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laststeamtrain Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-07-09 09:30 PM
Original message
Obama nearing decision to send more troops to Afghanistan
Source: McClatchy Newspapers

Obama nearing decision to send more troops to Afghanistan
By Jonathan S. Landay, John Walcott and Nancy A. Youssef, McClatchy Newspapers Sat Nov 7, 2:22 pm ET

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan next year, but he may not announce it until after he consults with key allies and completes a trip to Asia later this month, administration and military officials have told McClatchy .

As it now stands, the administration's plan calls for sending three Army brigades from the 101st Airborne Division at Fort Campbell, Ky. and the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, N.Y. and a Marine brigade, for a total of as many as 23,000 additional combat and support troops.

Another 7,000 troops would man and support a new division headquarters for the international force's Regional Command (RC) South in Kandahar , the Taliban birthplace where the U.S. is due to take command in 2010. Some 4,000 additional U.S. trainers are likely to be sent as well, the officials said.

The first additional combat brigade probably would arrive in Afghanistan next March, the officials said, with the other three following at roughly three-month intervals, meaning that all the additional U.S. troops probably wouldn't be deployed until the end of next year. Army brigades number 3,500 to 5,000 soldiers; a Marine brigade has about 8,000 troops.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/mcclatchy/3351521
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unkachuck Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-07-09 09:54 PM
Response to Original message
1. "...Obama...
...is nearing a decision to send more than 30,000 additional U.S. troops to Afghanistan..."

....anything, for our fearless military to defeat Ronald Reagans Mujahdeen 'freedom fighters' in Afghanistan....
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elocs Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-07-09 10:30 PM
Response to Original message
2. Was there ever any doubt? n/t
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Blandocyte Donating Member (830 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-07-09 10:53 PM
Response to Original message
3. Quagmire
giggity giggity
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USA_1 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sat Nov-07-09 11:22 PM
Response to Original message
4. The Smarter Thing to do is to Withdraw
... and to send the bill for the war to Bush.
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silver10 Donating Member (492 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 12:24 AM
Response to Original message
5. Didn't he promise to get us out...
of these wars, the major reason I voted for him?

We're not out of either, people continue to die, and unemployment continues to rise. WTF?
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Bette Noir Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 12:53 AM
Response to Reply #5
7. No.
Edited on Sun Nov-08-09 12:54 AM by Bette Noir
He promised to get us out of Iraq by 2011, which we're still on target to do, and win the war in Afghanistan by escalating it. He's not perfect; he's just a damn sight better than McCain would have been. McCain would have escalated both wars, and started a third war with Iran.
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yurbud Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 12:36 AM
Response to Original message
6. maybe Obama thinks health care reform will give him cover for Afghanistan. Medicare & civil rights
did that for LBJ and Vietnam...

Oh wait, that didn't work either.
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IndianaGreen Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 12:58 AM
Response to Original message
8. Obama wants to join Lyndon Johnson in the pantheon of war criminals!
Here is what the British are saying, Gordon Brown nothwithstanding:

What is true for the Americans in Zabul is true for the British in Helmand. It may seem to military commanders on the ground that, with more troops, they could hold more ground and send out more patrols. Throughout history, generals have believed they are a few thousand troops short of victory. But Afghans, who have long experience of war, think more foreign troops means greater violence, more dead and wounded Afghans. Support for the Taliban is highest in those areas where there have been US or Nato shelling or air strikes inflicting civilian casualties. In other words, the Taliban's best recruiting sergeants are the American and British armies.

The future good of Afghanistan is not the first reason why Britain has an army of 9,000 troops there, according to Gordon Brown. He said on Friday that they are there to protect people walking the streets of Britain: "Our children will learn of the heroism of today's men and women fighting in Afghanistan protecting our nation and the world from the threat of global terrorism." We are fighting there, he adds, so we are safe in our homes and guarded against the atrocities carried out by al-Qa'ida not only in London, but across the world.

The problem with this argument is that al-Qa'ida is based in Pakistan not Afghanistan. There is no particular reason why its leaders should return to Afghanistan since they have a measure of support in the Pakistani intelligence services and among fundamentalist jihadi organisations. If Britain has sent 9,000 troops abroad to fight al-Qa'ida, then they are in the wrong country. Mr Brown slyly tries to evade this point by claiming that "three-quarters of terrorists' plots originate in the Pakistan-Afghan border regions". His sudden geographic imprecision avoids having to admit that they originate in Pakistan and not in Afghanistan. The US military says there only 100 al-Qa'ida militants in the whole of Afghanistan.

In reality, the presence of a large British military force in Afghanistan is making Britain a more dangerous not safer place to live in. Interrogation of would-be suicide bombers captured before they could blow themselves up reveals that their prime motive since 9/11 has been opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/afghanistan-time-to-leave-1817004.html
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SandWalker1984 Donating Member (533 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 01:20 AM
Response to Original message
9. Everyone needs to read Paul Craig Roberts latest
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23908.htm

The Evil Empire

By Paul Craig Roberts

November 06, 2009 "Information Clearing House" -- -The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.

Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion “defense” spending that goes to private companies. In American “capitalism,” an amazing amount of taxpayers’ earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about “socializing” health care.

Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.

Obama inherited an excellent opportunity to bring US soldiers home from the Bush regime’s illegal wars of aggression. In its final days, the Bush regime realized that it could “win” in Iraq by putting the Sunni insurgents on the US military payroll. Once Bush had 80,000 insurgents collecting US military pay, violence, although still high, dropped in half. All Obama had to do was to declare victory and bring our boys home,
thanking Bush for winning the war. It would have shut up the Republicans.

But this sensible course would have impaired the profits and share prices of those firms that comprise the military/security complex. So instead of doing what Obama said he would do and what the voters elected him to do, Obama restarted the war in Afghanistan and launched a new one in Pakistan. Soon Obama was echoing Bush and Cheney’s threats to attack Iran.

In place of health care for Americans, there will be more profits for private insurance companies.

In place of peace there will be more war.

Voters are already recognizing the writing on the wall and are falling away from Obama and the Democrats. Independents who gave Obama his comfortable victory have now swung against him, recently electing Republican governors in New Jersey and Virginia to succeed Democrats. This is a protest vote, not a confidence vote in Republicans.

Obama’s credibility is shot. And so is Congress’s, assuming it ever had any. The US House of Representatives has just voted to show the entire world that the US House of Representatives is nothing but the servile, venal, puppet of the Israel Lobby. The House of Representatives of the American “superpower” did the bidding of its master, AIPAC, and voted 344 to 36 to condemn the Goldstone Report.

In case you don’t know, the Goldstone Report is the Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict. The “Gaza Conflict” is the Israeli military attack on the Gaza ghetto, where 1.5 million dispossessed Palestinians, whose lands, villages, and homes were stolen by Israel, are housed. The attack was on civilians and civilian infrastructure. It was without any doubt a war crime under the Nuremberg standard that the US established in order to execute Nazis.

Goldstone is not only a very distinguished Jewish jurist who has given his life to bringing people to accountability for their crimes against humanity, but also a Zionist. However, the Israelis have demonized him as a “self-hating Jew” because he wrote the truth instead of Israeli propaganda.

US Representative Dennis Kucinich, who is now without a doubt a marked man on AIPAC’s political extermination list, asked the House if the members had any realization of the shame that the vote condemning Goldstone would bring on the House and the US government. The entire rest of the world accepts the Goldstone report.

The House answered with its lopsided vote that the rest of the world doesn’t count as it doesn’t give campaign contributions to members of Congress.

This shameful, servile act of “the world’s greatest democracy” occurred the very week that a court in Italy convicted 23 US CIA officers for kidnapping a person in Italy. The CIA agents are now considered “fugitives from justice” in Italy, and indeed they are.

The kidnapped person was renditioned to the American puppet state of Egypt, where the victim was held for years and repeatedly tortured. The case against him was so absurd that even an Egyptian judge order his release.

One of the convicted CIA operatives, Sabrina deSousa, an attractive young woman, says that the US broke the law by kidnapping a person and sending him to another country to be tortured in order to manufacture another “terrorist” in order to keep the terrorist hoax going at home. Without the terrorist hoax, America’s wars for special interest reasons would become transparent even to Fox “News” junkies.

Ms. deSousa says that “everything I did was approved back in Washington,” yet the government, which continually berates us to “support the troops,” did nothing to protect her when she carried out the Bush regime’s illegal orders.

Clearly, this means that the crime that Bush, Cheney, the Pentagon, and the CIA ordered is too heinous and beyond the pale to be justified, even by memos from the despicable John Yoo and the Republican Federalist Society.

Ms. deSousa is clearly worried about herself. But where is her concern for the innocent person that she sent into an Egyptian hell to be tortured until death or admission of being a terrorist? The remorse deSousa expresses is only for herself. She did her evil government’s bidding and her evil government that she so faithfully served turned its back on her. She has no remorse for the evil she committed against an innocent person.

Perhaps deSousa and her 22 colleagues grew up on video games. It was great fun to plot to kidnap a real person and fly him on a CIA plane to Egypt. Was it like a fisherman catching a fish or a deer hunter killing a beautiful 8-point buck? Clearly, they got their jollies at the expense of their renditioned victim.

The finding of the Italian court, and keep in mind that Italy is a bought-and-paid-for US puppet state, indicates that even our bought puppets are finding the US too much to stomach.

Moving from the tip of the iceberg down, we have Ambassador Craig Murray, rector of the University of Dundee and until 2004 the UK Ambassador to Uzbekistan, which he describes as a Stalinist totalitarian state courted and supported by the Americans.

As ambassador, Murray saw the MI5 intelligence reports from the CIA that described the most horrible torture procedures. “People were raped with broken bottles, children were tortured in front of their parents until they signed a confession, people were boiled alive.”

“Intelligence” from these torture sessions was passed on by the CIA to MI5 and to Washington as proof of the vast al Qaeda conspiracy.

Amb. Murray reports that the people delivered by CIA flights to Uzbekistan’s torture prisons “were told to confess to membership in Al Qaeda. They were told to confess they’d been in training camps in Afghanistan. They were told to confess they had met Osama bin Laden in person. And the CIA intelligence constantly echoed these themes.”

“I was absolutely stunned,” says the British ambassador, who thought that he served a moral country that, along with its American ally, had moral integrity. The great Anglo-American bastion of democracy and human rights, the homes of the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights, the great moral democracies that defeated Nazism and stood up to Stalin’s gulags, were prepared to commit any crime in order to maximize profits.

Amb. Murray learned too much and was fired when he vomited it all up. He saw the documents that proved that the motivation for US and UK military aggression in Afghanistan had to do with the natural gas deposits in Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. The Americans wanted a pipeline that bypassed Russia and Iran and went through Afghanistan. To insure this, an invasion was necessary. The idiot American public could be told that the invasion was necessary because of 9/11 and to save them from “terrorism,” and the utter fools would believe the lie.

“If you look at the deployment of US forces in Afghanistan, as against other NATO country forces in Afghanistan, you’ll see that undoubtedly the US forces are positioned to guard the pipeline route. It’s what it’s about. It’s about money, its about energy, it’s not about democracy.” http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article23906.htm

Guess who the consultant was who arranged with then Texas governor George W. Bush the agreements that would give to Enron the rights to Uzbekistan’s and Turkmenistan’s natural gas deposits and to Unocal to develop the trans-Afghanistan pipeline. It was Karzai, the US-imposed “president” of Afghanistan, who has no support in the country except for American bayonets.

Amb. Murray was dismissed from the UK Foreign Service for his revelations. No doubt on orders from Washington to our British puppet.



Anyone still want to try to defend our being in Afghanistan?
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Doctor_J Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 05:03 PM
Response to Reply #9
17. My question is,
when, if ever, will we start burning things down to get our government back?
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Divine Discontent Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 01:22 AM
Response to Original message
10. well, it's not official yet - WRITE THE WHITE HOUSE with me, please!
He's not doing anything he didn't say he'd be doing in his campaign - he talked about sending troops to Afghanistan, and he talked about 18 months (from what I remember) for Iraq to withdrawal, but that there may be things when he gets in that delay that.

However, this is BUNK. These wars are a boondoggle for the defense corporations, a blood bath for our military, and most importantly - we're not under direct attack from an invasion force!

PLEASE write the White House to let him know what you think - he has repeatedly said he wants to hear from us - and reads around 10 emails a day that are selected for him!

www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

Is my letter okay? Should I remove anything, or add anything? If you're not someone that wants to write, and say something what would you want me to add or remove?

Dear President Obama,

These wars are not what the majority of the people of this country want, and we have been drained for more than 6 years by the Bush mistake in Iraq that was supposedly for Weapons of Mass Destruction that we've known for years were never there.

And sadly, we're still there surely into the next decade, from a war that was wrong to begin with and started in 2003. Please bring home the troops from Iraq, Mr. President, as Iraq is not attacking the US territories, and I don't approve of a mass invasion force of our brave troops being subjected to attack within a country that isn't attacking our land. There are other ways we can help Iraq help itself, without over 100,000 American troops being there.

Also, I know you mentioned increasing the troops in Afghanistan before you were elected by most of us, and I believe this is not a good move. I think it's a mistake to increase the troop level in a country that is not actively attacking our land - this Bush Doctrine, of preemptively striking groups to keep them weakened with large scale forces of American troops causes huge amounts of American blood and hundreds of billions of dollars. This is not something I want my country to do, I find it disgraceful, and I am part of a large number of Americans who feel the same way. I believe in much smaller operations with covert style teams, and undercover agents would be much more prudent for the USA, and the families who have family still over there.

Will you please reconsider your war decisions? I know you know much more about the situation than nearly all Americans, however, that's why I believe with the scope of intelligence you have, it should be easier to explain to the world why you'd be ending the American presence in these foreign lands to the extent we are there now.

Thank you, Mr. President, for all you do for our country to help correct the errors of the past 30 years.
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lonestarnot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 04:34 AM
Response to Reply #10
13. I will!
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Divine Discontent Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Mon Nov-09-09 06:51 PM
Response to Reply #13
19. thank you!
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laststeamtrain Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 02:22 AM
Response to Original message
11. NYT: All Afghan War Options by Obama Aides Said to Call for More Troops
November 8, 2009
All Afghan War Options by Obama Aides Said to Call for More Troops
By PETER BAKER and HELENE COOPER

WASHINGTON — Advisers to President Obama are preparing three options for escalating the war effort in Afghanistan, all of them calling for more American troops, as he moves closer to a decision on the way forward in the eight-year-old war, officials said Saturday.

The options include Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s request for roughly another 40,000 troops; a middle scenario sending about 30,000 more troops; and a lower alternative involving 20,000 to 25,000 reinforcements, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. Officials hope to present the options to Mr. Obama this week before he leaves on a trip to Asia.

While some civilian and military officials believe Mr. Obama is seeking a middle ground in the debate over Afghanistan, aides denied he has made any decision or is leaning toward any of the options. Still, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates appears to be supportive of the middle option, some officials said, and his view is thought to be pivotal because of Mr. Obama’s respect for him and his status as a holdover from a Republican administration.

The three options define the contours of a debate that has played out in public for more than two months. General McChrystal, the top American and allied commander in Afghanistan, and his advocates argue the war cannot be won without a major infusion of forces to protect the population and ultimately turn it against the Taliban. Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and others oppose a buildup in a war they believe cannot be won through conventional means and that diverts attention from Pakistan, where Al Qaeda is primarily located. There are currently 68,000 American troops in Afghanistan.

<more>

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/world/asia/08troops.html
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lonestarnot Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 04:32 AM
Response to Original message
12. Fucking A!
:thumbsdown: This is bad news.
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Mari333 Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 06:03 AM
Response to Original message
14. he does, and he is toast.
he will lose.
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michaz Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 06:53 AM
Response to Original message
15. And one of them will be my son-in-law who will be making his 4th
trip to that damn hell-hole! Enough is enough! I really believed Obama when he said he wanted to end these wars, and well, here we are.
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Doctor_J Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 05:01 PM
Response to Original message
16. he's determined to be a one-term president
can't wait for president Palin in 2013
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stopchildabuse Donating Member (11 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Sun Nov-08-09 05:29 PM
Response to Original message
18. war president
I thought he said he would end the wars. All that money not being used for poor people and health care.
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