... appears to be what we're doing : In a taped speech intended to be aired tomorrow, US Defense Secretary Robert Gates blamed the lack of more US and NATO troops in Afghanistan for the growing momentum of the Taliban, chiding NATO nations in particular for their small commitments to the ongoing conflict. The comments come as the Obama Administration is mulling a commitment of another 45,000 troops to the war effort, and inexplicably enough the same day that Secretary Gates chastized others in the administration for making public their positions on the proposed escalation. Gates cautioned that the US could not afford to ever retreat from the nation, saying it would empower al-Qaeda and give the appearance that the mujahideen had defeated a second superpower after a decade-long occupation. Whatever it would look like internationally, it seems apparent that eight years of occupation, as with the Soviets, has done little to strengthen pro-invasion forces in the nation and has rather r...

OK, I officially never want to hear about the 2000 US Presidential election again from anybody who does not question this decision : The White House has ended weeks of hesitation over how to respond to the Afghan election by accepting President Karzai as the winner despite evidence that up to 20 per cent of ballots cast may have been fraudulent. Abandoning its previous policy of not prejudging investigations of vote rigging, the Obama Administration has conceded that Mr Karzai will be President for another five years on the basis that even if he were forced into a second round of voting he would almost certainly win it. The decision will increase pressure on President Obama to justify further US troop deployments to Afghanistan to prop up a regime now regarded as systemically corrupt. The acceptance was conveyed by Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, in a meeting with her Afghan counterpart hours before Mr Obama received a formal request from General Stanley McChrystal, the comman...

From Kids Prefer Cheese [Angus in this case]: The most often made point I hear in the health care debate is the comparison with Western Europe. I find this point intriguing because, if you stop to think about it, the US really helped immensely to finance public health care in Europe. For example, national health care started in France right after World War II. At that time and over the next 50 years, the US both helped to finance France's economy (via the Marshall plan), and provide a huge subsidy to France (and Germany and the UK) via our military umbrella. Ironically, instead of using US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in the US, our Government used US taxpayer money to help finance universal health care in Western Europe, by paying so much $$ for the defense of the region! Nowadays we need to find us a sugar daddy to help finance our social programs, but the cupboard is looking mighty thin. Today we continue to fund an empire of military bases around the wo...

Remember that it all depended on your definition of is ? Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is pissed at reports that the US will increase its troop strength in Colombia and acquire military bases there. Oh poo, says the President, as quoted by Reuters : "There have been those in the region who have been trying to play this up as part of a traditional anti-Yankee rhetoric. This is not accurate," Obama told Hispanic media reporters.... "We have had a security agreement with Colombia for many years now. We have updated that agreement. We have no intent in establishing a U.S. military base in Colombia," Obama said. "This is continuation of assistance that we had been providing them. We have no intention of sending large numbers of additional troops into Colombia, and we have every interest in seeing Colombia and its neighbors operate peacefully." Fisking the President [albeit unintentionally, I suspect], Reuters then examines the new security agreement with Colomb...

Actually it's worse than that. According to WaPo : The Afghan army is already scheduled to grow from 85,000 to 134,000, an expansion originally expected to take five years but now fast-tracked for completion by 2011. Several senior Pentagon officials indicated that an adequate size for the Afghan force may be twice the expanded number. So that would be 268,000 soldiers (not counting police) for a country with a population of 32.7 million . That's one soldier for every 122 people in the country. But wait: by fall the US will have 68,000 troops on the ground, plus 8,000 Brits, 2,700 Canadians, and roughly another 4,000-odd NATO soldiers. So that's nearly 83,000 foreign troops, and WaPo also reports that General McChrystal may be gearing up to ask for more American forces early next year --trainers, you see. Let's just deal with the number we know will be there in the fall, which--when added to the potential expansion of the Afghani Army--means that there could be 351,0...

... with throw-down words by Brookings fellow Michael O'Hanlon at the Washington Post : After three months of very impressive decisions regarding national security, President Obama made perhaps his first significant mistake. It concerns the defense budget, where his plans are insufficient to support the national security establishment over the next five years. Thankfully, this mistake can be fixed before it causes big harm -- either by Congress this year or the administration itself next year. The administration is hardly slashing funds for defense; it is simply adopting a policy of zero real growth in the "base budget" (the part that does not include war costs, which are too unpredictable to include in this analysis). Specifically, the base budget is to grow 2 percent a year over the next five years. But with the inflation rate expected to average over 1.5 percent, the net effect is essentially no real growth. Cumulatively, that would leave us about $150 billion short of...

The Times suggests that this might be the case: AMERICA made clear last week that it would attack Taliban forces in their Swat valley stronghold unless the Pakistan government stopped the militants’ advance towards Islamabad. A senior Pakistani official said the Obama administration intervened after Taliban forces expanded from Swat into the adjacent district of Buner, 60 miles from the capital. The Pakistani Taliban’s inroads raised international concern, particularly in Washington, where officials feared that the nuclear-armed country, which is pivotal to the US war against the Taliban in Afghanistan and against Al-Qaeda, was rapidly succumbing to Islamist extremists. “The implicit threat - if you don’t do it, we may have to - was always there,” said the Pakistani official. He said that under American pressure, Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency told the Taliban to withdraw from Buner on Friday. However, reports yesterday indicated that the Taliban withdrawal was le...

Amazingly enough I have yet to see any commentator actually grapple with what the Pentagon's new proposed budget actually means. At the top, assuming that President Obama and SecDef Gates get what they want, there are going to be big cuts in major weapons systems: the F-22 [which should be known as the White Elephant fighter], a carrier group, several helicopter, the Future Combat Systems, and missile defense will all take major hits or be eliminated. This, of course, has the neo-cons up in arms that Obama is soft on terror and intent on appeasing our enemies. All of which misses the point. Overall defense spending is not going to go down. So where's the money going? Read carefully these three paragraphs indirectly quoting Gates at MSNBC (if I could find a direct quote I'd use it): Gates said his $534 billion budget proposal represents a "fundamental overhaul" in defense acquisition and reflects a shift in priorities from fighting conventional wars to the newe...

First: Congresswoman Michelle Bachmann is, umm, well-qualified to be a guest on the Glenn Beck Show. And the sort of twisted attention she's given to the question of creating an international reserve currency based on Special Drawing Rights at the International Monetary Fund is ... special. Michelle sees this as the end of national currencies: BACHMANN: What that means is all of the countries in the world would have a single currency. We would give up the dollar as our currency and we would just go with a One World currency. … If we give up the dollar as our standard, and co-mingle the value of the dollar with the value of coinage in Zimbabwe, that dilutes our money supply. We lose control over our economy. And economic liberty is inextricably entwined with political liberty. Once you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom. And then we are no more, as an exceptional nation, as we always have been. So this is imperative. Of course, this misrepresentation of an...

General Petraeus reports Pakistan as being on the verge of collapse : Less than a week ago, the Obama Administration unveiled a “new, comprehensive strategy” for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which included massive increases in spending as well as adding yet more troops to the ongoing surge in Afghanistan. Now, days later, top defense officials have informed Congress that the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan is growing worse by the day , and that the brand new strategy is no longer enough. SOCOM head Admiral Eric Olson described the situation as “increasingly dire.” At the same time, foreign military figures in Afghanistan have said they expect the surge to be a “game changer” and to cause a significant spike in militant attacks in that nation. Beyond that, while acknowledging that Pakistan had “betrayed America’s trust in the past,” General David Petraeus warned that Pakistan’s militants “could literally take down their state” if the US didn’t intervene. Undersecretary of Defense Mi...

As a Presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama managed to hang Senator Hillary Clinton's vote in favor of the use of force in Iraq around her neck and drown her candidacy with it. When we went into Afghanistan in 2001, President Bush had Congressional approval. Today I read this, from an interview with General David Petraeus: The U.S. military will reserve the "right of last resort" to take out threats inside Pakistan, but it would prefer to enable the Pakistani military to do the job itself, Gen. David Petraeus said Monday in an exclusive interview with FOX News.... "I think we would never give up, if you will, the right of last resort if we assess something as a threat to us, noting that what we want to do is enable the Pakistanis, help them, assist them to deal with the problem that we now think, and their leaders certainly now think, represents the most important existential threat to their country, not just to the rest of the world," he said. In a sense...

All of a sudden, Democratic congressional leaders can't quite square promises of an Iraq withdrawal by August 2010 that leaves more troops (50,000 plus) there than we will have in Afghanistan: From WaPo : President Obama has invited members of Congress to the White House for a meeting later this afternoon to discuss his plans for drawing down troops in Iraq -- a plan that has already drawn stiff criticism from his Democratic allies. After Speaker Nancy Pelosi complained that the level of troops -- 50,000 -- who would remain in Iraq is too high, other senior Democrats voiced similar concerns on Thursday. Among Democratic leaders, only Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois is defending the new Obama plan, which will take three months longer than he promised and still leave a significant force structure on the ground. "I'm happy to listen to the secretary of defense and the president, but when they talk about 50,000, that's a little higher number than I had anticipated," S...

I am glad that President Obama is attempting to live up to his campaign promises to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell in the US military. I would, however, hope the administration pays more attention to the ongoing disentanglement of our military from the American population that began in the 1990s and reached break-neck pace under Dubya. One of the tenets of the American republic has always been the fact that we have a citizen military, with a universal moral obligation to service that cuts across party and class lines. This tradition continued through World War Two, but took a heavy beating in Korea and Vietnam. The re-establishment of an all-volunteer military seemed to return more closely to the Framers' ideal in the late 1970s, but then--after the 1991 Gulf War--something seriously wrong happened. William Astore covers some of the essential aspects of this breakdown: A leaner, meaner, higher tech force – that was what George W. Bush and his Secretary of Defense Donald Rums...

This is not a criticism of the Obama administration, but an observation on world affairs: given that the situation in Gaza was raging and the Iraq/Afghanistan/Iran wars and controversies were on the US plate as he tied his tie for the inaugural, the new President intentionally jump-started his foreign policy to concentrate on the Middle East from day one. [I do not agree with a lot he's done or intends to do, but I give him full marks for starting on day one.] Which is why he has to be scratching his head in the very warm Oval Office, saying, "Mexico? Korea? Wait a damn minute!" The US has now admitted that it is seriously studying potential military intervention into Mexico's war with the drug cartels: The Dallas Morning News, citing anonymous sources, reported that if the bloodbath escalates, U.S. officials are contemplating the possibility of an enhanced U.S. role in battling Mexican drug cartels, including joint operations with Mexican forces and the involveme...

The NATO Commander-in-Chief is, well, pissed , about the leaking (pissed, leaking, get it?) of his operational directives to NATO commanders in the field to kill Afghan drug dealers, pretty much on sight: Yesterday we reported on the “guidance” of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander for Europe General John Craddock, which ordered NATO soldiers in Afghanistan to kill anyone involved in the drug industry, even if there was no evidence they were insurgents. The story has caused no shortage of outrage since the German magazine Der Spiegel initially broke it. NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer is riled up too, but not in the way you’d figure. He’s not so much upset at the general for ordering troops which are already losing ground to the insurgency to waste their time killing random opium dealers: he’s mad at whoever leaked the report. “The secretary-general considers it is unacceptable that confidential documents have been leaked,” according to spokesman James Appathurai, “he is call...

We're fighting in Afghanistan and along the Pakistani border because it is the front-line of the war on terror, right? That's what President Obama assured us during the campaign, promising renewed attention to the conflict there, and an Iraq-like surge, while his Defense Secretary-to-be Robert Gates was assuring the Afghanis we'd be there for as many years as necessary to end terrorism and complete nation-building. Of course, the fact that we've known for a couple of years that Afghanistan has ten times larger reserves of oil and natural gas than previously reported, or that China is interested in developing them, should we pull out, or even that Coalition military deployments often seem to be more interested in defending a US-financed pipeline than rooting out Al Qaeda are not significant, right? These connections couldn't possibly explain why the Obama administration enters office committed to doubling down in Afghanistan, even if the price is foregoing any Ira...

Now that over 287 Palestinians have been killed and over 700 wounded in the latest round of Israeli rocket attacks on Gaza, world reactions are starting to pour in : Russia was one of the first to respond, with a foreign ministry spokesman calling for an immediate halt to attacks by both forces. The European Union likewise called for a return to the cease-fire, saying there was “no military solution in Gaza” and urging Israel to allow the resumption of humanitarian aid. Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa said it was “an unimaginable and unacceptable act,” while the Jordanian government is pressuring the Arab League to unite in favor of an immediate end to the attacks. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas is reportedly in talks with the King of Saudi Arabia about the situation as well. As Gaza’s hospitals filled with dead and wounded, Egypt has opened the Rafah border crossing to allow ambulances to bring in the wounded. Virtually alone in refusing to criticize the killings was t...

Reading between the paragraphs is a fun exercise, but I think that people too often don't have the resources to do it. So, for fun, when I read this WaPo article by Ann Scott Tyson at Anti-war.com , I thought I'd give it a try. After all, the devil is in the details, and--far too often-- people who take the time to read the papers and journals think they are getting the whole story : The Army needs to add at least 30,000 active-duty soldiers to its ranks to fulfill its responsibilities around the world without becoming stretched dangerously thin, senior Army officials warn. Its responsibilities around the world? This is code for maintaining our foreign network of over 750 military bases in other nations, which provide the logistical framework to be able to project American troops unilaterally into virtually any region on the planet. "You can't do what we've been tasked to do with the number of people we have," Undersecretary of the Army Nelson Ford said in...

I'm following the line of thought advanced by Dana Garrett regarding President-Elect Obama's early picks for cabinet and advisors: Is the implication here that there are no progressives qualified to fill many of the cabinet positions? Dana is chiefly looking at domestic appointments, but Alan Bock of the Orange Country Register [h/t AWC ] makes the point that in his foreign policy appointments at State, Defense, and National Security Advisor, Barack Obama has clearly snubbed a number of strongly qualified progressive candidates who promoted non-interventionist views: But the fact that early Iraq critics like Steve Clemons of the center-left New American Foundation and Lawrence Korb of the Center for American Progress – not to mention Boston University army careerist-turned political science professor Andrew Bacevich – have not made any short lists suggests that Gen. Jones [as NSA] will be refereeing disputes within a rather narrow range of options. The argument won't be o...

Jeremy Scahill has it dead spot on at Anti-War.com : while the public eye is focused on the economy, President-elect Obama has no intention of withdrawing US forces from Iraq: The New York Times is reporting about an "apparent evolution" in president-elect Barack Obama's thinking on Iraq, citing his recent statements about his plan to keep a "residual force" in the country and his pledge to "listen to the recommendations of my commanders" as Obama prepares to assume actual command of US forces. "At the Pentagon and the military headquarters in Iraq, the response to the statements this week from Mr. Obama and his national security team has been akin to the senior officer corps' letting out its collective breath," the Times reported. "[T]the words sounded to them like the new president would take a measured approach on the question of troop levels." The reality is there is no "evolution." Anyone who took the time to cut...