Who Will Speak for Us, the Antiwar Majority, in Congress?

With Kudos to PDA’s Barbara Lee!

Last week for the first time, the majority of Democrats voted in favor of the Lee Amendment limiting funding for the Afghanistan War to the safe and orderly withdrawal of US troops and security contractors. (101 ayes, 79 Noes).

This represents a sea-change of opinion from the time that Rep. Barbara Lee stood alone among her House colleagues eleven years ago, challenging the wisdom of the war.

It is unfortunately no surprise that this amendment was defeated 113-303. However, in our upcoming work it will be important to emphasize that the President's political base is now in clear opposition to his Afghanistan war policy.

On the 2013 NDAA as a whole (HR 4310) we did better than anticipated with a final vote of 120 Noes and 299 Ayes. Fortunately the majority of Democrats voted against the 2013 NDAA. (104-77). The reasons for Democratic voting on this item are ambiguous because the White House itself was displeased with the final version of the bill and because civil liberties was also an important concern. Yet clearly for many Democrats a major factor was the size of the military budget at a time when domestic programs are under attack.

Going forward, it seems possible that with greater unity we might achieve a better result in the next round of votes. The bill now goes to the Senate, where there will be various efforts to shorten the American stay in Afghanistan and to cut billions from the Pentagon budget.

Our Legislative Working Group will continue to support these initiatives, as well as stronger amendments to end the war in Afghanistan and to garner more NO votes against the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act.

Provided below are links to the Roll-calls on the Lee Amendment and the 2013 NDAA itself. If your member of Congress voted for peace and against the authorization of $242 billion, it might be helpful to send a message of thanks.

Roll Call for 2013 Defense Authorization Act:

http://www.govtrack.us/congress/votes/112-2012/h291

Roll Call for Lee Amendment

http://www.opencongress.org/vote/2012/h/264

Many thanks for everyone who did the Congressional Calls last week. If you obtained any additional information from a Congressional Office, please pass along to rustiandgael@unitedforpeace.org

_______________________________________________
Ufpj-afghanistan mailing list

What Is Obama's Position on Afghanistan? Say It Again?

 

‘Winding Down’ the War vs. ‘Losing Afghanistan’

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPost

May 16, 2012 - As a candidate opposing the Iraq War, Barack Obama improved his hawkish credentials by promising to track down Osama bin Laden, expand drone attacks, and escalate the American troop numbers in Afghanistan. Three years later, bin Laden is dead, the drones inflame Pakistan opinion and complicate a peace settlement, and 33,000 American troops are scheduled to pull out by the end of 2012 with "steady withdrawals" to continue after. Sixty-eight thousand U.S. troops will remain in Afghanistan by this year's end, with the deadline for withdrawing most of them by December 2014.

By the numbers, Afghanistan has already directly cost taxpayers $528.8 billion, and the Obama request for Afghanistan this fiscal year is $107 billion. That does not include the hidden, indirect costs -- accrual such as long-term Social Security, disability, and medical care for veterans, etc. -- partly spurred by an order last year from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, which will add hundreds of billions, if not trillions to the ultimate financial impact of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The president's internal political calculation in 2008 was that he could never pull out of Afghanistan without killing Al Qaeda's top leadership and building a firewall against a Taliban return to power. While perhaps correct politically, this has led to an Afghan quagmire shaken by severe contradictions.

• Hamid Karzai remains an unpopular, unreliable president whose term ends in 2014, the year of the troop withdrawal deadline. He seeks $3.5-6 billion each of the next two years to build up the Afghan armed forces, plus a Western commitment to funding for at least another decade, an impossible expectation.
• According to Pentagon evaluations, those troops are unable to function independently, though insurgent infiltrators are skilled at shooting NATO allies. (Twenty percent of NATO fatalities have occurred this year, according to The New York Times).
• Foreign aid to Afghanistan equals its entire gross national product and, according to the World Bank, "cannot be sustained."
• "Intractable Graft by Elite Afghans" makes reform out of reach.

Earlier this year, the Taliban indicated through intermediaries a willingness to hold dialogue with the West, in Qatar, but demanded the release of several detainees now in Guantanamo, possibly in exchange for an American POW, Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. Those discussions are in trouble, partly because of Republican opposition to releasing U.S.-held Taliban combatants. As a result, the Obama administration's hope for progress in negotiations has hit the skids.

Afghanistan: Our Longest War and Biggest Fantasy

By Harry Targ
Beaver County Peace Links

On May Day, 2012 President Obama made a secret trip to Afghanistan and spoke to the nation and the troops on the ground about past, present, and future policy. What the speech revealed was a replication of a ten-year fantasy narrative about why we went to war on Afghanistan, what our goals were, and what the future holds in the region for the United States and, most importantly, the Afghan people.

The President announced he was signing an agreement between the two countries which will define “a new kind of relationship” in which Afghans will assume primary responsibility for their security and “we build an equal partnership between two sovereign states.” The future of this relationship will be bright as “the war ends, and a new chapter begins.”

The announcement sounded eerily like the policy of “Vietnamization” which President Nixon put in place in 1969; handing over ground action to the South Vietnamese government while the United States escalated the bombing of targets in North and South Vietnam and invaded neighboring Cambodia. The South Vietnamese government and military were incapable of assuming “primary responsibility” and in the end were overthrown by powerful forces in the countryside.

The President explained that President Bush correctly launched a war on Afghanistan in October, 2001 because the country allowed terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden an al Qaeda “safe-haven” for terrorist planning and attacks, ultimately leading to the tragedy of 9/11. While Bin Laden escaped to Pakistan, the U.S. continued fighting the Taliban who have “waged a brutal insurgency.”

Subsequently, he claimed, using the dehumanized language of violence –prone discourse, the U.S. military has “taken out over 20 of their top leaders” including bin Laden himself. But the war continues. While the United States downsizes its troop commitments policy will include:

• a transition of the war to our Afghan military allies. Importantly Obama proclaimed that at the NATO summit this month in Chicago, “our coalition will set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year.” However, “international troops will continue to train, advise and assist Afghans, and fight alongside them when needed.”
• training of Afghan Security Forces, leading to an Afghan force of 352,000 troops which NATO will support to create “a strong and sustainable long-term Afghan force.”
• increasing US/NATO/Afghan cooperation “including shared commitments to combat terrorism and strengthen democratic institutions.” President Obama declared that these commitments, in the short run involving counter-terrorism and continued training, do not include the building of permanent U.S. bases.
• pursuing a negotiated peace with the Taliban if they break with al Qaeda, renounce violence and “abide by Afghan laws.”
• working towards stability in South Asia, including partnering with neighboring Pakistan. The President assured viewers that “America has no designs beyond an end to al Qaeda safe-havens, and respect for Afghan sovereignty.” In short, the central goal of United States policy is to destroy al Qaeda, in the short run to stabilize Afghanistan, and “to finish the job we started in Afghanistan…”

The speech reflects the classic pattern of U.S. military globalization coupled with tortured ahistorical fantasy narratives that have characterized policy since the end of World War II.

Where Are We At, Where Are We Headed? A Study Guide…

NEW MOMENT, NEW MOVEMENT:

Ideas about Antiwar, Antimilitarist Strategies for the Years Ahead

Written by War Times
07 April 2012

As the global and U.S. political landscape shifts, a new round of strategic discussion is taking place in many sectors of the antiwar movement. Below are the key assessment points and questions used by War Times to kick off our collective's effort to (1) take stock of the current volatile moment and (2) look for effective paths forward. The third part of this discussion paper is a short essay on antimilitarist strategies by War Timer Lynn Koh that expresses some of what we felt were the most useful ideas coming out of our deliberations. We are sharing this material in hopes of pushing forward a much-needed dialogue not only among activists who are focused mainly on antiwar and international solidarity efforts, but also with grassroots organizers whose work is mainly in other movements but who see the importance of making opposition to war, empire and militarism an integral part of a revitalized U.S. progressive movement. –Max Elbaum, Francesca Fiorentini, Rebecca Gordon, Hany Khalil and Lynn Koh for War Times

1. Taking stock of the big picture: What can we expect on the war/peace/militarism front in the post-Iraq War, new-U.S.-military-doctrine, continuing-Great-Recession years ahead?

The U.S. is an empire in decline. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars, intended to be the first steps in securing a whole new level of U.S. global hegemony (and right-wing rule at home) instead over-stretched Washington militarily, financially and politically and accelerated the empire's downward trend. In the wake of these wars and the 2008 financial-then-economic crisis, the U.S. elite is adjusting its strategies to maximize U.S. clout in the period ahead.

The elite is united on the maintenance of U.S. military superiority over all rivals (combined) and the willingness to employ force and threats of force as a key part of its global arsenal. But it is badly divided over how adventurous to be in waging war (especially regarding deployment of ground combat troops) and how unilateral to be. The new military doctrine initiated by Obama, which stresses "rebalancing" toward Asia and use of drones and special operations over deployment of ground troops represents the "realist" strategy for the next stage. The Neocon faction, now out of power, wants much more aggressive use of force particularly in the Middle East; and their crusade is bolstered by the fact that a significant swatch of the white population has embraced a racist 'clash of civilizations' zealotry which sees white Christian-Jewish civilization pitted against a whole range of dangerous anti-American, anti-Western Civilization, anti-Israel "others" ranging from Al-Qaeda to Obama.

Under these circumstances, "low level" wars, expansion of military bases and threats against other countries (in Africa and Latin America as well as in the Asia/the Pacific region and the Middle East) will likely be constant features of the decades ahead. And there will be a near-constant danger of larger scale wars pushed by the far right as well. The kind of push is taking place right now with the right's crusade for an attack on Iran.

Simultaneously, the military-industrial complex and the militarist approaches to human relations it advocates will buttress regressive policies and structures on all fronts of social struggle. Military spending and militarist hostility to "enemies" drain resources from social programs; bolster the elite's austerity-for-the-masses program; distort the economy generally; foster racist, anti-immigrant and sexist views and practices; are key excuses to curtail civil liberties, and are a major force in continuing dependence on fossil fuels and threatening environmental disaster. In other words, militarism as both an institutional reality and set of ideas is an obstacle not only to peaceful relations among nations and peoples but to all social progress.

Questions: What do things look like on the war/peace/militarism front over the next 5-10 years? What impact will the 2012 election campaign, and its potential outcomes, have on what lies ahead? Readings:

Bob Wing, The Arab Spring and the Changing Dynamics of Global Struggle

Max Elbaum, Fighting for Peace Against an Empire in Decline

Tom Hayden, End to Long War Doctrine?

Iran: Who Is Threatening Whom?

One Graphic, One Thousand Words

Labor Coalition Warns Against War With Iran

 

By Roger Bybee
Beaver County Peace Links via In These Times

US Labor Against the War says "it is time to invest at home"

A broad coalition of influential labor organizations and leaders is urging the Obama administration to avoid any steps that would escalate tensions with Iran, which allegedly poses a nuclear threat in the near future. US Labor Against the War—which is independent of U.S. unions but affiliated with scores of unions and labor councils around the country—is alarmed both by the potential for a catastrophic U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran, and the resulting drain on resources needed to rebuild America's economy.

The USLAW statement highlights the human costs of yet another U.S. assault, but also stresses how an attack on Iran would rob U.S. workers of the resources needed to rebuild an economy still wracked by high unemployment and falling wages.

USLAW declared in a statement last month:

“    the AFL-CIO National Executive Council said in its statement on jobs and labor’s agenda on August 3, 2011: "There is no way to fund what we must do as a nation without bringing our troops home from Iraq and Afghanistan. The militarization of our foreign policy has proven to be a costly mistake. It is time to invest at home."

    …the budget crises at federal, state and local levels and their devastating consequences for working people make all the more urgent reductions in U.S. military operations and expenditures, and the transfer of those funds to meet pressing domestic needs…

Yet momentum continues to build for an attack on Iran, with Republican presidential candidates taunting the Obama administration as insufficiently tough toward Iran and supposedly hostile to Israel.

Note to Obama: We Need a Peace Candidate

A Protest of NATO From NATO Countries

By Tom Hayden
Beaver County Peace Links via HuffPost

Peace movements in every country are raising their voices against the war in Afghanistan in advance of the May 18-20 NATO summit in Chicago. Some will converge on Chicago, while others will march in NATO capitols. Around two-thirds of the public in NATO countries now opposes the war, and most of their governments are anxious to withdraw if a face-saving path can be found.

The Obama administration and its allies are scrambling to showcase an announcement of progress before the Chicago summit gathering, which thousands of journalists are planning to cover. The administration already has relocated the G-8 summit on the world fiscal crisis, originally planned at the same time, to the secure seclusion of Camp David.

To support a peace petition by citizens of NATO countries, please sign here.

The administration faces a growing reality of quagmire, possibly even deeper chaos, in Afghanistan. Sixty-nine percent of Americans say the U.S. "should not be involved", a jump of 16 percent from last year. The percentages tend to be even higher in NATO countries.

A March 7 New York Times headline, "Intractable Afghan Graft Hampering U.S. Strategy", summarizes the terminal ineptitude of the Karzai regime. According to NATO data, only one of the Afghan army's 158 battalions is able to fight on their own, up from zero last year. (New York Times, March 16, 2012) Meanwhile those same Afghan soldiers and police are "killing their colleagues among the international military force here at an alarming rate", according to another New York Times report. (March 28, 2012) One result of the deepening quagmire has been a collapse of U.S. military morale and discipline, as seen in widely-publicized cases of American soldiers burning Qurans, urinating on dead bodies, and a shooting spree against innocent Afghan villagers. The suicide rate in the American armed forces is at a historic high.