Articles (Jul – Sep 2010)
Afghanistan’s decade of war, and the endgame
From Open Democracy, written By Paul Rogers
September 27, 2010
The war in Afghanistan is at a critical point as it enters its tenth year – and the view that it is unwinnable can be glimpsed in unexpected places.
The war in Afghanistan enters its tenth year in early October 2010. It is already clear that 2010 is proving to be a turning-point point in its course. The clearest indication of this is the intensifying difficulties faced by the United States-led coalition as the Taliban campaign spreads and the increasing criticism among Afghans of the foreign presence.
But there are many signs of this change too among those western professionals whose role it is to explain and analyse the war for their various domestic audiences. In the worlds of think-tank research, journalism and scholarship, a number of influential current publications argue that the United States war in Afghanistan is failing.
The London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) published its annual global-security review on 7 September 2010 – Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs. The document is highly critical of the conduct of the war in Afghanistan; it says that “the) Afghan campaign has involved not just mission creep but mission multiplication”, warns that “for western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests” (see “Afghanistan: wind of change”, 9 September 2010). The IISS’s position at the centre of the international defence establishment means that its views cannot be dismissed so easily as are those of other critics of the war.
The same is true in the world of journalism, where the veteran “insider” American journalist Bob Woodward publishes a new book – Obama’s Wars (Simon & Schuster, 2010) – which reports deep divisions within the Barack Obama administration over its policies in Afghanistan and Iraq. The president views the current military “surge” in Afghanistan administration as a way not to achieve victory but to create the conditions for negotiations with the Taliban, and is determined to begin a drawdown of forces in mid-2011. Woodward’s book reveals in more detail than before that elements of the administration, including presidential advisers, believe both that this strategy is misconceived and that the United States-led effort in Afghanistan is becoming a lost cause.
A series of academic and biographical studies amplifies the understanding of the Afghan war and confirm the picture of the western forces’ deepening military predicament. …
Together we can move forward – Rasmussen on Russia-NATO relations
The Voice of Russia
By Yelizaveta Isakova and Maria Ustyuzhanina
September 24, 2010
…
Correspondent: My question is about your plans to deploy missile defense system in Europe. Are you going to use the radar in Armavir, Armenia, for the shield and would the missile defense system of the US, that is now in Poland, be involved?
[Anders Fog] Rasmussen: We have not yet started such detailed technical discussions on how to engage in cooperation on missile defense. But let me remind you that actually, we had certain cooperation between NATO and Russia on the so-called theatre missile defense. Until the spring 2008, we also conducted common exercises, as regards theatre missile defense. And I think that is an excellent point of departure for expanding this cooperation. As you know, we are currently considering within NATO to expand theatre missile defense to be a territorial missile defense. That is not only to protect deployed troops, but to protect the entire population. If we do so, I think it makes sense to invite Russia to cooperate also when it comes to territorial missile defense. And then, of course, there are a lot of technical details to be elaborated and we will do that in the next phase.
…
Read the full dialogue here: http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/09/24/22139427.html
Cleaning Up the Toxic Legacy of Closed Military Bases
DailyFinance
By Bruce Watson
September 24, 2010
The Department of Defense’s Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC) plans to close 20 military bases across the country by Sept. 15, 2011. Once a military facility closes, the ripple effect is felt throughout the surrounding communities: families lose neighbors, businesses lose customers and workers lose jobs. In this series of stories, DailyFinance looks at how closures have affected communities in the past, and at what some military families and the businesses that cater to them plan to do once their base closes.
Military base closures can leave behind a toxic environmental legacy that’s damaging and expensive to repair. In fact, the U.S. Force and Navy both rank among the top 100 polluters in America, and many of the bases they’ve left behind as a result of the BRAC closures have been declared Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency.
For most of the 20 bases that are currently slated to close, their path to a post-military rebirth will likely involve some measure of environmental remediation conducted either by the military or by private contractors. Depending upon the level of pollution and the vitality of the community, waste cleanup can vary considerably. To get an idea of what’s ahead for the bases slated to close, we’ve looked at two distinct cleanup cases …
Read on: www.dailyfinance.com/story/real-estate/closed-military-bases-leave-a-toxic-legacy/19638771/
U.S. Consolidates New Military Outposts In Eastern Europe
Eurasia Review
Written by Rick Rozoff
September 24, 2010
Two weeks after the United States started its third rotation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Baltic air patrol on September 1, with the deployment of F-15C Eagle fighter jets operating out of the Siauliai International Airport in Lithuania, neighboring Estonia finished a three-year project to upgrade its Amari Air Base in order to accommodate more NATO warplanes.
The opening ceremony for the enlarged base, which with expanded runways is able to host “16 NATO fighters, 20 transport planes [and] up to 2,000 people per day”, was held on September 15.
The Estonian base, like its Lithuanian counterpart, is a Soviet-era one modernized and extended for use by NATO, which financed 35 percent of the expansion. …
As the stock villains – Iran and North Korea – cannot be invoked as threats to the region, Estonia’s and Lithuania’s joint neighbor Russia is the inescapable candidate. …
Airfields are not the only locations where increased NATO and U.S. military presence is being felt in the Baltic Sea region.
On September 13 thirteen NATO member states and partners began this year’s annual Northern Coasts naval exercise in the Baltic Sea. Over 4,000 military personnel, more than 60 ships, and planes and helicopters from the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Finland and Sweden are involved in the largest exercise ever staged in Finnish waters, near the Bay of Bothnia where last year’s Loyal Arrow 2 NATO war games included “the biggest air force drill ever in the Finnish-Swedish Bothnia Bay.” …
Earlier this week Bulgarian Defense Minister Anyu Angelov announced that the draft of his nation’s National Security Strategy is “in total harmony with the draft Strategic Concept of NATO” and, contradicting a recent claim by President Georgi Parvanov, said “We should not make wrong conclusions from the contents of the draft National Security Strategy – such as concluding that the Bulgarian armed forces can protect the country in a large-scale military conflict on their own, and without NATO’s collective security system. …
Under an inter-governmental agreement, the US will be able to use together with the Bulgarian Army four military bases on Bulgarian soil, with a total of 2,500 soldiers, to go up to 5,000 during one-month rotation periods.” …
Read on: www.eurasiareview.com/201009248473/us-consolidates-new-military-outposts-in-eastern-europe.html
Days of rage: the Tea Party & America’s right
openDemocracy
By Max Blumenthal
September 17, 2010
The rise of the Tea Party movement in the United States in the first twenty months of Barack Obama’s presidency is shaking the political establishment, an effect reinforced by the victories of its candidates in Republican Party primaries. But where has the movement come from, and what is its inner life? Max Blumenthal, author of “Republican Gomorrah”, enters the heady world of the Tea Party to unravel the mix of driven personalities, feverish rhetoric, toxic hatreds, and flirtation with violence that fuel its sub-culture’s insurgent activism.
… I am not sure when I first detected the noxious fumes that would envelop the conservative movement in the Barack Obama era. It might have been in April 2009, when I visited a series of gun shows in rural California and Nevada. Perusing tables piled high with high-calibre semi-automatic weapons and chatting with anyone in my vicinity, I heard urgent warnings of mass roundups, concentration-camps, and a socialist government in Washington. “These people that are purchasing these guns are people that are worried about what’s going on in this country”, a gun dealer told me outside a show in Reno. “Good luck Obama”, a young gun enthusiast remarked to me. “We outnumber him 100 to 1.” At this time, the Tea Party movement had not even registered on the national-media’s radar.
In September 2009, I led a panel discussion at the University of California-Riverside about my book Republic Gomorrah (Basic/Nation Books, 2009). Inside an auditorium filled with nearly 100 students and faculty, I sat alongside Jonathan Walton, an African-American professor of religious studies and prolific writer, and Mark Takano, an erudite, openly gay former Democratic congressional candidate and local community-college trustee. In the middle of our discussion, a dozen college Republicans stormed the front of the stage with signs denouncing me as a “left-wing hack” while a hysterical young man leaped from the crowd, blowing kisses mockingly at Takano while heckling Walton as a “racist”. Afterward, university police-officers insisted on escorting me to my ride after the right-wing heckler attempted to follow me as he shouted threats. …
My encounter with this aggressive right-wing cadre seemed a strange, isolated event. But the hostility turned out to be symptomatic of the intensifying campaign to delegitimise President Obama and his allies in Congress. The right’s days of rage were only beginning. …
Members of the Tea Party “Patriots” did not seem to care that their rhetoric was irrational, or that comparing Obama to Hitler and Stalin was contradictory and obviously hyperbolic. Their motives were entirely negative. By purging government of the multicultural evil that had seized power through illicit means (several activists told me they believed Acorn helped Obama steal the election), they were convinced that a mythical golden American yesteryear would return. They had no interest in building anything new or even articulating an agenda, much less discussing the merits of policies. The Tea Party’s primary concern was cultural purification – freedom from, not freedom to. Against the dark image of the president and his liberal allies, Tea Party activists defined themselves as the children of light. The racial subtext was always transparent. …
Read on: www.opendemocracy.net/max-blumenthal/days-of-rage-tea-party-and-american-conservatism
US under secretary optimistic about “reset”
The Voice of Russia
September 13, 2010
The US Under Secretary of State William Burns has given an extensive interview to the ‘Interfax’ news agency following talks in Moscow with Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.
As is clear from the interview, William Burns is sure that the new Senate will ratify the START-3 Treaty with Russia and that the two countries will establish cooperation in building a missile defense system. In addition, the issue of Russia’s membership in WTO should be clarified by September 30th , as agreed by Presidents Dmitry Medvedev and Barack Obama at a summit in Washington in June this year and in view of Russia’s progress in seeking the WTO membership.
The US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and White House officials repeatedly indicated the same. But the United States is gripped by a party struggle in the run-up to midterm elections in November, with Republicans attacking the administration on every conceivable point. Given the situation, the newly signed START Treaty is interpreted as a major foreign policy lapse which threatens national security. According to reports from overseas, if the Republicans get control of the Senate, the new START will not be ratified.
As for Russian-US cooperation in missile defense, there has been much talk about it lately but no tangible results. …
Read on: http://english.ruvr.ru/2010/09/13/20109580.html
Afghanistan: wind of change
From Open Democracy, written By Paul Rogers
September 9, 2010
The annual report for 2010 of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a leading establishment think-tank, raises the prospect of a shift in western policy in Afghanistan.
The London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) is one of the world’s leading security think-tanks with a high status in defence circles in western Europe and north America. Its two main annual publications, The Military Balance (an assessment of military capabilities and defence economics worldwide, published in February) and Strategic Survey (a review of global security, published in September) are studied and taken seriously by governments and opinion-formers. The IISS is very much a mainstream organisation, heavily engaged with the defence and security establishment. As such it carries considerable weight.
On 24 May 2004, only fourteen months after the start of the Iraq war, the IISS’s Strategic Survey 2003-04 caused some consternation among the Tony Blair government in arguing that: “…the substantially exposed US military deployment in Iraq represents al-Qaida with perhaps its most ‘iconic’ target outside US territory…Galvanised by Iraq, if compromised by Afghanistan, al-Qaida remains a viable and effective ‘network of networks’”.
This interpretation was not greatly different from analyses by more radical if less establishment sources, some of them presented in earlier columns in this series (see “Iraq in a wider war“, 5 May 2004); but the prestige of the IISS meant that it carried greater weight.
This year’s document – Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs – is published only weeks before the Afghan war enters its tenth year, has once again caused flurries in government circles. Its assessment of the state of the conflict in Afghanistan is blunt (see Richard Norton-Taylor, “Al-Qaida and Taliban threat is exaggerated, says security thinktank”, Guardian, 7 September 2010).
The IISS comments: “The Afghan campaign has involved not just mission creep but mission multiplication”; and that “..for western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests”.
At the core of its analysis is the view that: “It is not clear that it should be axiomatically obvious that an Afghanistan freed of an international combat presence in the south would be an automatic magnet for al-Qaeda’s concentrated reconstruction. Al-Qaeda leadership, such as it is, may be quite content to stay where it is, while Taliban leaders who remained in Afghanistan might think twice of the advantages to them of inviting al-Qaeda back after the experience of the last decade.”
To repeat, this kind of assessment is shared elsewhere by more radical analysts; the significance here is the status of IISS in and around the corridors of power. It does not advocate withdrawal of all military forces as the answer, but does point in the direction of a very considerable drawdown as part of substantial changes in overall policy.
Pakistan and America: costs of militarism
Open Democracy
By Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed
September 8, 2010
Pakistan’s immense problems can begin to be solved only when powerful interests in Islamabad and Washington end their commitment to armed solutions.
Pakistan is in the eye of many storms. It lies at the heart of the United States’s almost decade-long “war on terror”, with an ever-ambiguous position (in Washington’s view) as an unreliable and perhaps even renegade ally. It is a society riven by enormous social inequalities and deep political, religious and ethnic divisions. It is frequently hit by acts of pitiless violence, from the targeting by religious extremists of members of rival faiths to “drone attacks” by US forces which kill innocent civilians. …
This mix of political crisis, natural tragedy and everyday corruption is itself an indication of how intractable Pakistan’s problems are. What is also clear is that the most serious of these problems go to the very top, and relate to the nature of the state and its institutions (not least its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence [ISI] agency). If there is a way forward for Pakistan, a path beyond violence and extremism, it surely lies in addressing how these institutions operate – in particular, how the years of war in Afghanistan and its spillover effects in Pakistan have entrenched militarism and strengthened those forces in Pakistan most beyond democratic control. …
The WikiLeaks “revelations” provoked a great outpouring of publicity, which in great part is owed to the nature of the project and the way it cooperated with established newspapers (such as the New York Times and Der Spiegel) to maximise impact. So it is important to stress that where the ISI is concerned the documents offer nothing new. US military intelligence has known for several decades that Pakistan’s state sponsors Islamist networks (see Paul Rogers, “The Afghan war via WikiLeaks“, 29 July 2010).
There are many examples to confirm this in existing official records. For example, two declassified reports of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in Washington – dated two weeks after 9/11, and released in September 2003 – observe that Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network was “able to expand under the safe sanctuary extended by Taliban following Pakistan directives” and funded by the ISI.
In addition, confidential Nato reports and US intelligence assessments circulated to White House officials in 2008 confirm consistent ISI support for Taliban insurgents. They indicate that Pakistan’s current chief-of-staff, General Ashfaq Kayani – who served as head of the ISI from 2004-07 – presided over Taliban training-camps in Pakistan’s western province of Balochistan and provided militants with over 2,000 rocket-propelled grenades and 400,000 rounds of ammunition. In the same year, US intelligence intercepted Kayani’s description of the senior insurgent leader Maulavi Jalaluddin Haqqani as a “strategic asset” in the insurgency around Kabul and eastern Afghanistan.
Britain, another key ally of both Pakistan and the United States, has also long been aware of this involvement. A leaked report in 2006 by the ministry of defence-run think-tank, the Defence Academy, spelled out the ISI’s “dual role in combating terrorism” while simultaneously “supporting the Taliban [and] supporting terrorism and extremism”.
A practice of successive British governments has been to overlook such while trumpeting Pakistan’s brilliance at fighting the “war on terror”. …
www.opendemocracy.net/nafeez-mosaddeq-ahmed/pakistan-and-united-states-costs-of-militarism
Afghanistan: This Way to the Egress
Huffington Post (blog)
By Michael Brenner
September 7, 2010
Long inconclusive wars — pseudo-wars and crypto-wars included — have the effect of draining away just about everything. Manpower, equipment, money, political support, diplomatic capital, ethical standards, patience — all start to run out. The one commodity sparingly used has been critical intelligence. That sad truth goes a long way toward explaining why we’re in such a quandary. Years ago, Charlie Schultz of OMB and Brookings renown cogently remarked that, in his considerable experience of government, most wasteful of time in policy deliberations was a failure to enunciate clearly at the outset what the ‘problem’ was and what the purpose of actions being reviewed was. Afghanistan and Iraq are testaments to that assertion’s accuracy. …
One thing (and only one thing) is plain: we do not want the United States to be exposed to another 9/11 type operation organized, directed or executed by al-Qaeda using Afghanistan as any sort of base. Once we get beyond that commonsensical declaration, a thick fog sets in. President Obama is the main culprit since 1) he is the man in charge; 2) his public statements have obscured more than they have clarified. Above all, he casually mixes together al-Qaeda and the Taliban. That is fatal. For were the objective to eliminate Taliban in its several guises as a force in Afghanistan that controls any sizeable territory or enjoys any substantial measure of freedom of action, then we might as well sign the contract now for some firm to strike the 25th, 50th and 75th commemorative medallions for Operation Forevermore. …
So we expect to be there a long time. Some people in the foreign affairs establishment clearly see the United States exercising military dominion across an enormous swath of Islamic Asia for the indefinite future. …
Read the Michael Benner’s post here: www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-brenner/afghanistan-this-way-to-t_b_707577.html
A Complex War in the Shadows
From the Oxford Research Group, written By Paul Rogers
This article looks at recent developments in Afghanistan and the United States’ increasingly shadowy war against al-Qaida. It also examines the planned withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq and the debate about the US withdrawal from Afghanistan due to start in July 2011.
Afghanistan
… The political strategy has moved towards advocating the start of a withdrawal by July 2011, meaning that the current surge in US forces is very much a short-term phenomenon. The idea is that in less than a year’s time, the US military superiority will be so effective that it will be possible to negotiate with weakened insurgents. While it is tacitly accepted that the eventual outcome will be some kind of Taliban participation in governance, this will be represented as no more than a minority influence – a necessary aid to achieving stability. …
Iraq
… At first sight, it would appear dangerous for the US military to continue its withdrawal, but the reality is that the “withdrawal” is partly a matter of semantics. A large proportion of the 50,000 US troops remaining in the country have been defined as “advise and assist brigades” that are intended to support and train the Iraqi security forces. In practice, these are combat brigades that have simply been re-assigned to new roles while retaining their full combat capabilities. Furthermore, they are supported by helicopter and fixed-wing air power and there are further US forces across the border in Kuwait. …
The al-Qaida Movement
… The re-emergence of al-Qaida-linked paramilitaries in Iraq has caused concern within the country and also in Washington, as has the growing power of groups in Somalia and Yemen which have their own links with the movement. …
Read or download the full article from www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk
South Korean government impeded Russian team’s Cheonan investigation
Donald Gregg Former U.S. ambassador to South Korea urges full disclosure of long-delayed report on navy warship’s sinking
The Hankyoreh
September 4, 2010
By Kwon Tae-ho
Current Korea Society chairman and former United States Ambassador to South Korea Donald Gregg, who raised doubts about the South Korean government’s Cheonan investigation findings in a piece for the International Herald Tribune, claims that the South Korean government impeded an investigation by a Russian team of experts. In a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh on Friday, Gregg said that the South Korean Government “must remove all doubts by announcing in detail the findings of the Joint Investigation group” (JIG). In his International Herald Tribune contribution Wednesday, Gregg wrote that the Russian team “concluded that [the Cheonan’s] sinking was more likely due to a mine than to a torpedo.”
The following is the text of the interview. Gregg’s responses are taken directly from the interview transcript.
Q: What was the basis for the Russian team reaching that conclusion?
A: Their conclusion was tentative. Because they were not given access to all of the material they wanted to see, and they were not allowed to conduct [simulation] tests. …
Q: Did the Russian team receive any help from the South Korean government during its investigation?
A: The Russians were frustrated that they couldn’t get access to all of the material that they wanted to see, and were not allowed to conduct tests, so they were unable to carry out the investigation. This is also the reason no Chinese investigation team went to South Korea. …
Q: Do you also think that the Cheonan’s sinking resulted from an accident rather than a North Korean attack?
A: I don’t know. But if you look at the situation at the time, North Korea had proposed the third summit, it was preparing U.S.-North Korea talks, and they invited Lee Hee-ho, Kim Dae-jung’s widow, to visit Pyongyang. It makes no sense that they would undo all of that by sinking the Cheonan. …
Read the full article here: http://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_northkorea/438299.html
Afghanistan: North Atlantic Military Bloc’s Ten-Year War In South Asia
Center for Research on Globalization
By Rick Rozoff
September 1, 2010
In slightly over a month, on October 7, the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan will enter its tenth year.
The conflict represents the longest continuous combat operations in the history of the United States and Afghanistan alike. With the North Atlantic Treaty Organization for the only time in its existence activating its Article 5 mutual military assistance clause in September 2001 and thus entering the Afghan fray, European nations that had not been at war since the Second World War are now engaged in an endless combat mission.
There are 150,000 foreign troops in Afghanistan, 120,000 of them under the command of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Military personnel from over a quarter of the 192 members of the United Nations.
They include soldiers from almost every European country, several Asia-Pacific states, and nations in the Americas and the Middle East.
NATO has grown from 19 to 28 members since it took control of ISAF in 2003 and has expanded military partnerships with several nations that have deployed troops to Afghanistan, from Australia to Georgia, Montenegro to South Korea, Armenia to the United Arab Emirates.
In the same interim the North Atlantic military bloc has assumed the role of an international, expeditionary, increasingly more multifaceted and politicized armed intervention force, a status that will be formalized this November at its summit in Portugal when its first 21st century Strategic Concept is adopted.
In the middle of August the death count for U.S. and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan passed the 2,000 mark and has grown almost every day since – 2051 by August 31 – with American fatalities accounting for some 60 percent of the total. The U.S. suffered 19 combat deaths in the four days beginning on August 28.
Troops from at least 26 nations serving under NATO’s ISAF have been killed in Afghanistan, a record number of countries to sacrifice soldiers in one nation. 521 foreign troops lost their lives in the Afghan war theater last year, a dramatic increase from the preceding year when 295 were killed. So far this year the number is 478, with 2010 poised to be the deadliest year in the nine-year war for U.S. and NATO forces.
The amount of foreign soldiers killed is matched if not exceeded by the number of Afghan civilians slain by NATO. …
NATO’s war in Afghanistan is being used not only to integrate the armed forces of over 50 nations into a U.S.-controlled globally deployable military force, but also to expand the Pentagon’s reach into Eastern Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, ever closer to the borders of Russia, Iran and China.
Since 2005 the U.S. has acquired seven new military bases in Romania and Bulgaria, including strategic air bases, and launched the world’s first multinational strategic airlift operation at the Papa Air Base in Hungary. …
www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20857
The Pentagon’s Double Envelopment of President Barack Obama
Truthout
By Melvin A. Goodman
September 1, 2010
The “double envelopment” or pincer movement is a classic military maneuver that finds the flanks of the opponent under simultaneous attack from the opposing forces. …
Now, President Barack Obama finds himself the victim of a political double envelopment in which the Pentagon, having ostensibly agreed to a strategy calling for discussion of withdrawal from Afghanistan, is already campaigning and planning for an extended stay. On one flank, the Pentagon is undertaking a huge base expansion program that will support a regional military strategy against Russia, China and Iran. On the other flank, the senior military leadership is walking away from any notion of even gradual withdrawal beginning in 2011. …
Read on: www.truth-out.org/the-pentagons-double-envelopment-president-barack-obama62876
Towards a World War III scenario? The role of Israel in triggering an attack on Iran
The stockpiling and deployment of advanced weapons systems directed against Iran started in the immediate wake of the 2003 bombing and invasion of Iraq. From the outset, these war plans were led by the US, in liaison with NATO and Israel.
Following the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration identified Iran and Syria as the next stage of “the road map to war”. …
While Iran is encircled by US and allied military bases, the Islamic Republic has significant military capabilities. What is important to acknowledge is the sheer size of Iranian forces in terms of personnel (army, navy, air force) when compared to US and NATO forces serving in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Confronted with a well organized insurgency, coalition forces are already overstretched in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Would these forces be able to cope if Iranian forces were to enter the existing battlefield in Iraq and Afghanistan? The potential of the Resistance movement to US and allied occupation would inevitably be affected. …
While Iran’s advanced weapons do not measure up to those of the US and NATO, Iranian forces would be in a position to inflict substantial losses to coalition forces in a conventional war theater, on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan. Iranian ground troops and tanks in December 2009 crossed the border into Iraq without being confronted or challenged by allied forces and occupied a disputed territory in the East Maysan oil field.
Even in the event of an effective Blitzkrieg, which targets Iran’s military facilities, its communications systems, etc. through massive aerial bombing, using cruise missiles, conventional bunker buster bombs and tactical nuclear weapons, a war with Iran, once initiated, could eventually lead into a ground war. This is something which US military planners have no doubt contemplated in their simulated war scenarios. …
Read more here: www.campaigniran.org/casmii/index.php?q=node/10648
Five Mind-Blowing Scenarios for Wartime D.C.
CBS News, August 16, 2010, Tom Engelhardt
… Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, the sort of place that — with its multiple bus routes, more than 30,000 inhabitants, PXes, Internet cafés, fast-food restaurants, barracks, and all the sinews of war — we like to call military bases, but that are unique in the history of this planet.
“Anyone who thinks the United States is really going to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 needs to come to this giant air base an hour away from Kabul. There’s construction everywhere. It’s exactly what you wouldn’t expect from a transient presence.” The old Russian base, long a hub for U.S. military (and imprisonment) activities in that country is now, as he describes it, a giant construction site and its main drag, Disney Drive, a massive traffic pile-up. (“If the Navy could figure out a way to bring a littoral-combat ship to a landlocked country, it would idle on Disney.”) Its flight line is packed with planes — “C-17s, Predators, F-16s, F-15s, MC-12 passenger planes” — and Bagram, he concludes, “is starting to feel like a dynamic exurb before the housing bubble burst.”
… For almost nine years, the U.S. military has been building up Bagram. Now, the Obama administration’s response to the Afghan disaster on its hands is — and who, at this late date, could be surprised? — a further build-up. …
The article goes on to imagine five “what if Washington? …” scenarios, “five possibilities, five pathways, that — given our world — verge on the fictional. …”
Read on: www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/15/opinion/main6775854.shtml
Heritage v. Hartung on New START
Huffington Post (blog)
William Hartung
August 13, 2010
I have had the distinct honor and privilege of waging a debate on the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) with James Carafano and Baker Spring of the Heritage Foundation. The pieces, which ran on the conservative web site the Daily Caller, can be seen here, here, here, here, here and here. …
As with all debates of this sort, the first question to ask is “Why does it matter?” In addition to the marginal entertainment value it provides, this debate matters because New START matters, and the arguments Heritage is making against the treaty are a good representation of what the treaty’s opponents have been saying. …
And why does New START matter? Because it is a modest but essential first step towards bringing the nuclear threat under control. By reducing each side’s deployed strategic warheads to 1,550, it reinforces a basic position of parity while reducing force levels by about one-third. It puts in place a sophisticated verification system that includes satellite monitoring, information exchanges, and 18 annual on-site inspections. It will set the stage for further talks with Russia on eliminating short-range, tactical nuclear weapons. And it will give the U.S. greater leverage in persuading other nations to reduce their own nuclear arsenals. ..
Read on: www.huffingtonpost.com/william-hartung/heritage-v-hartung-on-new_b_681518.html
New START at a Glance: http://legacy.armscontrol.org/factsheets/NewSTART
Defense spending cuts decried as severe, but they’re meant to stave off worse
Fort Worth Star Telegram
By Bob Cox
August 13, 2010
Defense Secretary Robert Gates believes that the U.S. government is hurtling toward a financial train wreck, and he’s trying to minimize the damage to the Pentagon and the armed forces by taking steps to trim military spending.
But the heated reaction to the modest cuts Gates proposed last week shows that making significant, carefully reasoned changes in defense spending will be difficult at best.
Gates’ plan to close the Joint Forces Command based in Norfolk, Va., one of 10 U.S. military commands, is an initial step in a plan to save $100 billion over the next five years. He’s also proposed reducing the number of generals and admirals and cutting spending on outside contractors.
Savings from the cuts would be used to pay for weapons and personnel benefits, reduce Pentagon funding requests and hopefully stave off draconian cuts to weapons programs such as the F-35 joint strike fighter. …
The article also lists examples of where the Defense budget could be trimmed e.g. …
… Reduce U.S. nuclear arsenal to 1,000 warheads deployed on 160 Minuteman missiles and seven nuclear submarines. Saving: $113.5 billion over 10 years
Cap peacetime U.S. military presence in Europe at 35,000 troops and in Asia at 65,000. Reduce size of Marines and Army to 2001 levels. Saving $227 billion over 10 years …
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/08/13/2403486/defense-spending-cuts-decried.html
Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah
‘worse than Hiroshima’
The shocking rates of infant mortality and cancer in Iraqi city
raise new questions about battle
From The Independent, By Patrick Cockburn, July 24 2010
Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.
Read more here: www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/toxic-legacy-of-us-assault-on-fallujah-worse-than-hiroshima-2034065.html
On Friday 23 July 2010 and in response to news of this shocking report Lindis Percy (Coordinator with Laila Packer) went to the American base at Menwith Hill and scattered notices around the carpark of the base which said ‘THE DISGRACE OF FALLUGA’ and stuck them on the invalid military land byelaw notices around the base.
US Military Bases on Guam in Global Perspective
By Catherine Lutz, Japan Focus
Guam’s military bases are part of the expansive US military basing system around the world and on the US mainland. That system is vast in scale and impact and has a particular if contentious rationale. It is important to examine what it means to live next to military facilities for several reasons:
- To study them with the tools of anthropology and the perspective of social science allows us to question the common sense about them and to see invisible processes.
- Like most social phenomena, bases are often hidden in plain sight. They are normalized from day to day, but are partially denormalized when they grow or shrink. Even then, much remains invisible and accepted as the natural order of things.
- Like social phenomena in which power is involved, their effects can be systematically hidden by advertising, fear, and public relations work.
Military base communities are in many ways as distinctive sociologically and anthropologically as the military bases they sit next to, because they respond in almost every way to the presence of those bases. They are not simply independent neighbors, but over time become conjoined, although one is always much more powerful than the other.
Read the article here:
www.japanfocus.org/-Catherine-Lutz/3389
Arrogance of power
By Paul Balles, July 24, 2010, Gulf Daily News
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, ending the Cold War, America breathed a sigh of relief.
A problem that should have been addressed at that point was neglected. The question that should have dominated American thinking: Do we really need to maintain the many US military bases abroad?
Twelve years after the Soviet collapse, America reportedly had 702 military bases in about 130 countries and another 6,000 in the US and its territories.
That report failed to include a number of so-called secret bases and those in the Middle East.
As military historian Chalmers Johnston observed: “…the US dominates the world through its military power. Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet.
“This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire….”
“By last year, the number of American bases outside of the US had increased to more than 1,000. …”
Read on … :
http://www.gulf-daily-news.com/NewsDetails.aspx?storyid=282979
A tale of three wars: Afghanistan, Iraq…Iran
Paul Rogers, 22 July 2010
The United States and its allies are rethinking their commitment to Afghanistan by the week. But an attack on Iran would return all calculations to ground zero.
The dominant political assessment in the United States of the future of the Afghanistan war is undergoing a significant shift. The nature of the change is suggested by the contrast with the atmospherics of the presidential election campaign of 2008. At that time, a clear division emerged between the two candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, over attitudes to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The view of John McCain, the Republican Party candidate, was that the Iraq war was being won (the continuing violence there notwithstanding), in great part thanks to the military “surge” in American troop-numbers from 2007; and that in Afghanistan a similar strategy would lead to a comprehensive defeat of the Taliban. The political implication was that a McCain victory in the election would complete the triumph of the two wars begun by George W Bush, and regain the momentum needed to build the “new American century”.
The view of Barack Obama, the Democratic Party candidate, involved making a distinction between the two campaigns. Iraq was, in effect, the “bad war” – wrong in conception, disastrous in execution – which left the only honourable option a progressive US withdrawal within the first term of a new administration. Afghanistan was the “good war”, justified in its origin by the Taliban’s supporting role in the 9/11 attacks and demanding a continued commitment to see it through.
In the event, it was Barack Obama who had to carry the military responsibility of political victory. A few months into office, his administration was facing a deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and – after a lengthy process of internal consultation – took the decision to expand the war, in two ways …
Read the rest of this article here:
www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/tale-of-three-wars-afghanistan-iraqiran
America’s Global Empire of Military Bases
The Freedom to get Paid for Lying
July 23, 2010
In total, there are 255,065 US military personnel deployed Worldwide.
These facilities include a total of 845,441 different buildings and equipments. The underlying land surface is of the order of 30 million acres. According to Gelman, who examined 2005 official Pentagon data, the US is thought to own a total of 737 bases in foreign lands. Adding to the bases inside U.S. territory, the total land area occupied by US military bases domestically within the US and internationally is of the order of 2,202,735 hectares, which makes the Pentagon one of the largest landowners worldwide …
Even if politicians and media pundits seem oblivious to these bases, treating the stationing of U.S. troops all over the world as a natural fact, the U.S. empire of bases is attracting increasing attention from academics and activists–as evidenced by a conference on U.S. foreign bases at American University in late February. NYU Press just published Catherine Lutz’s Bases of Empire, a book that brings together academics who study U.S. military bases and activists against the bases. Rutgers University Press has published Kate McCaffrey’s Military Power and Popular Protest, a study of the U.S. base at Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was closed in the face of massive protests from the local population. And Princeton University Press is about to publish David Vine’s Island of Shame–a book that tells the story of how the United States and Britain secretly agreed to deport the Chagossian inhabitants of Diego Garcia to Mauritius and the Seychelles so their island could be turned into a military base. The Americans were so thorough that they even gassed all the Chagossian dogs. The Chagossians have been denied their day in court in the United States but won their case against the British government in three trials, only to have the judgment overturned by the highest court in the land, the House of Lords. They are now appealing to the European Court of Human Rights.
American leaders speak of foreign bases as cementing alliances with foreign nations, largely through the trade and aid agreements that often accompany base leases. Yet, U.S. soldiers live in a sort of cocooned simulacrum of America in their bases, watching American TV, listening to American rap and heavy metal, and eating American fast food, so that the transplanted farm boys and street kids have little exposure to another way of life. Meanwhile, on the other side of the barbed-wire fence, local residents and businesses often become economically dependent on the soldiers and have a stake in their staying. …
Naval laser test blasts drones from the sky
USA Today, 19 July 2010
Death rays are making some interesting strides. In a series of tests in the last week of May. Lasers took on unmanned aircraft in a test off San Nicolas Island, the naval weapons proving ground off the coast of California.
In a few seconds, six fiber-optic lasers with a combined 32 kilowatts of power fried up the drones in the tests.
Read more here & watch a video of the test:
www.usatoday.com/tech/science/columnist/vergano/2010-07-18-laser-drones_N.htm
On Greg Mortensen’s Influence on the U.S. Military and our COIN doctrine
National Security Forum / New York Times
July 17, 2010
Colleagues: In a recent post I noted how much the U.S. Army and top military leaders had been influenced by Greg Mortensen, the author or the highly acclaimed, “Three Cups of Tea”. However, that has been a reciprocal relationship, as Mortensen himself acknowledges in his second book, “Stones into Schools”.
Mortensen’s books have become required reading for the American military, as they have inspired much of the “population-centric”, nation-building aspects of our current counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine. The Chairman of the JCS, Admiral Mike Mullen, GEN Dave Petraeus, and GEN Stan McChrystal have all become close friends and admirers of Mortensen. In turn, Greg has become a passionate advocate for the military and its COIN doctrine, shifting away from his criticism of our earlier approach, which he believed relied too much on indiscriminate bombing, night raids, and Predator strikes. This NYT article … has more detail.
In the frantic last hours of Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s command in Afghanistan, when the world wondered what was racing through the general’s mind, he reached out to an unlikely corner of his life: the author of the book “Three Cups of Tea,” Greg Mortenson.
“Will move through this and if I’m not involved in the years ahead, will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future,” General McChrystal wrote to Mr. Mortenson in an e-mail message, as he traveled from Kabul to Washington. The note landed in Mr. Mortenson’s inbox shortly after 1 a.m. Eastern time on June 23. Nine hours later, the general walked into the Oval Office to be fired by President Obama.
The e-mail message was in response to a note of support from Mr. Mortenson. It reflected his broad and deepening relationship with the United States military, whose leaders have increasingly turned to Mr. Mortenson, once a shaggy mountaineer, to help translate the theory of counterinsurgency into tribal realities on the ground.
In the past year, Mr. Mortenson and his Central Asia Institute, responsible for the construction of more than 130 schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan, mostly for girls, have set up some three dozen meetings between General McChrystal or his senior staff members and village elders across Afghanistan.
The collaboration, which grew in part out of the popularity of “Three Cups of Tea” among military wives who told their husbands to read it, extends to the office of Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Last summer, Admiral Mullen attended the opening of one of Mr. Mortenson’s schools in Pushghar, a remote village in Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains.
Mr. Mortenson — who for a time lived out of his car in Berkeley, Calif. — has also spoken at dozens of military bases, seen his book go on required reading lists for senior American military commanders and had lunch with Gen. David H. Petraeus, General McChrystal’s replacement. On Friday he was in Tampa to meet with Adm. Eric T. Olson, the officer in charge of the United States Special Operations Command.
Mr. Mortenson, 52, thinks there is no military solution in Afghanistan — he says the education of girls is the real long-term fix — so he has been startled by the Defense Department’s embrace.
“I never, ever expected it,” Mr. Mortenson, a former Army medic, said in a telephone interview last week from Florida, where he had paused between military briefings, book talks for a sequel, “Stones into Schools,” and fund-raising appearances for his institute.
Mr. Mortenson, who said he had accepted no money from the military and had no contractual relationship with the Defense Department, was initially critical of the armed forces in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks as “laptop warriors” who appeared, he said, indifferent to the civilian casualties inflicted by the American bombardment of Afghanistan. …
Japan-U.S. Relations Could Get Bumpy
Newsweek: by Tobias Harris, July 16, 2010
Washington’s interest in a more active security partnership—in which Japan would spend more on its armed forces, participate more in overseas operations, and perhaps even revise or reinterpret its Constitution to permit self-defense within the alliance—will continue to face serious obstacles because of Tokyo’s unsettled domestic politics.
… As the government’s fiscal situation worsens, it becomes less and less likely that Tokyo will take up an ambitious security policy agenda. Fixing the government’s finances is a key step to addressing the other pocketbook issues with which voters are concerned. It is unlikely that a government implementing controversial budget cuts and tax increases would also take up the contentious question of how it should contribute to the defense of Japan and security in East and Central Asia. Its fear would be that the public would punish leaders perceived as focused on problems far from Japanese shores as it implements policies that hurt Japanese households. Moreover, for a cash-strapped government, the status quo, in which Japan limits its defense spending while subsidizing U.S. bases in Japan, continues to suit Japan’s interests. The logic of the Yoshida doctrine—which was formulated during the early postwar period, and which called for low defense spending combined with an alliance founded on U.S. bases in Japan—remains relevant today: Japanese leaders once saw the doctrine as the key to postwar economic development, and now the same policies provide resources for shoring up Japan’s social safety net and halting economic decline. …
www.newsweek.com/2010/07/16/a-fragile-alliance.html
America divided: the politics of inequality
openDemocracy: by Godfrey Hodgson, 16 July 2010
The entrenchment of inequality in the United States damages the economy, degrades politics and corrodes the American dream …
The economic crisis in the United States has had a profound impact on the lives of millions of its citizens. Among the most damaging is the experience of unemployment. In a country where notions of work, self-reliance, and self-improvement are fundamental to its identity, the insecurities and hardships associated with forced idleness are hard indeed to cope with.
The persistence of large-scale unemployment is a standing affront to another of America’s core ideas: that, as the country’s founding document says, all men are created equal. True, the signatories of the Declaration of Independence were here pledging fidelity to a natural-rights principle than thinking of absolute or even relative economic equality.
Still, an important element in the American public philosophy has always been the idea that the United States does offer, certainly has offered, greater economic equality, and in particular greater and more equal economic opportunity. This was the American dream.
Now, that proposition has become dubious. Many Americans question whether life will be as good for their children as it was for their parents. There is much statistical evidence to suggest that the United States is neither exceptionally equal nor exceptional in its modern record of upward social mobility.
On the basis of such evidence I myself have written that “by all statistical measures . . . the United States, in terms of income and wealth, is the most unequal country in the world. While the average income in the United States is still almost the highest in the world . . . the gap between wealth and poverty is higher than anywhere else, and is growing steadily greater” …
www.opendemocracy.net/godfrey-hodgson/america-divided-broken-social-contract
Russia Seeks to Impose New ABM Treaty on the US
by Developing BMD
This week, the new First Deputy Defense Minister, Colonel-General Vladimir Popovkin (Retired), described in an interview … his priorities in reforming the defense ministry and rearming Russia’s armed forces.
The S-500 will be an air and ballistic missile defense (BMD) system … that … will have a range of 600 kilometers (km) and could intercept ballistic missiles with a range of 3,500 km, flying at speeds of 5 km/second …
Read the article here: http://georgiandaily.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=19340&Itemid=132
Israel vs Iran: fallout of a war
Paul Rogers, 15 July 2010
An Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear and missile infrastructure and personnel would be far more extensive than many realise. The prospect that it will happen in the next few months is increasing.
The voices in Washington calling for a military strike on Iranian nuclear plants are growing in number and strength. The cautious attitude of the Barack Obama administration itself in relation to such a course means that direct military action by the United States itself remains on balance unlikely … But current trends in the middle east suggest that the prospect of Israeli action against Iran in the next few months is coming closer …
These include oft-repeated reports that Iran is rearming Hizbollah in southern Lebanon, and that Syria is supplying Hizbollah with some of its Iranian-made M-600 ballistic-missiles. The M-600 is a solid-fuel missile with a range stretching over much of Israel – a much more potent weapon than those fired in the Israel-Lebanon war of July-August 2006 …
Israel’s current concern over a resumption of conflict with Hizbollah, however, is overshadowed by its analysis of the benefits, costs and consequences of an attempt to strike a decisive blow against Iran. Binyamin Netanyahu, concluding his visit to the United States with an interview on Fox News, described Iran as “the ultimate terrorist threat” and said that for Iran to think it can maintain its nuclear ambitions would be a mistake. …
Read the rest of this article here:
www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/israel-vs-iran-fallout-of-war
South Korean villagers say ‘No!’ to U.S. Navy base
The Times Record Opinion pages; by Bruce K. Gagnon; July 2, 2010
I have recently returned from a weeklong trip to South Korea, where I visited several communities that are experiencing major expansion of U.S. military bases. Several farming and fishing villages, each more than 400 years old, are either being completely destroyed or severely impacted as their lands are taken for the enlargement of U.S. bases.
The Washington Post reported several years ago that the U.S. would be doubling its military presence in the Asian-Pacific region in order to “manage” China. Thus we now see U.S. base expansion on Guam, Okinawa and in South Korea.
One such case is the small Gangjeong fishing village on Jeju Island in South Korea. The South Korean Navy is ostensibly building this base, but when members of our organization called the South Korean Embassy in Washington, D.C., to support the opposition to the base by local residents they were told, “Don’t call us, call your own [U.S.] government. They are pushing us to build this base.”
The U.S. wants to deploy Aegis destroyers, built here at Bath Iron Works, at the base on Jeju Island largely because of its strategic proximity to China. China imports 80 percent of its oil on ships and a Navy base on Jeju would help give the U.S. ability to “control” this vital shipping lane in the Yellow Sea. While the declining U.S. economy can’t compete with China anymore, the Pentagon is embarking on a strategy that says if we can control access to declining supplies of oil then we will still hold the keys to the global economic engine.
A very provocative strategy indeed.
Gangjeong village is famous for growing tangerines and for its fishing and soft coral reefs. UNESCO has named the sea coast there as one of the world’s environmental jewels. The building of a Navy base in Gangjeong, to serve as a port for the growing U.S. Aegis destroyer fleet, will require dredging of the sea bed and destruction of the coral. …
Read on:
www.timesrecord.com/articles/2010/07/02/opinion/commentaries/doc4c2e2493e0dfe283807936.txt
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