Congress ratifies Obama escalation of Afghanistan war

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One day after WikiLeaks exposures of US war crimes
Congress ratifies Obama escalation of Afghanistan war
By Patrick Martin
28 July 2010

Little more than 24 hours after the release of 91,000 documents detailing US
military atrocities in Afghanistan, the Democratic-controlled House of
Representatives gave final approval to a funding bill to pay for the escalation
of the war.

By a margin of 308-114, well over the two-thirds majority required under an
expedited procedure known as “suspension of the rules,” the House backed a $60
billion supplemental funding bill passed by the Senate last week.

More than half the Democratic caucus joined forces with a near-unanimous
Republican minority to pass the bill. The comfortable two-thirds majority was
significant since 162 Democrats voted earlier this month for a resolution to
require the Obama administration to begin significant troop withdrawals by July
2011. If that many Democrats had opposed the funding bill, it would have failed
to win a two-thirds vote, but as always in such parliamentary maneuvering, just
enough Democrats switched their votes to provide the margin required to sustain
the war policies of American imperialism.

The bill includes more than $33.5 billion for the additional 30,000 troops in
Afghanistan and to pay for other Pentagon operational expenses, $5.1 billion to
replenish the Federal Emergency Management Agency disaster relief fund, $6.2
billion for State Department aid programs in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and
Haiti and $13.4 billion in benefits for Vietnam War veterans exposed to Agent
Orange.

Domestic spending initiatives added to the supplemental bill to win passage
through the House earlier this month were removed in the Senate after they
failed to win even majority support, let alone 60 votes. Among these were $10
billion for state governments to avert mass teacher layoffs.

In a public statement in the White House rose garden, after a morning meeting
with congressional leaders of both parties, President Barack Obama appealed for
the House to pass the emergency funding bill.

Obama addressed the release of documents by WikiLeaks for the first time, while
deliberately evading the evidence of war crimes by US forces in Afghanistan.
Instead, he joined in the pretense that there was “nothing new” in the leaked
documents, the line peddled by the White House to the American media and adopted
by newspapers like the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as the
television networks.

“While I’m concerned about the disclosure of sensitive information from the
battlefield that could potentially jeopardize individuals or operations,” Obama
said, “the fact is these documents don’t reveal any issues that haven’t already
informed our public debate on Afghanistan; indeed, they point to the same
challenges that led me to conduct an extensive review of our policy last fall.”

Given that the WikiLeaks documents include reports on hundreds of incidents in
which US forces killed innocent Afghan civilians, many of which were covered up
or censored in the US media, Obama’s claim is a flat-out lie. These atrocities
have not “already informed our public debate on Afghanistan,” since the public
was not allowed to know about them.

There is no doubt that Obama himself, his top aides in the White House and
Pentagon and the leading circles in the media were well aware of these
atrocities. That makes all the more criminal the president’s decision to
escalate the war in Afghanistan, pouring in 47,000 troops over the past year and
a half and authorizing a major increase in the level of violence—knowing that
thousands more innocent lives will be destroyed.

Obama reiterated his determination to stay the course in Afghanistan, declaring,
“We’ve substantially increased our commitment there, insisted upon greater
accountability from our partners in Afghanistan and Pakistan, developed a new
strategy that can work and put in place a team, including one of our finest
generals, to execute that plan. Now we have to see that strategy through.”

He described Afghanistan as “the region from which the 9/11 attacks were waged
and other attacks against the United States and our friends and allies have been
planned.” This repeats the hoary mythology of the Bush administration, which
sought to use 9/11 as an all-purpose pretext for US military aggression around
the world.

US officials have conceded that the total number of Al Qaeda fighters in
Afghanistan is less than 100, an estimate that makes nonsense of the claim that
the war is being waged to avenge the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon.

There are more than 100,000 US troops in Afghanistan because Obama, like Bush,
is pursuing an agenda of using American military power to seize control of key
strategic regions, particularly in the oil-rich Persian Gulf and Central Asia,
to uphold the world position of American imperialism against its major rivals.

Public opinion in the United States and in most of the countries participating
in the NATO intervention has turned decisively against the war in Afghanistan.
But this shift in mass sentiment finds no reflection within the two parties of
big business that control Capitol Hill.

The so-called antiwar faction of the House Democrats issued an open letter
Monday decrying the removal of social spending from the bill and citing the
WikiLeaks material as a reason to oppose the funding bill—but only because the
leaked documents show the difficulties facing the U.S. occupation, not because
they provide evidence of war crimes.

The open letter of the “antiwar” Democrats—signed by, among others, former
presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, eight members of the Congressional Black
Caucus, and Raul Grijalva, chairman of the House Progressive Caucus—criticizes
the war as a failure in a good cause, not an atrocity in a bad one.

The letter does not call for the withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan.
Instead it credits the US military and the Obama administration with “trying to
build a modern, democratic state in an area divided by tribal and ethnic
identities,” only expressing regret that this mission is unlikely to succeed.
This is not genuine opposition to imperialist war, but rather an effort to save
American imperialism from a humiliating defeat.

Kucinich & Co. want a gradual pullback of US forces before the entire operation
culminates in a Vietnam-style debacle, with American helicopters plucking the
frightened remnants of a US puppet regime from rooftops in Kabul. In the
meantime, their participation in the congressional charade gives a “left” cover
for the Democratic Party and the Obama administration.

Two Senate committee hearings Tuesday demonstrated the all-out support for the
Afghanistan war in both the Democratic and Republican parties. The Senate Armed
Services Committee rubber-stamped the nomination of Marine General James Mattis
to succeed General David Petraeus as the head of the US Central Command, which
oversees military operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee held a hearing on the question of whether
and under what circumstances it would be possible for the US to negotiate with
the insurgents in Afghanistan. Committee chairman John Kerry, the Democratic
presidential candidate in 2004 and an erstwhile antiwar activist during the
Vietnam War, dismissed the significance of the WikiLeaks exposure of US
atrocities in Afghanistan.

It was “important not to over-hype or get excessively excited about the meaning
of those documents,” he said. “To those of us who lived through the Pentagon
Papers, there’s no relation to that event or these documents. People need to be
very careful in evaluating what they read there.”

The lead witness at the hearing, former US Ambassador to Iraq Ryan Crocker,
warned that US public opinion was turning against the war. “Impatience is on the
rise again in this country,” he told the committee, warning that a collapse of
domestic political support for the war was “what our adversaries are counting on
now.” In that context, he expressed reservations about the July 2011 date set by
Obama for beginning a limited drawdown of US troops from Afghanistan.

Australian counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen, a key adviser of US
General David Petraeus during the Iraq “surge,” called for the Obama
administration to “stop talking about 2011, start talking about 2014.” He added
that the main necessity is “a big tactical hit on the Taliban,” inflicting “very
significant damage.” The bloodshed would be “unpleasant, but unavoidable.”

This view was echoed by Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, the senior Republican
on the committee. “For the negotiating to be successful, we have to demonstrate
strength,” he said. “As bloody as this sounds, it’s critical that we kill a lot
of Taliban.” He called for inflicting “a rather significant casualty toll,
observed by all parties including the Taliban and those we’re negotiating with.”

The leading Democrat in the House of Representatives, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, came
to Obama’s defense over the WikiLeaks documents, saying, “they do not address
current circumstances. A lot of it predates the president’s new policy.”

Actually, of course, Obama’s “new policy” calls for much more killing, not less.
The after-action reports of the slaughter of civilians through bombing,
missiles, artillery and small arms have no doubt doubled and tripled as the US
military has gone on the offensive in the Taliban strongholds in southern and
eastern Afghanistan.

Another House Democratic supporter of the war, Adam Smith of Washington state,
openly defended the operations of Task Force 373, the military death squad whose
brutal activities caused much of the devastation detailed in the WikiLeaks
documents.

“This is a war. The enemy is shooting at us, and we’re shooting at them,” Smith
told the Associated Press. U.S. troops are “aggressively targeting” the
insurgents, he said, but “condemnation of our troops is completely wrong and
brutally unfair.”

The bloody-minded consensus in official Washington was summed up in an editorial
Tuesday in the Washington Post, which denounced claims that the WikiLeaks
documents constituted “evidence for war crimes prosecution.” The newspaper
dismissed the tally of 144 cases where US and NATO forces killed civilians,
concluding “the 195 deaths it counts in those episodes, though regrettable, do
not constitute a shocking total for a four-year period.”

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/jul2010/afgh-j28.shtml

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