The Questions

[Political Waves]

The escalation of our presence in Afghanistan ... "surge" is the word I keep hearing ... is taking up the political oxygen. The Right has spun off in Righty rhetoric, the Lefty's into Lefty pursuits. It feels to me as if I'm caught between two giant vortexes, staring alternately into each as familiar and both, not suddenly but most surely, no longer acceptable. A David Sirota piece caught my eye and turned my head yesterday; and, as if I were rereading an old familiar book, I knew the pages, knew the story and knew the ending. Old story -- but these are new times.

So, here's the thing ... it's time to come at this from a renewed understanding. I just can't do a Bush-kick like I did four, even eight years ago. It's not who Obama is that prompts my feelings, although he is NOT -- objections [and speeches, a'la an always brilliant Jon Stewart] aside -- Bushian. Times haven't changed so much as I HAVE. I can't just pick my side and join the lemmings of choice -- I can't just grab my cyber-picket and get on board the Peace Train in the same old way. What was always done before is not change ... it's rote; change requires some serious thinking, feeling and observation.

It's time to look at everything differently, for gawdsake ... if change is flooding consciousness, it's not just attempting to get into some politician's head -- it's HEART change across the whole of the planet. Cooperating with the incoming energies requires not just the passions and sympathies of which we're capable, it requires us to process incoming information in a NEW way ... not the old knee-jerk, outworn response we've practiced forever and a day! Part of the change we're engaging is to find a new resonance that is not part of the ancient Operating System of polarization with which we've become so comfortable.

If you go over to Smirking Chimp, you'll find just about every editorial listed a bash of the AfPak plan -- true of most Lefty sites today.  In Obama's worst speech to date  -- one he didn't have his heart in, obviously -- he put forth a renewed effort against radicalism of the Mid-eastern sort. As I repeated over and over before the election, Obama is an establishment Democrat, cut in the template of Hilary Clinton and John Kerry. If we wanted to end this war, we should have elected Dennis Kucinich -- as, if we wanted to control the bankers, we should have elected a flawed and embarrassed but singularly focused John Edwards. Obama's doing what he said he'd do and the Lefty's are having a cow about some presumed 'betrayal.'  

This president is 'decent' in ways we're unaccustomed to appreciating. I'm not willing to throw him under the political bus so soon. And, as Forrest Gump would say -- that's all I have to say about that.

I invite you to find a clip of Obama's speech and watch him carefully -- he both knows more than we do and isn't happy about it. The load he's carrying is so much larger than any of us either know or care about. I would suggest that we stop insisting it go the way we think it should, and find out HOW IT'S GOING ... what's involved, and who and why. We don't have those answers. And this I know for sure -- you don't FIGHT for peace, either the military OR the public. The truth is, our leaving Afghanistan might well relieve our anxiety about money spent, and put our shame about violence incurred far from the forefront of our minds, but it will not bring peace; it would bring a new set of home-grown occupiers.

I, for one, don't have the answers. But I am deeply concerned and interested in the QUESTIONS. What we do next will define us. I already marched in the 60's -- and you and I have been cyber-warriors in these last years. The traditional ways to protest have already been played out. And before I point and yell and blame and squall ... I want my facts straight, my senses engaged and my bias gagged.

One interesting tidbit floating to the top in these last few days is the role a certain Mr. Erik Prince, ex-CEO of Blackwater, has played in these last years -- a full-blown CIA asset acting with extraordinary powers. Panetta 'outed' him, and now he's pissy. Factor in the Senate report on what happened in Tora Bora under the Dubby's direction, as follows from a William Bradley article, [more below]:

The epic fail of Tora Bora echoes very loudly today. We might not be talking much about Al Qaeda, a diminished force, were it not for the incredible failure to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. After 9/11, President Bush vowed to get him, dead or alive. But when it came time to take him, almost exactly eight years ago, in the Tora Bora region of Afghanistan where he was trying to make his way to a new safe haven in Pakistan, it didn't happen. Read the new Senate report on this, and weep. The Bush/Cheney Administration turned down repeated reqests, saying it didn't want a heavy foreign presence on the ground, so he was allowed to slip away.

NATO has stepped up with 7,000 troops, a couple thousand more than Obama anticipated. This isn't Dubby's coalition of the unwilling -- these folks wouldn't be pledging assistance if they thought it was just to curry American favor; we need to stop thinking of ourselves as Superman ... those days are over. So, considering the nuclear-armed Pakistan in the mix, What's Up in Afghanistan? Something bigger than we know. I'd rather not throw ordnance at it, or sacrifice another life ... but until we learn how to think outside of the 'expected' box, things will go as they always have. So much of this appears to be falling apart -- now, the question is: will it fall together, as Obama has planned?  And how will we ... still rattling around in our box of expectations ... KNOW if it does, since we don't know what he's looking at?

We'll start with an excellent Fiori 'toon, today:

Obama Interruptus
http://www.markfiore.com/political/obama-interruptus

Next, Mother Jones has a  very cool interactive mission creep map, here -- very informative:
http://motherjones.com/military-maps

In other news, the economy is still a raging forest fire, and here's an activist/op from Digby -- with a YouTube worth a look and a site to investigate:

Zuzu's Petals Are All Dried Up
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/zuzus-petals-are-all-dried-up-by-digby.html

We're peeling layers -- within the situation we're watching, within ourselves. My advice? Stop doing what you've always done and go to your heart, now -- take some time there. Do what it suggests -- you can't go wrong.

Here's a short list of reads and links, for the day. Have a good weekend -- mine, here with my family after almost a year far from their dear faces, will be exceptional.

Jude


Barack Obama's War: 10 Key Things To Know
William Bradley, HuffPo
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/barack-obamas-war-10-key_b_380084.html

... Obama gave his big speech at West Point. Which was not one of his best, as he seemed rather nervous and didn't establish a rhetorical rapport with the crowd of cadets and the long military tradition with which he was there to resonate. Still, he got the message across. He will send 30,000 new troops to Afghanistan. When it's all said and done, there will be about 100,000 American troops in Afghanistan. There are over 40,000 troops there from American allies, principally NATO nations. Nearly 10,000 of those troops are British.

He's ordered the generals to have most of the new troops in place in six months, much faster than previously assumed possible.

He wants NATO to provide another 5000 troops. NATO leadership says it will provide 7000 new troops. But that decision won't be taken in terms of actual commitments from NATO nations till an international conference on Afghanistan at the end of next month in London.

Obama plans to protect big population areas while heavily degrading Taliban forces and spinning up the training of Afghan forces.

And Obama wants to withdraw most American troops in three years, reiterating that he'll start withdrawing troops in the middle of 2011. But how quickly those troops are withdrawn is up in the air.

The plan is predicated on pushing back the Taliban, which the military says presently control a third of the provinces, to provide a space for a rapid build-up of Afghan security forces.

A lot of things have to go right for this very ambitious plan, which sounds a great deal like Vietnamization, which worked wonders for Richard Nixon, to work. But you can bet that Obama wants most American troops out of Afghanistan by the time of his re-election.

[open link to read entire list] ++


Won't The Taliban Just Wait Us Out?
Andrew Sullivan, Daily Dish
Dec 2009
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2009/12/wont-the-taliban-just-wait-us-out.html#more

It's a good question and Les Gelb, via Joe Klein, offers a good answer:

"They simply won't do that. If you stand down, you allow the enemy — even this inept Afghan government — to create a bow-wave effect, to create the impression of authority and security. The Taliban aren't stupid."

Joe's piece is a superb tour d'horizon of the decision. He wanted more derring-do and passion in the speech, as did Matthews, O'Reilly, et al. I just find it hard for someone inheriting a war already eight years old in the economic straits we are in to give a Henry V address, as if we did not know the immense and complicated difficulties of carrying on a war solely to prevent a single terror attack that might come from somewhere else anyway and needs no real weaponry to succeed.

Obama couldn't fake a conviction he doesn't have and that few adults at this point could truly feel. What he has done instead is replace rhetorical drama with an influx of troops so swift and so large it could alter the dynamic on the ground and give us one more chance to break al Qaeda's back before a withdrawal in our long-term strategic interest. The speed of the deployment (and the CIA's work in Pakistan) is what Obama insisted upon:

The real haggle was over speed of deployment.

The military plans carefully, in five- to 10-year increments, and moves with the speed of a supertanker. A good part of the reason the troops were sent to Helmand instead of Kandahar, even though it violated the prevailing counterinsurgency strategy, was that the fortifications already had been built in Helmand; it seemed too late to turn the supertanker around. Obama kept sending plans back to the Pentagon, seeking a faster launch for his "extended surge." The military still isn't entirely sure that it'll be able to move 30,000 troops to Afghanistan by August. "We'll push in every way possible to get the forces on the ground ASAP," a senior military official told me. But the President clearly believes that the speed and vehemence of the new offensive will be its greatest assets.

Give him a chance. But hold him accountable. ++


Scahill: ‘The war is in Pakistan right now’
US's unofficial war in Pakistan will 'create enemies,' author says
David Edwards and Muriel Kane, Raw Story
Friday, December 4th, 2009
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/scahill-us-military-in-pakistan/

In the wake of President Obama's plan to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan, questions are being raised about the use of private contractors in US operations there. The acknowledgement by Eric Prince, founder of military contractor Blackwater, that he has been serving for years as a CIA asset only intensifies these concerns.

For Jeremy Scahill, author of the bestselling book Blackwater, however, the real concern is not Afghanistan but Pakistan, where according to an article in the New York Times, "the White House has authorized an expansion of the C.I.A.’s drone program."

"We need to view this sober reality," Scahill told MSNBC's Rachel Maddow on Thursday. "The war is in Pakistan right now. There's no question about it. The question, though, is how much it's going to expand. ... These are actions that are going to destabilize Pakistan and are going to create new enemies for the United States because of the high civilian casualties. ... Here you have military operations inside a country that we don't have a declaration of war against."

Scahill emphasized that the most destabilizing actions come not from the CIA but from Blackwater mercenaries, whom he recently described in The Nation as working for US special forces to "plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, 'snatch and grabs' of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan."

The drone attacks outsourced to Blackwater are the source of the highest numbers of civilian casualties. Scahill told Maddow that one of his sources is a "very well-placed military intelligence source [who] is offended at the idea that you have these operations happening outside of the military chain of command and with no oversight from the Congress."

"Blackwater has been operating under the cover of a training program," Scahill explained. "Blackwater is training the Pakistani Frontier Corps, which is a federal paramilitary force that is hunting down high-value targets in the frontier province. A former Blackwater executive told me that the line is being crossed -- that Blackwater guys are actually going out on these raids."

Scahill also revealed a few interesting tidbits about Eric Prince's decision to out himself as a CIA asset, saying, "I see this sort of as Eric Prince taking out an insurance policy for himself. ... Eric Prince is in the cross-hairs now of the Congress, the federal investigators, and others ... and it's a way of trying to insulate himself from future attacks."

[open link for] This video is from MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast Dec. 3, 2009. ++


VF exclusive: Blackwater’s Erik Prince to step down, reveals CIA role
Raw Story
Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009
http://rawstory.com/2009/12/blackwaters-prince-cia-role/

Blackwater's Erik Prince was recruited as a CIA agent in the years after the 9/11 attacks, says an exclusive report at Vanity Fair that also reveals the billionaire ex-Navy SEAL plans to step down from Blackwater to teach high school.

For the past six years, Prince "appears to have led an astonishing double life," writes Adam Ciralsky. "Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s CEO and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the CIA’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into 'denied areas'—places US intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies."

Ciralsky reports that Prince became a CIA "asset," or spy, who became a "Mr. Fix-It" in the war on terror.

"Prince wasn’t merely a contractor; he was, insiders say, a full-blown asset," Ciralsky reports. "Three sources with direct knowledge of the relationship say that the CIA’s National Resources Division recruited Prince in 2004 to join a secret network of American citizens with special skills or unusual access to targets of interest. As assets go, Prince would have been quite a catch. He had more cash, transport, matériel, and personnel at his disposal than almost anyone Langley would have run in its 62-year history."

Prince also told Vanity Fair he believes that people inside the US government sold him out when news of Blackwater's involvement in the CIA's secret assassination program went public. Last summer, CIA director Leon Panetta informed congressional intelligence committees that the CIA had kept secret an on-and-off assassination program that many people believe was run during the Bush administration by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Later, news reports emerged alleging that Blackwater, which recently renamed itself Xe Services, was involved in the program which sought to assassinate high-value terrorist targets.

Prince "confesses to feeling betrayed," Vanity Fair reports.

“I don’t understand how a program this sensitive leaks,” he says. “And to ‘out’ me on top of it?”
Ciralsky reports:

Prince blames Democrats in Congress for the leaks and maintains that there is a double standard at play. “The left complained about how [CIA operative] Valerie Plame’s identity was compromised for political reasons. A special prosecutor [was even] appointed. Well, what happened to me was worse. People acting for political reasons disclosed not only the existence of a very sensitive program but my name along with it.” As in the Plame case, though, the leaks prompted CIA attorneys to send a referral to the Justice Department, requesting that a criminal investigation be undertaken to identify those responsible for providing highly classified information to the media.

Prince told Ciralsky that he was engaged in work for the CIA "up until two months ago—when Prince says the Obama administration pulled the plug." That would seem to confirm recent news reports that the Obama administration was using Blackwater for assassinations in Pakistan.

Prince also told Ciralsky he plans to step down as chairman and CEO of Blackwater -- a move Ciralsky reports has started a "power struggle" within the company over who will succeed its founder.

“I’m through,” Prince told Vanity Fair. “I’m going to teach high school. ... History and economics. I may even coach wrestling. Hey, Indiana Jones taught school, too.”

Read the full Vanity Fair report here. ++
http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/2010/01/blackwater-201001

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~ Barack Obama

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