While everybody is awaiting President Obama’s Tuesday evening speech on Afghanistan strategy to be broadcast out of the United Military Academy at West Point, we are still awaiting some definition of what it is that we are trying to achieve there. To the best of our knowledge nobody has defined either the Iraqi, nor the Afghan war’s mission objectives – not Bush and not Obama.

At least, the president is reportedly going to address his planned exit strategy. That’s better than nothing, but are we waiting for a few more ministers of the Karzai government to be indicted for corruption, before we withdraw the troops which – at a cost of $1 million per year, per soldier – are propping up his regime?

The mission objectives should of course be the absolute first thing to be addressed and that’s why we have decided to re-post this article, originally published here on November 3, 2009.

Since the original article was posted there have been some overtures by the Karzai government to engage “moderate elements” of the Taliban, so we stand corrected on that point.

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While the Obama administration ponders whether to send tens of thousands of additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as General Stanley McChrystal proposed and as everybody is trying to figure out what impact the Afghan run-off election, which has never taken place will have on the overall situation there, we still haven’t really figured out what it is that we are trying to achieve there.

“A foreign army alone cannot beat an insurgency; the insurgency in Afghanistan requires an Afghan solution,” wrote General McChrystal. In view of that probably sound assessment, why would we need an additional 40,000 U.S. troops?

Lets first of all decide what is it that we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan. Is it hunting down the remains of al-Qaida and maybe finally catching up with Osama bin-Laden? Or maybe something that sells in Washington, DC, but it doesn’t sell in Afghanistan – a stable Karzai government? Or maybe we are trying to defeat the resurgent Taliban? Or are we trying to transform the Afghan society? Are we including Pakistan in our grand plan?

Speaking of the Taliban, we haven’t heard any proposals to include this group in possible talks about forming a coalition government. No doubt that this omission is a really big mistake.

As things stand, eight years into an occupation of Afghanistan even the military are saying that we have not achieved anything, but that the situation on the ground has in fact deteriorated. What in fact appears to be the main problem is not the remains of al-Qaida, or the Taliban itself, or even the rampant corruption among the ruling clique, but rather the militarization of the Afghan conflict.

The military “solution” is obviously not working in an environment as complex as the one in Afghanistan and Pakistan for that matter.

One cannot expect the average U.S. serviceman to understand the very complicated tribal, ethnic, or language problems of the country he, or she has been shipped to.

The actual solution to the problem staring us in the eye appears to be getting the foreigners out of Afghanistan, rather than increasing their number.

When in 2001-2003 troops were truly needed in Afghanistan, they got diverted to the insane invasion and occupation of Iraq.

To make a long story short: we don’t even know what problem, or problems that we are trying to solve in Afghanistan are and we are still talking about changing our military strategy and increasing the number of troops. What are those troops supposed to do there? What do we expect from them? What is their mission? Nobody seems to have an answer to any of these questions.

Our advice to the White House team is to first come up with a mission statement, to nail down what it is that we are trying to achieve in Afghanistan and whether getting involved in that country is really in the U.S., or the world’s interest.

Throwing more troops into the Afghan quagmire, without even having a clear objective is clearly not the way to proceed.

Technorati Tags: Afghan, al-qaida, election, mission, obama, objectives, Pakistan, politics, Taliban, war

Considering the amount of coverage that the arbitrarily chosen 20^th anniversary celebration of the fall of the Berlin Wall received, one would think that it was purely, or at least mostly a media event.

As it turned out, despite the cold rain falling on November 9, 2009, it was more of a celebration of the human spirit, of the beginning of the end of communism in Europe and a call for action against continuing violations of human rights throughout the world.

There have been many discussions as to who actually contributed the most to the disintegration of communism.

Most knowledgeable experts underscore the huge contribution of Pope John Paul II, who has given the Polish people the encouragement needed to start the strike at the Gdansk shipyard and to found the Solidarity trade union in 1980.

The communist government has cracked down on Solidarnosc on December 13, 1981. Many activists were imprisoned, but the opposition remained very active, finally reaching the point in February of 1989 of forcing the Polish government to initiate talks with the opposition to defuse social unrest.

Here’s the rest of the timeline of events, leading up to the demise of communism in Europe:

1989

April 5: The Roundtable Agreement is signed in Poland, legalizing independent trade unions and calling the first partially democratic elections in June.

May 2: Dismantling of the Iron Curtain – the boundary between Warsaw Pact and NATO countries – begins as Hungary disables the electric alarm system and cuts through barbed wire on its border with Austria.

Aug. 19: The ‘Pan-European Picnic’ – a peace demonstration at the Hungarian town of Sopron on the Austrian border – turns into an exodus when Hungarian border guards hold their fire as 600 East German citizens flee to the West.

Aug. 24: Tadeusz Mazowiecki is appointed Polish prime minister, becoming the first noncommunist head of state in Eastern Europe in more than 40 years.

Sept. 10: Hungary reopens its border with East Germany, allowing 13,000 East Germans passage to escape through Austria.

Oct. 18: East German leader Erich Honecker is forced to resign.

Nov. 4: One million people rally in East Berlin during weeks of mounting demonstrations.

Nov. 9: The Berlin Wall falls.

Nov. 17: The ‘Velvet Revolution’ in Czechoslovakia erupts in reaction to a police crackdown on peaceful student protests in Prague. Days of mass demonstrations ensue.

Nov. 24: Communists in Prague step down.

Dec. 3: Soviet spokesman Gennady Gerasimov, speaking after a press conference between George H.W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev, who were concluding a shipboard summit at Malta, declared: “From Yalta to Malta, the cold war ended at 12.45 p.m. today.”

Dec. 22: Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaucescu is overthrown. He and his wife, Elena, are executed three days later after a summary trial.

1990

April 8: Hungary elects a non-communist government.

Oct. 3: Germany unifies.

Dec. 9: Poland elects Lech Walesa president.

July 1: Baltic states gain independence from the Soviet Union.

Dec. 25: The Soviet Union dissolves.

Technorati Tags: Berlin wall, Communism, fall, Germay, media, overkill, poland, Pope John Paul II, Solidarity, Walesa

We still have a whole lot of totally unresolved issues in our country.

Small issues for some, such as torture, invading and destroying other countries, killing hundreds of thousands of mostly innocent people, destroying the U.S. and the world economies and so forth.

At the same time, those with a bit more decency, brains and no criminal streaks in their makeup, might consider these issues not to be so small after all. We certainly hope that you belong to the second category.

Along with out friends at BadGalsRadio we have been creating and collecting all kinds of materials on these subjects and placing them on the Neocons on Parade website.

Technorati Tags: bush, Cheney, neocons on parade, Rumsfeld, torture, war crimes, Wolfowitz

Matthew Hoh, a former Marine captain and lately a Foreign Service official in Afghanistan has decided to resign in protest over the Afghan war, which he believes simply fuels the insurgency.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” wrote Hoh. “I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

Hoh also wrote that many Afghans are fighting the United States largely because its troops are there – a growing military presence in villages and valleys where outsiders, including other Afghans, are not welcome and where the corrupt, U.S.-backed national government is rejected.

In 2006 Matthew Hoh was called up to active duty from the reserves to serve in Iraq. He commanded a Marine company in Anbar province. In 2008 he rejoined the Foreign Service and went to Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, on the border with Pakistan.

Soon after the August 20, 2009 presidential elections Hoh became so seriously disenchanted that he wrote: “multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, “[the insurgency] is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The U.S. and NATO presence in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non-Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified.”

Although we generally agree with Matthew Hoh’s assessment of the situation and his decision, there probably isn’t much that we can add to this.

Technorati Tags: Afghan, Diplomat, Matthew Hoh, Over, Resigns, US, war

Even though recently 18 scientific organizations wrote Congress to reaffirm the consensus behind global warming and a federal government report found that global warming is upsetting the Arctic’s thermostat, a new poll says that just 57 percent of Americans think there is solid evidence the world is getting warmer, down 20 points in just three years.

A new Pew Research Center for the People & the Press  poll shows the number of people saying there is strong scientific evidence that the Earth has gotten warmer over the past few decades is down from 71 percent in April of last year and from 77 percent when Pew started asking the question in 2006. The number of people who see the situation as a serious problem also has declined.

Also, the share of people in the U.S. who believe that pollution caused by humans is causing temperatures to rise has also gotten lower, even as the world gears up for possible action against climate change.

The steepest drop has occurred this year, as Congress and the Obama administration have taken steps to control heat-trapping emissions for the first time and international negotiations for a new treaty to slow global warming have gotten under way. All this in view of mounting scientific evidence of climate change – from melting ice caps to the world’s oceans hitting the highest monthly recorded temperatures this summer.

The opinions appear to be strongly related to political, rather than scientific views, which doesn’t surprise us one bit. According to the poll, three-quarters of Democrats believe the evidence of a warming planet is solid, and nearly half believe that the problem is serious, far fewer conservative and moderate Democrats see the problem as severe. At the same time, 57 percent of Republicans say there is no solid evidence of global warming, up from 31 percent in early 2007. It appears that the climate deniers are just as staunchly sticking to their guns as in the case of health-care reform.

In general it seems that priority that people give to pollution and environmental concerns and a whole host of other issues is down because of the state of the economy and because of the focus on other things. The relentless lobbying efforts by the industry appear to have convinced quite a few gullible citizens, even though with some exceptions the vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is occurring and that the primary cause is a buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, such as oil and coal.

That said: despite misgivings about the science, half the respondents still say that they support limits on greenhouse gases, even if they could lead to higher energy prices. And 56 percent of Americans feel the United States should join other countries in setting standards to address global climate change.

Technorati Tags: americans, democrats, global warming, Interest, lose, poll, republicans, Science