Bananastan Delusions

President Obama’s Dec. 1 speech about his decision on the Bananastans (Afghanistan and Pakistan) is unlikely to surprise anyone. The sanctioned leaks have been coming fast and furious the past few days, and it appears that Gen. Stanley McChrystal will get what he asked for. Maybe.

He’ll get his 40,000 extra troops, 34,000 to come from the U.S. and 6,000 or so to come from NATO nations. He’ll train Afghanistan security forces to a total strength of 400,000. Afghan President Hamid Karzai will eliminate corruption in his government.

Right.

At a million smackers per troop per year, the annual cost of the war bumps up by $34 billion, and that’s probably a conservative estimate. Many other expenses will be involved. Democratic leadership in Congress doesn’t much care for that aspect. Congressman David Obey, (D-WI.), wants to pay taxes to pay for any escalation of the war.

Europe is not all shot up about sending more troops to Afghanistan. France, Germany and England have had significant anti-Afghan war protests.

McChrystal will have a tough time getting Afghanistan’s police and military forces up to 400,000. The Afghan National Army’s rate of turnover--due to desertion, absenteeism and lack of reenlistment--is atrocious.

The White House called Hamid Karzai the “legitimate” leader of Afghanistan after he stole two elections. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has called on Karzai to make a “new compact” with the people of Afghanistan. Get real, Hillary. Karzai is one of the biggest crooks in the second most corrupt country in the world. (Somalia is the most corrupt. Iraq is number four.)

McChrystal wants to do a “classic” counterinsurgency operation, based on the doctrine prescribed in Field Manual 3-24 that states unequivocally, in several places, that successful counterinsurgency operations require effective and legitimate governance. We’ll never get that from Karzai. He’s congenitally crooked; he’s a warlord whose cabinet is made up of fellow warlords and his brother Ahmed is a drug lord who’s on the CIA payroll. Drugs finance the Taliban and Hamid himself has old ties to the Taliban.

What on earth are we doing in that part of the world?

We estimate that at a maximum, 100 al-Qaeda operators are in Afghanistan and maybe 300 are skulking around Afghanistan. Former CIA officer Philip Giraldi relates that there may be fewer than ten of them left.

Obama says, "I feel very confident that when the American people hear a clear rationale for what we're doing there and how we intend to achieve our goals, that they will be supportive." If there’s a clear rationale for what we’re doing in Afghanistan why haven’t we heard it yet? If Candidate Obama kept telling us Afghanistan was the “war of necessity,” how come President Obama never told us why that is? Obama’s strategy team already went through one high-level strategy session in March and came with a paper pile of trash. We would disrupt terror networks, turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into real countries, and get the international community involved. Sure.

As we discuss an escalation, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is talking about how to get British troops out of the joint. He’s put up a series of demands of the Karzai government. But he says he would not set a timetable for withdrawal. Nothing ever happens without timelines in the military. If it weren’t for timelines, we’d still be waiting for Dwight Eisenhower to order the invasion of Normandy.

To make matters messier, there are indications that another civil war between the Pashtuns and a Tajik-led anti-Pashtun ethnic coalition that would look like the one that took place after the fall of the Soviet-supported regime in 1992. Sticking our soldiers in the middle of other countries’ civil wars seems to have become America’s new pastime.

We’re still running a funky facility in Afghanistan at Bagram Air Base called the “black jail” where prisoners are locked away with no due process and tortured.

We’re still assassinating “suspected” bad dudes from the air in Pakistan with unpiloted drones, and killing a lot of civilians as well.

Pakistan isn’t doing so well on the corruption scale itself. President Asif Ali Zardari and his allies face corruption and criminal charges, and Zardari has ceded his control over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons to the country’s prime minister, and is being called on to cede other powers as well. Pakistan’s military has traditionally been stronger than its civilian government, and Pakistani journalist Syed Saleem Shahzad says that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton cut a dope deal with Pakistan’s military and its Inter-Service Intelligence agency to negotiate with the Taliban for us. Ain’t that a heel upside the noggin?

Speaking of boots, the Washington Post reports that shortly after President Obama announces his latest Afghanistan plan, as many as 9,000 Marines will deploy to resume an offensive in Southern Afghanistan, the one that stalled out when McChrystal first took over. The current official explanation of why the original offensive went flat is that we didn’t have enough troops at the time. But the time, the story was that the Taliban fighters faded away in the presence of a superior force and struck elsewhere. How many shiny Ohio quarters would you care to bet that they’ll fade away this time too?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Obama’s Big Speech

President Obama will announce his big decision about Afghanistan on Tuesday. The sanctioned leaks about what he’ll say are coming fast and furious.

According to various reports, he’ll commit somewhere between 30,000 and 34,000 extra U.S. troops to the region. When he announces that, NATO nations will maybe send 6,000 extra troops. That adds up to the 40,000 extra forces Gen. Stanley McChrystal wanted, and then we’ll train Afghan security forces up to an end-strength of about 400,000, and we’ll have as many counterinsurgency troops in place as our bogus counterinsurgency field manual calls for (between two and 2.5 percent of the host nation population, which in Afghanistan is a little over 28 million, so the total number of counterinsurgents will be in the ballpark of 600,000).

The bad news: this means Obama is signing on to a nation birthing strategy, one that in part is about maintaining a reason to exist for NATO and the U.S. Army, who would otherwise have trouble justifying their bloated budgets.

The politics of this goat rope are becoming as ridiculous as they are transparent. Obama’s “deliberative process,” that has taken months, will end up giving McChrystal more or less just what he asked for. Obama asked our NATO Shemps to kick in 10,000 extra troops, knowing they’d give him about half that number.

Candidate Obama put himself between a rock and a brick wall when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity” and promised he would get “the job done” there. He said that gibberish to get critics off his back for his having voted against the Iraq surge, something he shouldn’t have apologized for. The Iraq surge was a shipwreck. Iraq’s government and security forces are incompetent and corrupt, political reconciliation is nowhere in sight, and we may never see their next set of elections. (I’m thinking we’ll never get completely out of Iraq. The whole point of invading the joint was establishing a permanent base of operations in the heart of the oil rich Gulf region.)

Obama supposedly insisted that his security team come up with an exit strategy. White House spokesmodel Robert Gibbs says, "We are in year nine of our efforts in Afghanistan. We are not going to be there another eight or nine years." That’s not an exit plan. It’s blabber from a White House spokes-character.

"The American people are going to want to know why we are here, they are going to want to know what our interests are," Gibbs says.

What exactly are our interests in Afghanistan? None of the 9/11 attackers came from there. Al Qaeda has all but disappeared; some reports say it’s down to a core membership of eight or ten, and few if any of them are in Afghanistan.

U.S. and NATO forces already in place in Afghanistan outnumber the Taliban by a ratio of 12 to one, and it’s questionable why we give a rat’s rump about the Taliban. They’re a more potent political force in Afghanistan than Hamid Karzai’s government, and a more honest one, and they control 80 percent of the country. Our political leaders are calling Karzai the “legitimate” leader of Afghanistan even though he just stole two elections and everybody on the planet knows it.

Top Democratic leaders aren’t peace, love and understanding about the vector Obama seems to be taking on Afghanistan. Chairman of the House Appropriations committee, David Obey (D-WI) doesn’t like the idea of escalating and says if Obama wants to do that we need to increase taxes. Chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee Carl Levin (D-MI) would also like to increase taxes but only on high-income earners. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says there’s not a shipload of support in the Democratic caucus for escalation in Afghanistan.

Candidate Obama stuck his wits in a wringer when he called the Afghanistan conflict a “war of necessity” and vowed to “get the job done” there. Now, it appears, he can’t back down from those statements without being reviled from the right as a “weak on security” Democrat, and a black one at that. He’s already suffered a media blitz from McChrystal that rivals anything Harry Truman had to put up with from Douglas MacArthur, and the hawks in Congress have been screeching at him non-stop for not giving McChrystal what he wanted the second he asked for it.

I’d like to see him go on TV Tuesday night and say, “My fellow Americans, I was wrong. Our war in Afghanistan has nothing to do with national security anymore and we can’t afford it, and I’m not sending one more kid into harm’s way to fight there. As of tonight, I’m ordering a complete withdrawal.” But the odds of that happening are slimmer than a licorice rope. Obama couldn’t take the heat.

Former four-star Barry McCaffrey, the military-industrial ghoul who was the worst of the retired military media analysts who helped sell the Iraq war to the American public, is, incredibly, back on the air with NBC. He’s pushing the “no exit strategy, no timeline in Afghanistan” line. McCaffrey has ties to DynCorp International, a company that has a five-year contract to support bases in Afghanistan.

A swell fellow, that McCaffrey is, but he’s really just a symptom of a larger American disease. Our wars, even though they’re destroying our economy, are making a lot of people rich. The cash caisson, the gravy ship and the wild blue budget continue to grow. War is our only export, and counterinsurgency is the perfect tool of the Long War mafia because counterinsurgency wars are unwinnable.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Let Them Fight Among Themselves

Are we going to escalate the war in Afghanistan for the sake of saving face? Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we have to stay the course in Afghanistan to deny al-Qaeda a “propaganda win.”

A propaganda win, as best I can tell, is a condition where someone can say “nyah, nyah” to us and we can’t say “nyah, nyah” back. Except that wouldn’t be the case if we left Afghanistan. They could say they ran us off. We could say so what, we live in the richest country in the world and you live in Afghanistan.

Gates has proven himself to be a bureaucratic survivalist who knows how to work the system but very little else. He calls Afghanistan the “modern epicenter of jihad.” A place “where the Mujahedeen defeated the other superpower,” and in his estimation of the Taliban’s thinking, “they now have the opportunity to defeat a second superpower.”

One senses that Gates doesn’t understand the difference between al-Qaeda, which by some estimates is down to fewer than a dozen core dudes, and the Taliban, who just want us to quit occupying their country, and the mujahideen, whom we created to help defeat the Soviets, and the variety pack of other militant outfits that roam around in that part of the globe.

Gates has an narrow perspective on the concept of “defeat.” The Taliban—or whoever he perceives to be the “enemy”—can’t defeat us if we leave. They can only defeat us if we stay. Despite what you’ve heard for years, they can’t follow us home. The oceans are too big to swim or jump across.

As the Cato Institute’s Justin Login says, “There will always be somebody to declare victory for al Qaeda, whether we leave Afghanistan next year or 20 years from now. Staying until you feel comfortable no one can claim a moral victory as we depart is a recipe for staying forever.”

Of course, a recipe for staying in Afghanistan forever is just what America’s Long War mafia is looking for, and Gates is in their camp.

Make no mistake, fellow citizens, the Pentagon we have now is not interested in defending America because the head dudes there know there’s nothing they can defend us from. Our far-flung forays overseas are disasters. Our missile defense systems don’t work. Our $2 billion strategic stealth bombers can be shot down by moisture. No, the brass hats just want a never-ending war against opponents they can never defeat but will never lose to, per se, so they can continue to justify soaking up half or more of our national budget.

Therein lies the conundrum that Gates and his four-stars and their supporters in Congress and the media are trying to box Obama and the rest of us into. We have to keep fighting stupid wars against vastly inferior opponents who we can’t defeat or we’ll look like wimps. Never mind that we look stupid in doing so; it’s much better to be a stupid sole superpower than a wimpy sole superpower.

Our NATO pals are tired of the Afghanistan game, which is rich because David Kilcullen, a key adviser to David Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, says the major justification for staying the course in that country is to give NATO a reason to exist, something it hasn’t had for 20 years. Obama’s national security team wants NATO to pony up 10,000 more troops to Afghanistan. NATO is saying no.

The war is so unpopular in Germany and France that those two countries can barely maintain the troop levels they’re contributing now. The Netherlands and Canada are talking tall about pulling out altogether.

The premise of McChrystal’s proposed counterinsurgency strategy is fundamentally flawed. Our counterinsurgency doctrine calls for good governance from a legitimate government of the host nation. Afghan President Hamid Karzai just stole two elections. He’s knee deep in relatives and cronies who are warlords and drug lords who we’re paying off to provide us with security, and he’s an old pal of the Taliban, who are raking off a piece of the foreign aid we send to Karzai.

If we send more troops, and we bribe NATO into sending more troops, we’ll be spending more money (about a million USD per troop per year) that we can’t really afford (our national debt is at $12 trillion) so they can fight an enemy that we’ll wind up bribing not to fight us, just like we’ve bribed our enemies in Iraq.

When will it occur to our foreign policy wonks just how counterproductive our foreign policy practices are? The only things our military interventions overseas accomplish are to provide our enemies with targets give them superb reasons to hate us.

The neocon cabal warns us of all the horrible things that will happen if we withdraw our troops from the Middle East and Central Asia. The worst of their campfire ghost stories describes how a regional war will break out if we don’t stay around. Heh. These people can’t do anything to each other worse than what we’re doing to them. Let a regional war break out. Let them fight among themselves. We don’t need to be in the middle of it.

Sages from the ancient stoics to our parents have admonished us time and again not to worry about what other people think of us. To continue to pour blood and treasure into AfPak is mindless shame, and it’s a shame we’re going to keep doing it. Let them have their propaganda victory. We’ll sit around and enjoy our holiday dinners.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Unforced Error

President Barack Obama is about to make the biggest mistake of 21^st century by sending 34,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

We currently have 68,000 troops in Afghanistan. NATO countries supply an additional 42,000. There are maybe 100 al-Qaeda in Afghanistan, and maybe 300 in Pakistan. Some estimates say al-Qaeda is down to fewer than a dozen core fighters. And we already have 110,000 mechanized, highly trained and well paid dudes gunning for them. There are also 200,000 Afghan forces under the command of Gen. Stanley McChrystal who suck, but that’s a lot of forces. All told, McChrystal already outnumbers al-Qaeda nearly 800 to one at a conservative estimate.

If we grant that the Taliban and the other militias in Afghanistan are the enemy, which is a dopey notion because those cats just want us to leave their bleak country, we still outnumber them by 12 to one—there are no more than 25,000 Taliban.

The Taliban are supposedly the enemy because they support al-Qaeda. Problem: Hamid Karzai, whose government we’re supporting in that sinkhole, not only just stole two elections, but he’s thigh rubbing pals with the Taliban. His brother Ahmed is hairline deep in the Afghan drug industry and he’s on the CIA payroll. Among other things, Ahmed acts as a broker between the Taliban and us.

Diplomat Richard Holbrooke, who has said that we will recognize success in Afghanistan “when we see it,” has confirmed that we’re trying to cut dope deals with the Taliban. We’re doing this through Pakistan’s Inter-service Intelligence Agency (ISI) who are a bigger bunch of crooks than the crooks Hamid Karzai is in league with.

So why is Obama sending more troops there?

He shot himself in the metatarsal during his campaign with his crock of jive about how the Iraq surge took our eyes off the prize of the “war of necessity” in Afghanistan, where we needed to “finish the job.” The war in Afghanistan is as necessary as removing the prostate gland of a healthy 12-year old boy.

The notion of America exceptionalism has worn itself transparent. We’re making the world a worse place, not a better one. Our counterproductive wars have nothing to do with national security. The al-Qaeda that attacked us with 19 guys on 9/11 who didn’t have the equivalent of a Chicago school system high school diploma is, for all practical purposes, dead and gone. Their work is finished. They suckered us into massive commitments of national blood and treasure into sinkholes that shouldn’t matter to the world’s sole superpower.

The notion that we can create an “exit strategy” by training Afghan troops to take over the counterinsurgency task is, to put it mildly, quaint. Afghan soldiers and police are as reliable as a flock of cats.

We need to get out of Central Asia as soon as we can. Alexander the Great couldn’t tame that patch of mountain and desert, nor could the British, nor could the Russians, and we won’t either.

I had hoped that Obama would stand up to the Pentagon’s insistence on a Long War approach to Afghanistan, but alas. We’re going to be stuck with this pig, lipstick and all, for a long time. It’s a boondoggle that will make Iraq look like a smooth move.

This big re-re escalation of Afghanistan is a big mistake. It’s a grand execution of a flawed doctrine. Counterinsurgency (COIN), the Pentagon’s latest flimsy excuse to exist, is based on a host of internal fallacies. Premier among them is the notion that the host nation must be a “legitimate government” that provided “good governance.” Mohammed on a crutch, if you have good governance from a legitimate government, by and large, you don’t have an insurgency.

Talk of an exit strategy for Afghanistan is low comedy. If you put troops into a country you’ll have to get them out with the hugest pair of pliers ever made. The way to exit Afghanistan is to exit, not to put more troops there.

Reports will say Obama will define the “precise U.S. goals in Afghanistan.” Give me a break. We haven’t had precise goals in a war since World War II, when the goal was unconditional surrender. There’s no such thing as surrender in the wars we’re fighting now. The best thing we can achieve is to bribe our enemies into playing along with us. Bribery, after all, is the essence our COIN doctrine.

Bribery has been the spine of our foreign aid for a really long time. We use the term “foreign aid,” like we’re somehow feeding “those poor kid” in wherever-land, but we’re really just making crooked high rollers richer.

I had such high hopes that Obama would really change things. Not any more, as Inspector Clouseau once said.

An excellent article in Armed Forces Journal by retired Army Col. Douglas MacGregor titled “Refusing Battle” deserves wide attention. MacGregor wisely admonishes:

America’s experience since 2001 teaches the strategic lesson that in the 21st century, the use of American military power, even against Arab and Afghan opponents with no navies, no armies, no air forces and no air defenses, can have costly, unintended strategic consequences. Put in the language of tennis, the use of American military power since the early 1960s has resulted in a host of “unforced errors.”

Obama has caved in to the Long War Pentagon and its supporters in the Congress and the neocon press who have been so wrong for so long that nobody should be listening to them anymore. He’s still talking his “finish the job” nonsense. What job? How will we know when it’s finished?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Dumb and Dumber Wars

Michael O’Hanlon, a war-hawk tank thinker with the Brookings Institution who encouraged us to invade Iraq, says we should “remain hopeful” about Afghanistan. Even though the news about Afghanistan has been “dispiriting,” O’Hanlon tells us, “Most foreign and Afghan officials and officers who I encountered on a recent weeklong visit sponsored by the U.S. military are guardedly optimistic about our prospects.”

That’s because the Afghan officials and officers O’Hanlon met to were guardedly selected to feed him a line of bull feathers. Our adventure in Afghanistan is as impossible to justify, or be optimistic about, and the follies conducted there by Alexander the Great and the British and the Soviets.

Harvard Crimson sass Anthony Bonilla whines “It has been almost three months since General McChrystal reported to Obama that U.S. efforts in Afghanistan would fail if 40,000 additional troops were not deployed there. McChrystal’s experience as the commander of the military’s clandestine service has given him expert insight into how insurgencies operate.” Bonilla is scheduled to graduate from Harvard in 2012. We’ve seen the amount of harm Harvard graduates can do. One of them got us into two wars that seem to have no end.

Stanley McChrystal’s experience doesn’t give him “expert insight” as to how insurgencies work. McChrystal was the head of an assassination ring that worked for Dick Cheney, who had no legal standing in the military chain of command.

McChrystal may have seen a PowerPoint brief on counterinsurgency at some point in his life. He probably hadn’t slept much the night before—one hears he doesn’t sleep much (one hears that from his public affairs people like Smith who want to make Stan the Man seem manlier than mere mortal men, like he’s Nick Fury of Shield.)

Senator Joe Lieberman, who doesn’t think we can afford health care reform, does think that we can afford to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Lieberman, if you haven’t noticed yet, is dumber than a quarry.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates says we might “withhold money” from Hamid Karzai’s government if it doesn’t do something about that nasty old corruption stuff. But we’ll still send more troops Afghanistan, apparently, and, uh, something, something, something. Troops and money go together. If we pour more troops into Afghanistan, national treasure will end up in Karzai’s pals’ pockets. You’d think that Gates, whose old outfit the CIA is paying off Karzai’s drug-dealing brother, would understand about those sorts of things.

Karzai is a bung buddy of the Taliban, who we’re supposedly fighting but who we are also funding.

As Boston University Professor Andrew Bacevich, a retired Army officer, said in February 2009, Afghanistan is “not worth the cost in blood and treasure.” Bacevich notes that, our military supremacy didn’t “drain the swamp.” Hell no, it didn’t. It made the swamp bigger and created quagmires from which we can’t extract ourselves.

The terrain in Afghanistan and Pakistan is horrifying, and as best we can tell, al-Qaeda, (remember them?) the outfit we’re supposedly fighting, has vanished like a blind dowager’s tea service. There may be fewer than a dozen of the so-and-sos left.

President Obama had his ninth big honking meeting with his big honking national security team on Monday (Nov. 23). I’m not sure why he’s bothering with all these meetings, unless he’s trying to improve the employment rates by keeping PowerPoint geeks busy.

Richard Holbrooke, who has a kind of sort of job with the State Department as a kind of sort of special dude in kind of sort of honchoing relationships with Afghanistan and Pakistan says that we’ll know success in that region “when we see it.” Holbrooke has also confirmed that we’re cutting dope deals with the Taliban via the Saudis.

Foreign policy doesn’t get more half-baked than that. We’re the most powerful nation in human history, and we make more mistakes than any other nation in human history. It’s as if we’re a nation of compulsive molesters.

The Washington Post reports that both McChrystal and Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, a retired three-star who once had McChrystal’s job as military commander in Afghanistan, “have been told to prepare to testify before Congress as early as next week.” Some fun. McChrystal has asked for up to 80,000 additional troops to be sent to Afghanistan. Eikenberry says that corruption in Afghanistan is so rampant the country is not worth investing any more blood and treasure into. The funky part about this testimony stuff is that Stan the Man and the Berry will testify after Obama has made his decision on how many more troops to send to Afghanistan.

And oh yeah, it turns out we’re actually funding the Taliban, who we’re supposedly fighting. According to The Nation, “a minimum of 10 percent of the Pentagon's logistics contracts--hundreds of millions of dollars--consists of payments to insurgents.” Ain’t that a kick in the sack? We should can Karzai and give the country back to the Taliban.

Invading Iraq was dumb. Escalating the war in Afghanistan will be even dumber. It will cost a lot of money and won’t accomplish a doggone thing except get a lot of people killed; most of whom will be civilians who want nothing more than for us to leave them alone.

The latest sanctioned leak says we’ll send another 34,000 troops to Afghanistan.

God help America. We have no strategy. We have no realistic objectives. We have no idea what we’re doing.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Afghanistan: Hurry Up and Screw Up

Reptilian former presidential candidate Fred Thompson says that President Obama’s delay in making a decision of Afghanistan is “evidence” that the war is already lost. “Our enemies are emboldened,” says Thompson, “our allies are discouraged.” He says Obama’s “heart’s not in it” and that he is too obsessed with an “exit strategy.” Huh?

Our “enemies” are nothing. They don’t have an air force, they don’t have a navy, and they can hardly be said to have an army. We spend more on defense that the rest of the world combined. Our opponents in Afghanistan don’t have a defense budget.

Thompson is part of the right-wing hawk mob that supports the Pentagon’s Long War stratagem that seeks to keep us bogged down in some silly-Simon, low-intensity conflict for the next 50 or so years in order to justify the military budget, which by plausible arguments soaks up the majority of the federal budget.

Thompson associate John McCain, the dimmest bulb to ever serve in both the Navy and the Senate, is also pressing President Obama, who kicked his can a block down the street in the 2008 election, to give Gen. Stanley McChrystal all the troops and resources he wants to make a real nation out of a tinhorn country that has never been more than a spot in the middle of Asia.

McCain’s best girlfriend Lindsey Graham says that, “Obama must decide soon.”

McCain’s side squeeze, Joe Lieberman, says "I think it's time for us to stop beating up on President Karzai and start building up President Karzai and his government to be the government we need, Because they're not the enemy. The enemy is the Taliban." Psst. Joe. The enemy is al Qaeda, and your pal Karzai is a bung buddy of the Taliban and has family ties to drug lords and warlords.

John Boehner, House Minority Leader and the GOP’s leading fake tan product consumer, says that Obama’s decision on troop levels in Afghanistan is “long overdue.” Boehner had nothing to say about Afghanistan troop levels through two terms of the woebegone Bush administration.

Blue dog Democrat Ike Skelton, who sleeps in Joe Lieberman’s tent, exhorts us to show our “commitment to this fight.”

Sen. Mitch McConnell, who couldn’t find his exit ramp with a GPS gizmo, says it’s important that Obama listens to his advisers stationed in Afghanistan now, which means Obama needs to go along with the nation-birthing scheme McChrystal proposes.

McCain, Graham, Lieberman, Skelton, McConnell and the rest of the G.I. Josephine crowd don’t have national security on their agenda. They just like war. President Obama was Bugs Bunny-class maroon for calling Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” We no sooner need to deploy troops to Afghanistan than we need to deploy them to Pluto. Al-Qaeda is all but gone from everywhere, and who gives a rat’s rhetoric about the Taliban? The Taliban just wants us to leave Afghanistan.

We’re funding militias in Afghanistan to fight the Taliban. We’re also funding the Taliban. We’re so screwed up we can’t figure out which way to point our pistols. I’d love it if Obama could un-funk American foreign policy, but fear that he punted the game away when he called Afghanistan a “war of necessity.” Alas.

Obama has made some good moves. Talking to Iran was one of them. Cancelling the Bush administration’s rope-a-dope deal to deploy a missile defense system that didn’t work to Poland and the Czech Republic was another one. Committing to leave Iraq was also good, though I’m not sure the Pentagon and its paramours in Congress and the press are going to let that happen.

I’m hoping Obama has finally realized that Afghanistan is a bad investment, and that he can’t fix a violent, corrupt country by pouring arms and money into it. Unfortunately, I don’t think he’s there yet.

I also don’t think he’s reached the point where he’s ready to stand up to his generals and his Secretary of Defense. The singular failing of the Obama presidency may turn out to be that he kept David Petraeus, Ray Odierno, Mike Mullen, and Robert Gates on the job and that he put Petraeus protégé McChrystal, who was Dick Cheney’s personal assassin, in charge of Afghanistan.

The open warfare between the Pentagon and the White House needs to be stomped, and the White House needs to have won. The egotistical four-stars and their stooge boss Gates got too used to the idea that they ran the country, and that kind of thinking in military circles has to stop. We’re Americans, for heaven’s sake, not Prussians. We don’t exist to support our military. Our military exists to support us, and it’s not doing a very good job of it. It creates more terrorists than it kills or captures.

Our military has turned putrid. We did pretty darn good during the post Desert Storm years when we leaned largely on naval and air forces to show the flag and perform surgical strikes. Boots on the ground have led to quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, just as they did in Vietnam.

The last thing we want to do is put tens of thousands more boots in Afghanistan. We’ve already made this mistake in Korea and Vietnam and Iraq. How many more times will we make it?

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

The Children's Crusade

“It really boils down to one of two decisions, getting out or getting in.”

--President Lyndon Johnson, speaking about Vietnam.

“Soldiers came to school today,” announced the Kindergarten kid. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." This is story comes to us by way of Jon Letman of Truthout. The Kindergarten kid is his five-year old son.

Letman relates that:

In his book The Limits of Power, Boston University history Professor and retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich describes a near future in which the US is in an almost constant state of war. He writes, "Rather than brief interventions ending in decisive victory, sustained presence will be the norm ... The future will be one of small wars, expected to be frequent, protracted, perhaps perpetual." If Bacevich's bleak assessment proves true, it's no wonder the National Guard sees value in chatting up kindergarteners.

The 50-year Long War embraced by the Pentagon and its allies in the military-industrial-congressional complex is by far the most insidious policy ever dealt to the American public from the bottom of the deck. Sun Tzu noted more than two thousand years ago that no nation ever profited from a long war.

Reuters reports that, “U.S. defense spending in coming years must rise roughly six percent on average from the record sum sought by President Barack Obama this year just to meet current plans.” So much for the peace dividend Big Daddy Bush promised us.

War has become America’s top export. Military recruiting is through the roof because of the poor economy. How pathetic it is that the most powerful nation on earth has nothing to offer its youth but war. Even more pathetic is the kind of war the nation has to offer them.

COIN, the acronym for counterinsurgency, has replaced airpower and nuclear weapons as the latest “truth” in American warfare. COIN’s basic premise calls for “effective governance by a legitimate government.” We don’t have effective or legitimate governance in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not going to have it. Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite government will never “unify” with the Sunni and Kurd factions in Iraq, and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government is a mob of drug dealers and warlords. We’re fighting wars that by our own definition are doomed to fail.

We’re fighting junk wars to prop up junk governments with junk strategies and we’re giving our kids junk body armor to fight them with.

And we’re recruiting children to keep these wars alive for as long as we can.

God help America.

House Minority leader John Boehner and 14 other jackdaw Republicans have written a letter to President Obama about his “long overdue” decision about Afghanistan. “For over two months you have been engaged in a strategy review that has left the country, our military and allies uncertain about your commitment to the war in Afghanistan and unsure about your will to do what is necessary to win this conflict,” the letter reads.

There is no winning our conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. We can pour national treasure and the blood of our young into those two sinkholes, two of the most corrupt countries on the planet, from now until kingdom come and we won’t accomplish gnat’s whisker’s bit of good.

The New York Times says that the U.S. has spent $53 billion on “relief and reconstruction” in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The projects in include “tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.”

But, but, but, “there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.”

So we have to stay there forever. Jolly old fun.

“Exacerbating the problem,” says the Times, “Iraqi and American officials say that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and others.”

Who chased them out? Not Saddam Hussein. He’s deader than a door latch.

We may or may not manage to skulk our way out of Iraq. If the Pentagon has its way, we won’t. Desert Ox Ray Odierno, the American Commander in Iraq, thinks the insurgency in that country may go on for another 15 years.

Underfed and sleep deprived Stan McChystal, our loopy commander in Afghanistan, wants to build a combined force of U.S, NATO and Afghan troops of over a half-million to pull off a nation birthing project that will never end.

None of the wars we’re fighting have anything to do with our national security. Like it or not, the folks who have kept another 9/11 from happening are the folks in our Homeland Security apparatus—the FBI, NORAD, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies that should have kept 9/11 from happening in the first place.

That military recruiters are aggressively targeting the Kindergarten generation should alarm all of us. We “don’t kill good people?” Pluck me in the heart. We kill more civilians than bad guys. We create more bad guys than we kill.

We need to shut down the Pentagon’s Long War, and we need to keep military recruiters from molesting children.

If you haven’t seen it already, you must watch the Bill Moyers PBS show on how President Lyndon Johnson got sucked into the Vietnam War. Moyers gives us some extraordinary telephone conversation transcripts. LBJ knew escalating the war was a bad idea, but feared that his Republican opponents, most notably Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, would rain bull poop on him if he didn’t do whatever General William Westmoreland wanted him to do.

Like Mark Twain, I don’t believe that history repeats itself, but it often rhymes. President Obama has an opportunity to avoid LBJ’s tragic mistake. Let’s hope he takes it. I don’t want today’s preschoolers fighting in Afghanistan when they’re teenagers.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Overdue Process

“It really boils down to one of two decisions, getting out or getting in.”

--President Lyndon Johnson, speaking about Vietnam.

“Soldiers came to school today,” announced the Kindergarten kid. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." This is story comes to us by way of Jon Letman of Truthout. The Kindergarten kid is his five-year old son.

Letman relates that:

In his book The Limits of Power, Boston University history Professor and retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich describes a near future in which the US is in an almost constant state of war. He writes, "Rather than brief interventions ending in decisive victory, sustained presence will be the norm ... The future will be one of small wars, expected to be frequent, protracted, perhaps perpetual." If Bacevich's bleak assessment proves true, it's no wonder the National Guard sees value in chatting up kindergarteners.

The 50-year Long War embraced by the Pentagon and its allies in the military-industrial-congressional complex is by far the most insidious policy ever dealt to the American public from the bottom of the deck. Sun Tzu noted more than two thousand years ago that no nation ever profited from a long war.

Reuters reports that, “U.S. defense spending in coming years must rise roughly six percent on average from the record sum sought by President Barack Obama this year just to meet current plans.” So much for the peace dividend Big Daddy Bush promised us.

War has become America’s top export. Military recruiting is through the roof because of the poor economy. How pathetic it is that the most powerful nation on earth has nothing to offer its youth but war. Even more pathetic is the kind of war the nation has to offer them.

COIN, the acronym for counterinsurgency, has replaced airpower and nuclear weapons as the latest “truth” in American warfare. COIN’s basic premise calls for “effective governance by a legitimate government.” We don’t have effective or legitimate governance in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not going to have it. Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite government will never “unify” with the Sunni and Kurd factions in Iraq, and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government is a mob of drug dealers and warlords. We’re fighting wars that by our own definition are doomed to fail.

We’re fighting junk wars to prop up junk governments with junk strategies and we’re giving our kids junk body armor to fight them with.

And we’re recruiting children to keep these wars alive for as long as we can.

God help America.

House Minority leader John Boehner and 14 other jackdaw Republicans have written a letter to President Obama about his “long overdue” decision about Afghanistan. “For over two months you have been engaged in a strategy review that has left the country, our military and allies uncertain about your commitment to the war in Afghanistan and unsure about your will to do what is necessary to win this conflict,” the letter reads.

There is no winning our conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. We can pour national treasure and the blood of our young into those two sinkholes, two of the most corrupt countries on the planet, from now until kingdom come and we won’t accomplish gnat’s whisker’s bit of good.

The New York Times says that the U.S. has spent $53 billion on “relief and reconstruction” in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The projects in include “tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.”

But, but, but, “there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.”

So we have to stay there forever. Jolly old fun.

“Exacerbating the problem,” says the Times, “Iraqi and American officials say that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and others.”

Who chased them out? Not Saddam Hussein. He’s deader than a door latch.

We may or may not manage to skulk our way out of Iraq. If the Pentagon has its way, we won’t. Desert Ox Ray Odierno, the American Commander in Iraq, thinks the insurgency in that country may go on for another 15 years.

Underfed and sleep deprived Stan McChystal, our loopy commander in Afghanistan, wants to build a combined force of U.S, NATO and Afghan troops of over a half-million to pull off a nation birthing project that will never end.

None of the wars we’re fighting have anything to do with our national security. Like it or not, the folks who have kept another 9/11 from happening are the folks in our Homeland Security apparatus—the FBI, NORAD, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies that should have kept 9/11 from happening in the first place.

That military recruiters are aggressively targeting the Kindergarten generation should alarm all of us. We “don’t kill good people?” Pluck me in the heart. We kill more civilians than bad guys. We create more bad guys than we kill.

We need to shut down the Pentagon’s Long War, and we need to keep military recruiters from molesting children.

If you haven’t seen it already, you must watch the Bill Moyers PBS show on how President Lyndon Johnson got sucked into the Vietnam War. Moyers gives us some extraordinary telephone conversation transcripts. LBJ knew escalating the war was a bad idea, but feared that his Republican opponents, most notably Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon, would rain bull poop on him if he didn’t do whatever General William Westmoreland wanted him to do.

Like Mark Twain, I don’t believe that history repeats itself, but it often rhymes. President Obama has an opportunity to avoid LBJ’s tragic mistake. Let’s hope he takes it. I don’t want today’s preschoolers fighting in Afghanistan when they’re teenagers.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.

Cockamamie COIN

“Soldiers came to school today,” announced the Kindergarten kid. "They only kill bad people. They don't kill good people." This is story comes to us by way of Jon Letman of Truthout. The Kindergarten kid was his son, who is five.

Letman relates that:

In his book The Limits of Power, Boston University history Professor and retired Army Col. Andrew J. Bacevich describes a near future in which the US is in an almost constant state of war. He writes, "Rather than brief interventions ending in decisive victory, sustained presence will be the norm ... The future will be one of small wars, expected to be frequent, protracted, perhaps perpetual." If Bacevich's bleak assessment proves true, it's no wonder the National Guard sees value in chatting up kindergarteners.

The 50-year Long War embraced by the Pentagon and its allies in the military-industrial-congressional complex is by far the most insidious policies ever bottom dealt to the American public. Sun Tzu noted more than two thousand years ago that no nation ever profited from a long war.

America is ruled by its military-industrial-Congress complex, a juggernaut that has an expanding life of its own. Reuters reports that, “U.S. defense spending in coming years must rise roughly six percent on average from the record sum sought by President Barack Obama this year just to meet current plans.” So much for the peace dividend Big Daddy Bush promised us.

War has become America’s top export. We don’t make anything worth buying any more. Our cars suck. Military recruiting is through the roof because of the poor economy.

How pathetic it is that the most powerful nation on earth has nothing to offer its youth but war. Even more pathetic is the kind of war the nation has to offer them.

COIN, the acronym of choice for counterinsurgency, has replaced airpower and nuclear weapons as the latest “truth” in American warfare. COIN’s basic premise calls for “effective governance by a legitimate government.” We don’t have effective or legitimate governance in Iraq or Afghanistan, and we’re not going to have it. Nuri al-Maliki’s Shiite government will never “unify” with the Sunni and Kurd factions in Iraq, and Hamid Karzai’s Afghan government resembles Al Capone’s mob.

We’re fighting junk wars to prop up junk governments with junk strategies and we’re giving our kids junk body armor to fight them with.

And we’re recruiting children to keep these wars alive for as long as we can.

God help America.

Fake-tanned House Minority leader John Boehner and 14 other Republicans have written a letter to President Obama about his “long overdue” decision about Afghanistan. “For over two months you have been engaged in a strategy review that has left the country, our military and allies uncertain about your commitment to the war in Afghanistan and unsure about your will to do what is necessary to win this conflict,” the letter reads.

There is no winning our conflicts in Afghanistan or Iraq. We shouldn’t have engaged in them from the start. We can pour national treasure and the blood of our young into those two sinkholes, two of the most corrupt countries on the planet, from now until kingdom come and we won’t accomplish gnat’s whisker’s bit of good.

The U.S. has spent $53 billion on “relief and reconstruction” in Iraq since the 2003 invasion. The projects in include “tens of thousands of hospitals, water treatment plants, electricity substations, schools and bridges.”

But, but, but, “there are growing concerns among American officials that Iraq will not be able to adequately maintain the facilities once the Americans have left, potentially wasting hundreds of millions of dollars and jeopardizing Iraq’s ability to provide basic services to its people.”

So we have to stay there forever. Jolly old fun.

“Exacerbating the problem,” says the NYT, “Iraqi and American officials say is that hundreds of thousands of Iraq’s professional class have fled or been killed during the war, leaving behind a population with too few doctors, nurses, engineers, scientists and others.”

Who chased them out? Not Saddam Hussein. He’s deader than a door latch.

We may or may not manage to skulk our way out of Iraq. If the Pentagon has its way, we won’t. Desert Ox Ray Odierno, the American Commander in Iraq, thinks the insurgency in that country may go on for another 15 years.

Underfed and sleep deprived Stan McChystal, our loopy commander in Afghanistan, wants to build a combined force of U.S, NATO and Afghan troops of over a half-million to pull off a nation birthing project that will never end.

None of the wars we’re fighting have anything to do with our national security. Like it or not, the folks who have kept another 9/11 from happening are the folks in our homeland security apparatus (FBI, NORAD, FAA, and the rest of the alphabet soup agencies that should have kept 9/11 from happening in the first place.)

That military recruiters are aggressively targeting the Kindergarten generation should alarm all of us. We “don’t kill good people?”

Pluck me in the heart. We kill more civilians than bad guys. We create more bad guys than we kill.

We need to shut down the Pentagon’s Long War, and we need to keep military recruiters from molesting children.

Commander Jeff Huber, U.S. Navy (Retired) writes at Pen and Sword. Jeff's novel Bathtub Admirals (Kunati Books), a lampoon on America's rise to global dominance, is on sale now.