[ufpj-news] Congressman, Vote No on Afghan War Escalation
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Congressman, Vote No on Afghan War Escalation
By David Swanson, DefundWar.org
[Testimony to be hand-delivered and presented orally at a forum hosted
by Congressman Bill Delahunt in Falmouth, Mass., this Sunday. The
public is encouraged
to attend. The article could be tweaked for any congress member,
and I'd be glad to help you tweak it for yours.--DS]
I want to thank Congressman Delahunt and Cape Codders for Peace. I
opposed this war before it began, as did many of you, and I hope to
explain why. But, Congressman Delahunt, you need not agree that it was
always wrong in order to agree that it is wrong now. I support the
immediate announcement of a swift withdrawal of all troops,
mercenaries, and military contractors, and I hope to explain why. But
you don't need to agree in order to oppose spending $33 billion to
escalate the war with 30,000 more troops. To vote to fund that
escalation, you have to believe that this war is such a good thing that
it should not only be continued but also expanded. Or you have to
believe that the way to end it is to expand it AND that nothing more
useful at home or abroad could be done with all that money. I expect
that we can jointly establish here today that both of those last two
ideas are mistaken.
In October, 2003, Congressman, you wisely voted against a bill to fund
the wars and supposedly reconstruction in Afghanistan and Iraq. Had
your vote prevailed, those wars would have had to end, despite the
wishes of the President and the Pentagon. You were not committing
treason or failing to support troops or endangering Americans. You
were upholding the law, representing your constituents, striving to
bring those troops safely home, and reducing global animosity toward
our country. We applaud you.
Refusing to fund an escalation does not compel a war to end. It only
maintains the war at the current level. So nonsensical claims about
"abandoning the troops" become even more nonsensical. Last December,
Congressman, you and most of your colleagues voted for a massive budget
for wars and the military, but many who voted yes said they would vote
no on an escalation, an escalation that was opposed by a majority of
Americans and Afghans and Pakistanis and the people of nations around
the world. It was universally maintained in Washington that the vote on
the escalation money would not come until the spring. So the fact that
the escalation has predictably already begun cannot be treated as a
fait accompli unless we're going to tell the American public that we
were all played for a bunch of fools. Are there troops on their way or
already arrived? Well, turn them around and bring them home!
Last summer, Congressman Delahunt, you and a majority of the Democrats
in the House voted for an amendment to create an exit strategy for
Afghanistan. Here's something that I take to be a simple fact that has
been obscured by propaganda: you do not exit a war by escalating it.
The president sent 21,000 more troops to Afghanistan last year, plus
5,000 more mercenaries, and tens of thousands of contractors, all
without so much as a by-your-leave to the first branch of our
government, the United States Congress. We have at least 68,000 troops
and 121,000 contractors or mercenaries now in place, and violence,
deaths, and misery escalated following the troop escalation. In fact
the president said that he sent those troops prior to developing a
strategy for the war, almost as if sending the troops was an end in
itself, a possibility that is almost too grotesque to contemplate, a
possibility I would hate to have to explain to the parents of all the
soldiers who will die in the hell that will be the coming attack on the
city of Kandahar. The military has recorded 78 wounded and 22 dead from
Massachusetts prior to this onslaught.
Oh, but we escalated in Iraq in order to withdraw, didn't we? Did we?
We have 198,000 troops, mercenaries, and contractors in Iraq. If you
believe they're all coming home next year without Congress waking up
from its slumber, I've got some yellowcake to sell you. Violence in
Iraq is down, at least for the moment, for many reasons. One is simply
the massive numbers of people killed, wounded, impoverished, and driven
from their homes. Accomplishing that feat in Afghanistan would require
several armies and what's left of our soul. Even pacifying Afghanistan
according to plan, according to General Charles Krulak (retired), the
31st Commandant of the Marine Corps, would require several hundred
thousand additional troops. This is not a war, but an occupation.
When you attack in one place, people disperse. When you hand out cash
it ends up being used to attack you. Several hundred thousand troops
may be a conservative estimate. And what if that was only 20 percent
of your force? General Petraeus's counterinsurgency manual says you
should spend 80 percent on civilian operations. We currently spend 6
percent, and over half of what we've spent on reconstruction has gone
to the U.S. military's training of Afghan military and police.
Violence is also down in Iraq because troops have in great measure
withdrawn from urban areas. We saw this predictable cause and effect
begin when violence in Basra dropped 90 percent because the British
stopped patrolling Basra to control the violence. The British were
quite surprised and amazed. And if you ask Iraqis, many will tell you
that violence is down because a complete withdrawal has been promised
and a date stated. Sending troops to Iraq has never done the United
States or Iraq any good, and the same is true and will remain true for
Afghanistan. National Security Adviser James Jones says there is no
guarantee that sending troops to Afghanistan would accomplish anything
useful, and that they could just be "swallowed up".
Howard Hart, a 25-year CIA veteran who ran operations in Afghanistan
for three-and-a-half years during the Cold War, like countless
other
experts, favors withdrawal. Hart says that the original goal was
supposedly to destroy al Qaeda, which has long since left, and that
creating a legitimate government (something that most people and
history and the law tell us a foreign occupation can NEVER do) would
require hundreds of thousands of troops, cost "umpteen billion"
dollars, and still be next to impossible. It is almost universally
accepted in the United States that our own government is broken, and
yet we are trying to impose a central government on people in a country
we don't know, people who don't want it. The elections in Afghanistan
and Pakistan are practically down to our own standards, and the puppet
governments are not viewed as legitimate. In Afghanistan we are
propping up and using a government of corrupt war lords and drug
dealers, and our chief puppet has threatened to join the resistance
against us, the Taliban. That's not because he's crazy or drugged, but
because he hopes to win the support of the people of Afghanistan.
Replacing him with a different puppet wouldn't solve this problem. But
I suspect Americans are catching on to the outrage and hopelessness of
pouring blood and treasure into an effort to fight the Taliban on
behalf of a government that wants to join the Taliban.
WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR?
What about that original goal? Revenge is not a legal ground for war,
or a morally acceptable motivation for anything, but does revenge even
make sense here on its own terms? The 9-11 hijackers were not from
Afghanistan. Most of the planning of 9-11 was done in hotels and
apartments in Germany and Spain, and flight schools in the United
States, and would be again even if al Qaeda was permitted to build
camps in Afghanistan. Paul Pillar, former CIA deputy chief for
counter-terrorism, says that an al Qaeda base in Afghanistan would not
significantly increase threats to the United States. Richard Holbrooke,
President Obama's representative in Afghanistan, says that if the
Taliban had control it would likely not allow al Qaeda in anyway. And
many observers treat with great skepticism the idea that a U.S.
withdrawal would necessarily put the Taliban in control of all of
Afghanistan. The Taliban is fueled by the occupation and would lose
strength with its withdrawal. The fundamentalist Taliban, as opposed
to those poor people just fighting for the pay and in defense of their
homes, is not popular in Afghanistan. Neither are the war lords and
the current government, and there is no easy solution. But the idea
that building a quagmire in Afghanistan will protect the United States
from a small terrorist organization whose mastermind we now claim must
be murdered in Yemen gets things backwards. Occupying and bombing
Afghanistan is actually making us less safe. It is enraging people
against the United States, and building the Taliban and other
resistance forces.
Well, if we're not there for revenge against al Qaeda which is not
there at all, and we're not there to keep al Qaeda out of that one
particular country, what are we there for? For the benefit of the
Afghan people? To fight the Taliban? The past 35 years should make us
very suspicious of the notion that the United States government gives a
damn about the Afghan people. Our government looked pretty favorably
on the Taliban in the mid 90s when the Taliban favored building oil and
gas pipelines. And, by the way, the Taliban offered to put bin Laden
on trial, but our government chose instead to try to capture him by
bombing the Afghan people.
OK. So let's let bygones be bygones. Let's ignore the many homes of
suffering around the world that we do not feel compelled to bomb.
Might it not be true that Afghanistan would be even worse off without
the U.S. military? There's often a condescending colonialist
perspective behind this sort of thinking, and I see it as missing some
basic facts. One is that no matter how awful Afghanistan will be when
the United States military leaves, it will never have a chance at
becoming a decent place to live during a foreign occupation, because
foreign occupations produce resistance. And the growing devastation
will make the post-occupation struggle harder the longer the occupation
goes on. Malalai Joya, a former member of the Afghan parliament,
expelled for her opposition, puts it this way: "Some say that if
foreign troops leave Afghanistan will descend into civil war. But what
about the civil war and catastrophe of today? The longer this
occupation continues, the worse the civil war will be."
Another fact is that, for much less money than the occupation requires,
the United States could provide assistance to Afghans restoring their
environment and agriculture, which is precisely what the current U.S.
Ambassador to Afghanistan advised the president to do. Our troops, who
have plenty of bravery, could bravely clean the cluster bombs out of
the fields rather than dropping more. A third fact is that illegal
invasions and occupations damage the rule of law internationally as
well as antagonizing sympathetic populations, which is why terrorism
has increased around the world during the so-called global war on
terror. And, most importantly, even when it has an American face on
it, there is simply nothing worse than war with which war can be
replaced.
When a local resident in the United States is kidnapped or raped or
murdered and the media latches onto it, we talk about the horror of it
with friends and strangers. But these stories exist by the thousands
and hundreds of thousands for the victims of our wars. They are all
real people with loved-ones, and a single one of their stories properly
communicated by our corporate media cartel would end all of our wars
forever. I'm sure many of us saw the recently released video of
civilians being killed from a helicopter in Iraq. If you haven't you
should also watch the interview of the family members of the dead.
Wikileaks said it plans to release another video of 97 people being
bombed in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan and Pakistan we have
dramatically increased the use of drones, which are known to regularly
kill what we call collateral damage. There is simply no way to kill
the people whom you think, as prosecutor, judge, and executioner you
have to kill without enraging more people against you than you started
with. And sometimes those people come and blow themselves up to kill
the CIA agents controlling the drones. And in this futile stupidity we
are immorally killing human beings.
But General McChrystal has developed a new tool in Afghanistan that
kills even more civilians than drone strikes. It's called night
raids. We kick in doors at night and murder people, including family
members who get in the way, including neighbors who come running to
help, and -- in the worst sorts of incident -- including children with
their hands cuffed behind their backs. We haven't given Afghan women
civil rights, but at least we dig the bullets out of them with knives
after we kill them in order to pretend someone else did it. And our
media parrot the military's lies until the moment it's forced to recant
them.
Again, this is not a war but an occupation. No U.S. soldier knows who
the enemy is and who the people are he or she is supposedly
protecting. They look the same. This means the innocent will die. If
you think such incidents are aberrations, watch the confessions of our
troops in the Winter Soldier testimony. Or listen to General
McChrystal on the topic of another form of murder, road blocks.
McChrystal said:
"To my knowledge, in the nine-plus months I've been here, not a single
case where we have engaged in an escalation of force incident and hurt
someone has it turned out that the vehicle had a suicide bomb or
weapons in it and, in many cases, had families in it. . . . We've shot
an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge,
none has proven to have been a real threat to the force."
You can't fix that with better rules of engagement. You have to
disengage. You cannot win an occupation. You can only end it.
A POLICY OR A CRIME?
We are killing thousands of civilians per year, plus non-civilians, a
distinction Afghans don't always see as a sharp one, plus over 1,000
U.S. troops killed and over 5,000 wounded, plus mercenaries, plus those
diagnosed with brain and other injuries after leaving Afghanistan, plus
suicides which are now higher than combat deaths, plus the violence to
others that troops bring home. And anyone who suffers in the United
States or anywhere else from heroin can thank our efforts in
Afghanistan.
U.S. soldiers signed up to defend the United States, not to commit war
crimes in distant lands. Our states' militias, the National Guard, is
needed at home and cannot constitutionally be sent abroad to fight for
empire. This enterprise is criminal from top to bottom and will be
until it's ended. We currently use Afghanistan to lawlessly imprison
human beings without process or rights or foreseeable end, and in such
situations, prison guards torture. And when you refuse to prosecute
torture, torturers do not end their torturing. Here's the Washington
Post from this past November:
"Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year
said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived
of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at
least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their
alleged links to the Taliban."
What if those were your kids? This is one example of many. These are
not aberrations, but the heart of the war, and the heart of what drives
the resistance. New York Times reporter David Rohde was held hostage
for seven months by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and upon release
reported on what motivates Afghans to engage in violence. The reasons
he provided suggested that, as with most foreign occupations in any
other time or place, the occupation was motivating the violent
resistance to it rather than helping to ease unrelated tensions.
The senior U.S. civilian diplomat in Zabul province, a former Marine
Corps captain with combat experience in Iraq named Matthew Hoh,
resigned to protest what he sees as a hopeless quagmire. After more
than eight years of the current war, the people of Afghanistan are no
better off, and their environment is being destroyed by war and
resulting deforestation. And we're supposed to believe we have a moral
responsibility to keep this going? If I break into your house and
smash up your furniture, do I have a moral responsibility to spend the
night? No, in fact I have a duty to turn myself in to the police.
It is illegal to invade and occupy other nations. The United Nations
did not sanction this attack and it was not in self-defense. It is
illegal to use weapons that you know will kill large numbers of
civilians. It is illegal to target civilians. It is illegal to use
depleted uranium. It is llegal to scatter the countryside with cluster
bombs the same color as food packets. It is illegal to imprison people
without charge or trial. It is illegal to torture. The United Nations
has warned the United States about its ongoing illegal use of drones.
The International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg concluded that
aggressive war is "not only an international crime; it is the supreme
international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it
contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole." What we are
doing now is what we had in mind back then. A former assistant
secretary of state during Bush's presidency wrote in the Washington
Post this April 2nd that if the International Criminal Court begins
prosecuting crimes of aggressions this year, potential defendants will
include members of congress who fund aggressive wars. Is that likely?
It's likely enough for a Bush man and the Washington Post to be worried
about it.
If we do not prosecute crimes or at least cease to commit them and make
amends, then what is likely is repetition. As recently as February the
White House press secretary said the President was open to attacking
Iran. In fact, President Obama asserted his power to make war in a
peace prize acceptance speech in Oslo. And this week he created a
policy of never using nuclear weapons against non-nuclear states, with
the exception of Iran. And let's keep in mind that any powers a
president seizes unchallenged will belong to all future presidents. If
anyone is going to prevent a future of wars like the current ones, it's
going to be members of Congress who remember that the Constitution
places war powers in their hands for a very good reason.
HOW MUCH DO WE OWE YOU?
If you're still convinced that the way to exit Afghanistan is to
escalate the war, there may still be hope, because in order to vote for
the funding you have to also believe that nothing more useful could be
done with it. I will leave this discussion to my colleague from the
National Priorities Project, except to highlight a few points. First,
27 million gallons of gasoline were used by the U.S. military in
Afghanistan last month at a cost of up to $100 per gallon. The New
York Times last week reported yet again on our money being given out to
Afghans, among whom are members of the Taliban who turn around and use
it against US troops. The semblance of a coalition in this war is
created by giving hundreds of millions of dollars to other nations.
For $1 million per troop sent, we could have 20 well-paid green jobs
right here, one for that former soldier and 19 more. Massachusetts
alone has spent $7.5 billion on Afghanistan, not counting interest,
veterans care, the economic impact, etc. According to the analysis on
Iraq produced by Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes the number certainly
needs to be tripled if not quintupled.
The military puts hundreds of millions of dollars into this district
(you can see the details at fedspending.org). But every dollar we
give
the military is a dollar less for jobs. Research from the University
of Massachusetts Amherst found that nothing produces fewer jobs than
the military. Funding education, energy, infrastructure, and other
industries produces more jobs. Even cutting taxes produces more jobs.
So even though you see military and weapons industry jobs everywhere,
you're not getting a bang for your buck. Some of those bucks go right
back where they came from. If opensecrets.org is correct,
Congressman
Delahunt, Raytheon gave $10,000 to your last campaign.
The military itself is the most wasteful and least accountable
government agency we have, and our own people in Afghanistan, in their
own way, give Karzai some stiff competition in the corruption contest.
According to Sen. Claire McCaskill's Contract Oversight subcommittee,
oversight is gravely lacking. "In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract
Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on
Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting
Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently
vacant." A USAID official said the agency is "spending too much money,
too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent" and does not
"know … where the money is going." Plus we're hiring contractors to
oversee contractors, which allows us to waste even more money. The
Defense Contract Audit Agency found more than 16 percent of Defense
contracts in Afghanistan to be questioned and unsupported costs. One
place we can't possibly spend money so wastefully is right here at home
where we can see it. And the most likely people to be able to manage
money in Afghanistan are, in fact, Afghans.
HOW DOES IT END?
So, we're trudging along in the fog of war, either engaged in a crime
or heroically pursuing glory, but how does it end? What does victory
look like? If we've been through over eight years of this and not been
able to even devise a rough description of what a "success" would look
like, what are the chances that it will be identified and achieved in
year number nine? The only possibility, I think, is if we identify a
useful approach that involves tools other than the military. We need
to announce a withdrawal date and a handover of bases. We need to
negotiate peace, as President Karzai wants to do. And we need to
assist people in pursing a livelihood through non-drug farming.
Congressman Delahunt, you have opposed permanent U.S. bases in Iraq,
and I assume you might be willing to oppose them in Afghanistan as
well. Two years ago you introduced the "Protect Our Troops and Our
Constitution Act" which would have banned permanent bases in Iraq,
among other things. We have nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan now, and
counting. Escalating the war will mean more bases, not fewer.
Zbigniew Brzezinski (whose history with Afghanistan goes back to the
1970s when he knowingly provoked a Russian invasion of what was then a
much healthier nation) last October spoke in a Senate caucus room and
said that one of the main reasons to occupy Afghanistan was to build a
north-south pipeline to the Indian ocean. Nobody questioned this
assertion. And yet, the RAND Corporation, at whose forum he was
speaking, has put out a report finding that there is no military
solution in Afghanistan. So we're going to send troops to build a
pipeline in a place where troops cannot possibly halt the violence?
Mikhail Gorbachev has some experience with occupations of Afghanistan.
He advises withdrawal. Even the late former Congressman Charlie Wilson
said Get out of Afghanistan. Whom will we listen to?
Increasingly, U.S. military veterans are advocating for withdrawal, and
-- in small but rapidly growing numbers -- active duty soldiers (in the
UK as well as the US) are refusing to comply with the illegal order to
participate, and in some cases going to prison. Will we honor their
sacrifice?
WHAT DO WE WANT?
Congressman Delahunt, we ask you to vote No on the $33 billion
escalation. But we would like you to do something much more serious:
Commit now, ahead of time, to voting No and urge your colleagues to do
the same. If a bill is destined to pass, and some dozens of members
vote No against no resistance from their parties, that doesn't build
the movement for peace. Committing ahead of time to vote No, and
publicly making the case for it, is much more meaningful, because there
is always the chance that your vote will actually matter and you will
face the wrath of your party's leaders and other war supporters.
But you have announced your retirement. So you have no need to listen
to your constituents, but you also have no need to listen to a party or
to any campaign donors. And if the media doesn't like your decision to
stand with us against the military industrial complex, we will have
your back. Senator Kennedy said his most important vote was his vote
against the Iraq War. Who knows, looking back, what you will tell your
grandchildren your most important vote was.
We're asking for an unusual commitment, but less than those soldiers
are making who refuse to go, and less than so many activists are making
who routinely protest this war and, in many cases, face imprisonment.
Whistleblowers have sacrificed their careers. We're asking you only to
put a positive exclamation point on yours.
A year ago the President said that last year's war supplemental would
be the very last one, and many congress members actually used that as a
reason to vote for it. I think it's safe to assume that even Charlie
Brown wouldn't kick that football this time around.
Lipstick is being applied to this pigskin however. $2.8 billion for
aid to Haiti will be put into this bill. And yet everyone knows that
the Haiti aid can be passed separately. Nobody in Congress doubts that
we know that they know that we know that they know it can be passed
separately. So "I voted for a war in Afghanistan to help the Haitians"
is unlikely to justify the wrong vote here.
Congressman McGovern is introducing bills requesting "flexible
timetables" and unspecified exit plans. But passing such things in the
House would mean having to pass them through the Senate and getting the
president to sign them. And then nothing would necessarily change.
Such things are not meaningless, but they are talk, rather than
action. Obviously we can all talk. We want our congress members to
govern. Congressman Obey's war tax bill is just as rhetorical, but
signing onto it might stiffen his important spine.
Bruce Taub of Progressive Democrats of America gave me a report on a
meeting with you, Congressman Delahunt, at which you said you had two
concerns. One was the safety of our country. I hope to have addressed
that one. The other was this, quoting Bruce quoting you: "President
Obama is my leader. I respect him and trust him. I think he is
earnest, someone who wants to genuinely do the best he can for the
country, someone who considers all the options and is a thoughtful
intelligent man. And if he thinks a supplemental is needed, I give
that great deference."
But you seem like a thoughtful intelligent man yourself. And we
elected you to the first branch of our government, the one that takes
up the first 60 percent of our Constitution, the one to which our
founders gave every power they'd seen King George abuse, the one whose
laws and wars are to be faithfully executed by the executive. It was
by giving war powers to a president that congress got us into this
disaster in the first place. The House of Representatives has the
power of the purse for precisely the purpose now at hand. To choose not
to use it because you approve of the war would be one thing. To defer
to a party not sanctioned by the Constitution to make these decisions
would be to undo our own revolution. For the people of this district
to be represented by someone who simply obeys the president would be to
grievously wound representative government in this land. I implore
you, whatever you decide, to decide it yourself.
You will have to live with it. Your colleagues will have to face
reelection on it this year. The president will not. And your
colleagues may misinterpret the political winds. In your recent senate
race as in our gubernatorial race down in Virginia, Democratic voters
stayed home because nobody inspired them to turn out. Independent
candidate and peace activist Peter White may inspire people in this
district, but will the Democrats?
Republicans are turning against this war. The death count is about to
jump. We have a financial crisis and an environmental crisis. Is this
the time to be the party of reckless spending on foreign quagmire
building? Did it work well for Lyndon Johnson?
We don't expect you to stand alone against this escalation. Others are
already speaking out and whipping against it, and 65 congress members
just voted to end the war entirely.
We don't expect you to stand against troops. The Chairman of the
Veterans Affairs Committee has already committed to voting No on behalf
of the troops.
We believe you can have an impact whether the bill goes down or not in
building a caucus that will eventually end these wars and in sending a
signal to the world that will make it harder for our government to keep
resisting peace negotiations.
There came a time when Martin Luther King Jr. said "My conscience
leaves me no other choice. . . A time comes when silence is betrayal."
Let's break the silence.
**
David Swanson is the author of "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial
Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union," and has created a whip
list at http://defundwar.org
David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You can order it and find out when tour will be in your town: http://davidswanson.org/book.