Barack Obama is blind, stupid or a liar: what progress looks like
Obama, presenting the White House annual review of the Afghanistan war, said the war is "on track to achieve our goals". It isn't, as he must know, because the CIA, the Red Cross, 15 Afghanistan experts who recently wrote him an open letter, and 60 per cent of the American public, all have the same message: the war is a catastrophe.
By Robin Beste
Stop the War Coalition
16 December 2010
SIXTY per cent of Americans say the war in Afghanistan isn't worth fighting -- the highest number yet since the war began in 2001.
The CIA is pessimistic and disparaging about the talk of "progress". The Red Cross says conditions in the country are the worst for 30 years.
An open letter to Obama from 15 Afghanistan experts says the war is a disaster and the US-Nato forces should leave now.
But Barack Obama says, "We are on track to achieve our goals."
The White House Annual Review of the War in Afghanistan is full of assertions that "the strategy is making progress", "there has been significant progress", "Taliban momentum has been "arrested in much of the country and reversed in some key areas", "we are setting the conditions" for beginning troop reductions in 2011.
No data or specifics are provided to validate judgements that are contradicted so widely by other sources reaching very different conclusions.
Obama's goal is a farce: the training of over 300,000 Afghans police and soldiers to take the place of US and Nato troops by 2015. This isn't going to happen. The desertion rate of recruits is more than 20 per cent, drug addiction is rampant, the killing of US and British trainers by their trainees is a sign of where loyalties lie, and the Afghan army is such a shambles it is rarely in the frontline fighting alongside US and Nato troops.
As the war enters it's tenth year, 2010 has been the bloodiest by far, for both invading armies and Afghan civilians, with nearly 500 US soldiers and over 100 British soldiers killed. No one keeps accurate figures of Afghan civilians killed.
The war is costing America $2 billion a week and Britain at least £6 billion a year. It costs £1 million a year to keep one US soldier in Afghanistan. And it's calculated that the cost of killing one Taliban fighter is around $50 billion.
And the declared reason for this madness? Obama says it is the "disrupting, dismantling and defeating" al-Qaeda. You can't defeat what isn't there, and Obama knows full well -- because the CIA told him -- there are less than 50 al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.
The real aim is to defeat the resistance by the Taliban and other Afghan forces to the US-Nato occupation of their country-- or at least be able to get out without being seen to suffer ignominious defeat. Saving the face of warmongering politicians and generals is the real reason that thousands of Afghan civilians and hundreds of invading soldiers are dying every year.
How long will this go on? Hilary Clinton says, "We have a long way to go." Obama and the Pentagon have made it clear that withdrawing troops will be "conditions-based". In other words, they will stay as long as it takes to avoid admitting defeat.
But they are waging war against the will of huge majorities in public opinion who want the troops home now. How long it lasts will depend on the extent to which the voice of the anti-war majority can be mobilised to make it politically impossible for a futile and unjustified war to continue.
