obama administration and Congress. For the sake of American troops, our security and the Afghan people, it is time for change. Legislation demanding an exit strategy is already in Congress –pressure your representative to support it!

See Brave New Films, “Rethink Afghanistan”

Steel: Important To Us But Not Important To Us

Dave Johnson — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 10:10:08 -0400

I had the opportunity to tour a steel plant outside of Pittsburgh yesterday. (I am here for the Netroots Nation convention.)

The word that keeps coming into my mind is "intense."

I experienced intense heat, intense colors in the molten steel, and intense faces on the workers. We wore protective clothing, boots, earplugs, gloves and protective eyeware. Safety is a prime concern because without careful attention to detail this can be a very dangerous undertaking. The workers in these plants depend on safety procedures and each other to a degree that you do not find in many other occupations.

One of the notable things about this tour was the security. It was intense. I won't get into some of the details, but plants like these are considered to be very important to the Department of Homeland Security and special precautions are taken. You need special permission to even enter the grounds. ID is carefully checked. We not only couldn't even take pictures of the facilities but they will confiscate a cell phone if they see it out of your pocket. (You can have it back later.)

Let that sink in: Manufacturing plants like these are considered vitally important to the security of the United States and are assigned special protection.

Unfortunately our own government does not feel the need to protect plants like this beyond the vague post-9/11 threat of "terrorism." They check your ID at the gate, but they aren't concerned with making sure plants like this one stay in the United States. The two blast furnaces at this plant are the last two operating in the whole state of Pennsylvania. There used to be a dozen just at this plant. Nationally the decline is similar. We all know this but we do not seem to be capable of doing something about it.

Scott Paul On The Chinese Steel Steal

The executive director of the Alliance for American Manufacturing explains to a group of bloggers on a steel plant tour outside Pittsburgh how Chinese steel manufacturers gain an unfair trade advantage over their U.S. counterparts, even though U.S. plants are demonstrably more efficient and technologically advanced. The August 13 tour was part of the Netroots Nation conference.

This decline is not the "buggy-whip" phenomenon where an industry is being replaced or is evolving. Quite the opposite. Steel is the core component of the bridges, buildings, appliances, cars, etc. that we build. But now much of that steel comes from other countries. And much of it is inferior quality or produced in ways that harm the planet. This plant produces 1/3 the carbon emissions of similar plants in China. And then there is the carbon-emitting shipment across oceans to consider. But harming the planet is apparently someone else's long-term problem when money is to be made today.

The problem is not even labor costs. Labor is not a large component of our steel costs. The cost of raw materials is a larger part of the lower cost of imported steel. When you hear about hundreds of people trapped in mines in other countries you are hearing about lower cost of raw materials. Lives can be cheap and it is someone else's problem when money is to be made.

We have stood by and allowed other countries take over industries like this one by pursuing national strategies to build their economies at the expense of our own, or their own workers and of the environment. When competition is allowed to occur by continually moving the work to cheaper and less protective (of both lives and the environment) regions the result has to be a continued downward spiral of living standards. This is not sustainable and we are all living the results of this constant downward pressure.

Manufacturing is the key to economic power. Yet we worry about some fanatics in a cave somewhere, but we don't seem to worry about losing the steel plants and other industries and the jobs and the economic benefits to us and the world. This practice of checking ID at the gate but standing back and letting the plant itself close because another country allows worker or environmental exploitation is beyond short-sighted. It is self-destructive.

Charles Knight

Charles Knight — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:49:22 -0400

Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives. He also serves as the President of the Commonwealth Institute which he helped found in 1987. In 1989 he founded the Ground Force Alternatives Project at the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, where he was a Research Fellow. As a follow-on to that project, in 1991 he co-founded the Project on Defense Alternatives.

Mr Knight also serves on the board of directors of the Conservation Services Group, an energy conservation services company with over a hundred employees.

In his work at the Project on Defense Alternatives he has authored seventeen publications and co-authored another thirty. These have been published by the Commonwealth Institute and have also appeared in such publications as Defense News, American Sentinel, Boston Review, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Social Policy, Boston Globe, International Security, and Dissent.

Mr Knight also edits the Defense Strategy Review Webpage. He has made numerous presentations on peace and security issues at governmental and non-governmental institutions, and during the 1994-1996 period had the honor to consult on stability-oriented security options for southern Africa with the African National Congress and South African Ministry of Defense.

Formerly Mr Knight was a fellow at the Institute for Peace and International Security in Cambridge, Massachusetts; publisher of Working Papers magazine; administrator of the Pequod Counseling Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a research associate at the Cambridge Institute, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Smirk of the Union: The Show's Over; Shelve the Sequel

Robert Borosage — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:09:36 -0500

The old routines don’t work anymore. The presidential smirk seems sheepish. The threats seem like bluster. No one really listens anymore. Even George W. Bush seemed almost giddy that he wouldn’t have to go through this again. The president appears as tired of us as we are of him.

Monday’s State of the Union speech had an inescapable problem. It couldn’t possibly address the question at hand — the actual state of the union. Costly and unending occupations. Economic recession. Unprecedented foreign indebtedness. Unsustainable trade deficits. A declining middle class. Millions about to lose their homes. Leading banks on the auction block. Gilded Age inequality. A foolish starvation of vital public investments in everything from bridges to broadband. Basic challenges — global warming, a broken health care system — simply ignored. America weaker, more isolated, and less secure.

Bush is history; his name spurned even by Republicans seeking to succeed him. But hold off on the interment rites. While Bush is being discarded, the catastrophic conservative policies that he championed live on.

The leading Republican candidates pledge to continue the costly occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. The Democratic majority in Congress failed to end them. The leading Democratic presidential candidates pledge more forces for Afghanistan and wouldn’t promise to have troops out of Iraq by the end of their first term. That would be 10 years, $2 trillion and 50,000 U.S. casualties later.

No leading candidate in either party questions the U.S. empire of bases, nor its role as globocop that leads us to spend as much on our military as the rest of the world combined, and insures that we will be enmeshed in strife across the globe. In fact, candidates in both parties pledge to increase the size of the U.S. military and expand its ability to go places and do things.

Our global economic strategy — developed by, for and of the multinational corporations and banks — has disemboweled our manufacturing sector while racking up unsustainable foreign deficits and debts. Financial deregulation has created a global speculative casino economy marked by increasingly rapid and destructive booms and busts. Every leading Republican candidate for president pledges to pursue more of the same. Leading Democrats promise no more NAFTAs, and pledge to add labor rights, environmental and consumer protections to trade accords. But none have laid out a national strategy for the global economy that can get us out of this hole. And needless to say, none have challenged Wall Street’s deregulation. The Democratic Congress couldn’t even gird itself to require hedge-fund billionaires to pay the same rate of taxes as their secretaries, much less implant regulations that would limit destabilizing speculation.

Bush’s distorted tax and budget priorities have contributed to Gilded Age inequality, racked up trillions in national debt, even as we have simply starved vital investments in our future — from schools, to affordable college, to advanced broadband, to basic sewage systems, levies and bridges. Yet every leading Republican candidate pledges to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, increase spending on the military and cut more from domestic investment. Leading Democrats vow to rollback the top end of the Bush tax cuts to pay for national health care, but they also pledge to increase military spending and move towards balanced budgets — virtually insuring the continued starvation of vital domestic investment.

Bush will not be on the ticket in 2008, but it seems clear that the Republican nominee will make this election a referendum on his policies — promising only more of the same, sustaining the ruinous Bush wars, tax cuts and global economic policies. The Democratic nominees look to offer a choice, promising to bring the occupation of Iraq to an end, roll back tax cuts to pay for affordable health care and launch a bold plan for energy independence. That’s a big agenda, but we’re still a long way from putting a stake in the heart of the policies that have created this wreckage.

It's Your Money

Bill Scher — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 11:39:21 -0500

Newsflash: For seven years, George Bush has collected your taxes, and spent your money.

He may have collected those taxes in a more unfair manner than in the prior decade. And he may have spent much of that money in ways that weren't economically helpful or supported by the public.

Nevertheless, the record is clear. He has had a seven-year policy and taxing and spending.

Yet when Bush vetoed the annual bill that determines what we invest in labor, health and education, he railed against "the cost of tax-and-spend policies."

He said, "My philosophy is that the American people know how to spend their money better than the government can." Never mind that the American people didn't ask their government to lose $1.3 trillion (total economic cost projected through 2008) on an invasion and occupation of Iraq that has failed to do anything for national or global security.

And he said, "This year alone, the leadership in Congress has proposed to spend $22 billion more than my budget provides ... Over five years, their proposed spending spree adds up to an extra $205 billion. Put another way, that's about $1,300 in higher spending every second, of every minute, of every hour, of every day, of every year for the next five years."

The Iraq Occupation happens to cost about $90,000 a second. But hey, you know how to spend your money, right?

Since it is your money, perhaps you might want to know a little about what your Congress was trying to do in that veteod bill. From the Associated Press:

a 20 percent increase over Bush's request for job training programs.
$1.4 billion more than Bush's request for health research at the National Institutes of Health, a 5 percent increase.
$2.4 billion for heating subsidies for the poor, $480 million more than Bush requested.
$665 million for grants to [poverty-fighting] community action agencies; Bush sought to kill the program outright.

Creating job opportunity, eradicating poverty, strengthening the overall economy and improving the nation's health, for a pittance of what the failed Iraq occupation has cost.

With Bush's veto supported by the conservative congressional minority, we're left with a clear contrast in visions for our government.

One that invests your tax dollars into effectively addressing pressing problems that affect us all. And one that wastes your tax dollars on reckless and disastrous adventures abroad.

It's your money.

Weekend Watchdog Wrap-Up

Isaiah J. Poole — Sun, 28 Oct 2007 12:16:53 -0400

The substitute Watchdog gave something of a break to the chattering Sunday morning class. George Stephanopoulos and Tim Russert took advantage of it. Chris Wallace didn't.

Stephanopoulos on ABC's "This Week" asked Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican presidential candidate, about the refusal of Judge Michael Mukasey, President Bush's nominee for attorney general, to characterize as torture the practice of waterboarding, which subjects its victim to a drowning-like sensation. McCain had earlier sharply criticized former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani for his own equivocation on the issue.

"Will Mr. Mukasey have to say clearly that waterboarding is torture to get your vote for attorney general?" Stephanopoulos asked.

"I can't be that absolute," McCain said. "But I want to know his answer. Obviously, you judge a candidate based on his entire record. But this is a very important issue for me."

McCain left himself a lot of room to back an attorney general who has made clear that he largely supports President Bush's bid to expand presidential power and minimize checks on that power, including the power to use tactics such as waterboarding against people who have none of the basic rights to challenge the legality of their detention.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., got to address the issue posed by the Watchdog question we suggested for Russert on NBC's "Meet the Press." Russert asked about Dodd's opposition to legislation that would give telecommunication companies immunity for illegal wiretapping at the administration's request. He reiterated that opposition, but he was not pressed on how far he would take that opposition.

(Russert did ask a very good question about Dodd's reticence, as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, to support taxing the profits of hedge-fund managers as ordinary income. Dodd replied that he was concerned about "unintended consequences" of doing so and that the responsible approach would be to study the issue more. But he also talked about how much experience he has had in dealing with financial issues in the Senate, so wouldn't you think he would have a more definitive answer?)

Chris Wallace's interview with first lady Laura Bush on "Fox News Sunday" did, as I predicted, take on the air of a friendly chat. Still, it was surprising that Wallace didn't go near either of the Watchdog questions we posed.

While a significant percentage of the interview was devoted to her advocacy for early breast cancer detection in the Arab world, there was no serious discussion of breast cancer issues here in the United States, including the fact that in the United States, according to the National Cancer Institute, "African Americans have higher mortality rates than any other racial or ethnic group in the United States. The gap in mortality between African Americans and Whites has widened in recent years."

That points to continuing racial disparities in health care availability and treatment within our own borders that have not been effectively addressed, or even acknowledged, by Republican leaders when they ridicule Democratic and progressive health care reform proposals.

And while Wallace asked a question about "soft diplomacy" in Iraq, there were no critical questions about recent actions that are working against any good soft diplomacy would do, including the shootings of civilians by Blackwater security guards under contract to the State Department.

This coming weekend Rick Perlstein will do a stint in the Watchdog pen.