[Peace-discuss] Obama's imperialism

[C. G. Estabrook]

>From 
<http://www.newshoggers.com/blog/2010/11/bad-hippies-no-december-afghanistan-review-for-you.html>:

Karl Eikenberry is the latest administration official to tell us that the 
thorough review of progress that Obama promised the nation a year ago when he 
ordered the Afghan surge will instead be just a rubberstamp of "staying the 
course" for another Friedman Unit.

"I won't prejudge the December review that's ongoing right now. Again, my friend 
General [David] Petraeus has said many times that for the first time in 
Afghanistan we have the inputs right, we've got the forces on the ground, we've 
got the civilians on the ground, we've got the right programs, we've organized 
ourselves effectively, we've got some big ideas that we've now translated into 
the delivery of results. All of those inputs, so to speak, that President Obama 
then ordered up in his 1 December 2009 West Point speech, all of those inputs 
finally arrived in the spring, in the summer of just this year. So we've had 
about a five, a six-month period where all of these inputs now are being brought 
to bear. So to have an extensive review in December, where we've only had five 
or six months of the new strategy properly resourced and being brought forward, 
that would not make good sense."

At least Eikenberry has the balls to put his name to this broken promise. As 
Robert Dreyfuss notes, the rest of the officials signalling that "the much 
anticipated December 2010 presidential review of war policy is being reduced to 
a rubber-stamp approval of General David Petraeus’s counterinsurgency scheme" 
have hidden behind anonymity all too easily provided by the mainstream media. 
Likewise, a whole slew of officially unofficial administration and Pentagon 
folks have been backing this bait-and-switch with happy talk about how well the 
Afghan occupation is going.

The truth is far from pleasant. Alex Strick van Linschoten recently disassembled 
the happy talk which is replacing substantial discussion now that the December 
review isn't going to be the vehicle of good news everyone thought it would be. 
Peter Galbraith, the former number-two U.N. diplomat in Afghanistan says it will 
take "100 years" to field an honest, literate Afghan police force. After the 
recent fraud-ridden election, Pashtuns will be a minority in the Afghan 
parliament but a majority in the nation as a whole - and they're very unhappy 
about it.

Even the Pentagon itself can't find much official evidence of unofficial 
hyperbole about progress:

The Pentagon's semiannual report to Congress on the war in Afghanistan paints a 
picture of a country where corruption remains rampant, violence has increased, 
and a well-funded Taliban insurgency continues to make troubling gains.

...The number of Afghans rating their security situation as “bad” is “the 
highest since the nationwide survey began in September 2008,” the report’s 
authors write, noting that the “downward trend in security perception is likely 
due to the steady increase in total violence over the past nine months.”

...According to the report, the Taliban insurgency’s capabilities and 
operational reach “have been qualitatively and geographically expanding” with 
plentiful sources of funding.

And not only is the promise of a 2011 start to troop withdrawals a broken 
promise, the week-old promise of 2014 as an end-date for combat operations has 
already been walked back too.

Even as the Obama administration steps away from July 2011 as a departure date 
of any consequence for US troops, senior officials in the briefing this week 
were reluctant to discuss the 2014 date that was put forward by Afghan President 
Hamid Karzai as a new goal for US combat troops to leave the country.

When asked by a reporter about the US “exit strategy” for Afghanistan, the 
senior defense official took issue with the term. “We don’t have an exit 
strategy. We have a transition strategy. The US commitment to Afghanistan is 
continuing, enduring, and long-lasting.”

The reporter suggested a rephrasing: “How about the exit of combat troops?”

Countered a senior State Department official, “How about the transition to 
Afghan control?”

So, what we're about to be treated to as a "December Review" is a bit of 
national security theater that will prove only one thing - that America is 
better at staying in a hopeless quagmire than the Soviets! " On Saturday Nov. 
27, the United States and its allies will reach a grim milestone: they will have 
been in Afghanistan a day longer than the Soviet Union had been when it 
completed its 1989 withdrawal."