[Peace-discuss] An anti-war effort?

[C. G. Estabrook]

[Maybe we should organize a group to oppose America's killing people in the 
Middle East (even if Barack Obama is ordering it).  We could begin by working to 
stop this $83.4 billion.  Why leave it to tea-party people to oppose it? --CGE]

	April 24, 2009
	Democrats Have Qualms Over War in Afghanistan
	By CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON — Congressional Democrats are voicing increased concern about the 
Obama administration’s plans to escalate military involvement in Afghanistan and 
to try to stabilize the rapid deterioration in Pakistan, complicating the push 
by the White House for $83.4 billion in war spending and other aid.

“I’ve got the sinking feeling we are getting sucked into something we will never 
get out of,” said Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts.

The sentiment is increasingly echoed in both the House and the Senate. While it 
hardly signals that Congress is about to pull the plug on the war — leaders 
there are confident of a bipartisan vote to approve the administration’s request 
— it shows that even with a Democrat as commander in chief, his party’s 
longstanding qualms over the course of the war remain.

Indeed, the Obama administration may have a harder time than the Bush 
administration in resisting Congressional calls for some kind of strings 
attached to the spending, whether in the form of measurements for success, or 
something even more restrictive, if still undefined.

Even Representative David R. Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat who as chairman of the 
Appropriations Committee will have to shepherd the money through the House, said 
Thursday that he was uncertain what his ultimate position would be.

“I frankly don’t know what I’m going to do on your supplemental request,” Mr. 
Obey told Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton at a hearing. “I’m very 
concerned that it is going to wind up with us stuck in a problem that nobody 
knows how to get out of.”

Lawmakers cannot blame President Obama for seeking midyear supplemental money 
for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which were not fully paid for before he 
took office, but they are worried about what lies ahead.

Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a senior Democrat on the Foreign Relations 
Committee, said he was worried that the administration’s “strategy regarding 
Afghanistan and Pakistan does not adequately address the problems we face in 
Pakistan and instead has the potential to escalate, rather than diminish, this 
threat.”

Administration officials have held briefings and supplied position papers for 
lawmakers, but their testimony so far has not been very encouraging, and the 
headlines from Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan have been alarming.

The top commander in the region, Gen. David H. Petraeus, who has strong 
credibility on Capitol Hill, is said to have provided lawmakers with a sober 
assessment of the military situation in Afghanistan in a closed meeting on 
Wednesday and is expected to repeat some of those observations in a public 
hearing set for Friday.

Congressional leaders say they realize some lawmakers are anxious about Mr. 
Obama’s proposal to commit at least 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan, given the 
history of other military failures in the region.

“We will have concerns, but we will have to work through them with people as to 
where we are going in Afghanistan,” said the House majority leader, Steny H. 
Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland.

The administration has just begun working with Congress to lay out some 
guideposts for gauging the effectiveness of the strategy. It is calling them 
“metrics” instead of “benchmarks,” as they were called when the Bush 
administration resisted formal restrictions on its war spending.

Unlike the repeated partisan clashes between the Bush administration and 
Democratic leaders over war financing, the party’s leadership of the House and 
Senate is now firmly behind the new Democratic administration. They say Mr. 
Obama is fulfilling his pledge to draw down combat forces from Iraq and to 
concentrate on Afghanistan as a harbor for terrorists.

“Afghanistan is where the terrorist threat exists to the world, not just the 
United States,” said the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, who said the Bush 
administration’s decision to focus on Iraq left unfinished a mission in 
Afghanistan that originally had broad support in Congress.

Ms. Pelosi, Democrat of California, said she believed the administration had 
assembled a strong program for Afghanistan, focused not just on a military 
presence but also on civilian construction projects, enhanced intelligence 
gathering and government improvements. She said any benchmarks would best be put 
on the use of military aid to Pakistan.

Ms. Pelosi also said lawmakers wanted to make sure the Pakistan government used 
“those resources in a way that is not just focused on the threat they fear from 
India.”

Given Democratic opposition to such war spending bills in the past, Democrats 
have regularly relied on strong support from Republicans to push the legislation 
through.

But some Republicans have raised objections to the spending plan since the 
administration is also seeking money to move ahead with its plans to close down 
the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and move those detainees 
elsewhere. That position could give them some leverage on that issue if too many 
Democrats break with the president over the money for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The administration can probably rely on sufficient party support, but lawmakers 
say the White House needs to do more persuading.

“I’m sure many members have concerns, and I am one of them,” said Representative 
John Yarmuth, Democrat of Kentucky, “and are a little bit unclear as to what we 
are trying to accomplish in Afghanistan.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/us/politics/24spend.html?ref=global-home