How The Military Fails US Veterans

People, all over the world, will fight with their lives on the line, when there's a worthy cause to fight for. Those people who win that fight or battle or war will also be able to survive better, knowing full well that they fought for a solid purpose & achieved that worthy purpose. Besides, the biggest judge of all our actions is our own conscience, which will also be at peace, even though, there were deaths & destruction in that battle or war.

What American veterans are going through, currently, mentally & physically, is more of a matter of how their own conscience is restless & making them relive that nightmare of killing or injuring thousands upon thousands of innocent people, including senior people, women, & children. Heck, even hospitals & UN-recognized shelters were not spared from these vets' actions.

Coupled that mental anguish & physical suffering with the knowledge that all these wars & invasions were not for wiping out terrorism from the face of the Earth. These wars were pure & simple genocidal actions against innocent people of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria, & several other countries, & their only purpose was for military-industrial complex to keep earning its blood-soaked profits.

So, regardless of how many Presidents come & go, these veterans & their PTSD-fuelled actions, & suicides, are simply "chickens coming home to roost" for America.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fA2QSlYZ9Jk

COL. LAWRENCE WILKERSON, FMR. CHIEF OF STAFF TO COLIN POWELL: I got a book from a gentleman who started a project called [Waking Up from War]. And what he's done is assess the programs that the DA and the DOD and those two in combination, though they rarely are in sync, offer for veterans coming home primarily from Afghanistan and Iraq and the bloody wars there. And the manuscript not only describes the Coming Home Project and how successful and effective it has been, but it also describes why other programs run by the services, run by DOD in general, run by the VA are not working or are causing more problems than they're helping to solve. And in a very comprehensive sense, he comments on the backdrop of all of this, which is a nation, supposedly a democratic federal republic, interminably at war and how that exacerbates all of this.

And, of course, it's a positive manuscript, in terms of he wants to say how we get out of this, both the larger problem, interminable war, and the problem it breeds, which is a lot of Americans, millions of Americans, who were sent off to do their nation's business and who are now back seriously harmed, seriously injured psychologically and physically, sometimes both. And we're not doing a very good job of taking care of them.

JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: So what are some of his suggestions? How do we kind of get out of this vicious cycle of failing our veterans and our soldiers once they come home from serving?

WILKERSON: I think the first thing we have to do--and I agree with him 100% on this--is we have to take a long-term approach to it. You cannot cure these veterans by giving them the magic elixir, the antidepressant or the cocktail of drugs that the military sometimes would like to give them to get them off its books and out of its hair. What this is doing in many cases is giving them situations, depression and so forth, that leads to suicide. As you probably know, the suicide rate is off the charts in all the military services. So this is an ancillary problem connected with this, though.

The most important thing you have to do in that sustained approach is give the veteran a sense of community. You have to give them a sense of coming home to something that really cares for them, that wants to deal with their problems, that will deal with their problems, that doesn't accuse them in any way, that is not something that is a handshake in the Atlanta airport, for example, and a trite welcome home, thank you for your service, but is a serious effort to deal with their problems, physical and psychological, that will last over time and not quit until they're back being meaningful members of their community again.

And I'll give you an anecdote of my own experience that sort of demonstrates this in crushing detail. I was at Walter Reed National Medical Center recently and met a triple amputee, and older young man, about 32. He was an EOD, an ordinance disposal technician, and he'd been disposing of IEDs in both Iraq and Afghanistan when one of them went off and took off both his legs below the knees and his right arm. And this was a young man who was being visited by a congressional delegation that morning, and I was visiting with him around lunchtime after that. And he told me, he said the delegation came in--dog and pony show, he called it--and he said they thanked him for his service. And that was the first thing they said, almost in unison. And he cut them off and he said, don't thank me for my service; thank me for my sacrifice, which you can clearly see. My service I'm conflicted over.

And this takes us into the second dimension of this manuscript, which is so eloquent and so well written in terms of this, and that is a nation that is interminably at war, and arguably at war that many of these veterans don't understand the purpose of. They don't understand what their sacrifice was for. The Iraq War comes to mind immediately as an illegal war, a war we should never have participated in. Many of these veterans feel that way about it. And this makes their healing burden, if you will, all the more challenging, makes the problem, the challenge that we have to welcome them home and to deal with their problems, their challenges, all the more difficult, because they don't feel like the sacrifice that they made--in many cases catastrophic sacrifices--was for anything meaningful, for anything worthwhile. So we have to cure that problem too. And the first thing, of course, we have to do is stop this business of interminable war.

One of the quotations in the book that just grabbed me by my heart was from a Marine, active-duty Marine general, two-star general. He was speaking over the 30,000-plus graves in the San Francisco national Cemetery on the northern slope of the Presidio--beautiful place in California. And he said, ... the costs of war are so great that we just have to find a better way to resolve our problems and our disputes than killing one another.

And, now, that's a truism of the very first order. We have to start doing things through political, diplomatic, and other means, other parts of our national power, than through the military means. It simply is not a sustainable way to do things. And these veterans are testimony to that.

DESVARIEUX: And how do these veterans feel about lawmakers? Some people kind of make this criticism that they don't even have skin in the game, they don't have their kids serving, things of that nature. What's their take on that? What's been the book's perspective on that?

WILKERSON: That's a precise point, Jessica. It's a very important point. If you don't have skin in the game, if you don't have your family members under duress, in harm's way, if you don't go there yourself--one of the vets, for example, says something to this effect: when the king led his forces into battle, there was less battle. Well, just think about that for a moment. When is Lindsey Graham and John McCain going to mount their Charger and go out and get in front of the forces fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and in Syria? And you say, well, John McCain's a veteran, he's done his service, and so forth. Well, shut up, then. We don't need people mongering for war. We don't need people asking the president and others to lead this nation into yet more conflicts, for example a war with Iran ... . We need less war. And we need less veterans.

DESVARIEUX: Larry, remind our viewers: what is the name of that manuscript and the author?

WILKERSON: [Waking Up from War], and the author is Joseph Bobrow.

Bombs, War Crimes & Our Diminished Sensitivity

A great opinion piece on how bombing & killing innocent civilians, at the push of a button, has become just a video game for the strong & "civilized" nations.

2 Hague Conventions banned the senseless aerial bombing of civilians but the fine print was that these bombings were banned during the wars between "civilized nations." Since, the Global West has always considered itself "civilized," aerial bombing of civilians was never banned during wars when an "uncivilized" country needs to be taught a lesson.

Although, today's world has several different kinds of international institutions, beside the UN, where, countries are supposedly on an equal footing, but when it comes to politics, wars, & the ensuing value of human lives, there is still a huge divide between the strong Global West / North & Global East / South. The Global West / North still consider itself "civilized" & above any international law, whatsoever, whereas, the Global East / South has to be policed & berated like a little naughty baby.

Most of the general public in the Global West has a diminished sensitivity towards illegitimate wars & chaos their countries are creating in other countries. News of innocent civilians being killed for no reason than just being alive either don't make to the Western news media or if they do, the public just brushes it away like some kind of unwanted annoyance. There was a time when huge protests were organized in the streets of American streets against the Vietnam war, but when American drones are easily killing innocent civilians in Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria etc., the public is all fine & dandy with it.

Ironically, as the emir of Afghanistan implied, so-called "civilized" nations have not only mastered the art of killing innocent civilians for no reasons, whatsoever, they have also lost any sensitivity or guilt towards falsely creating wars & then killing people in other countries. In the West, when someone kills someone else without any remorse, he / she is labelled a psychopath. But when hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians are killed by a "civilized" nation, it's all in the name of peace & justice. Prosecution of war crimes are never done against them & everyone goes on with their lives like nothing ever happened.

Then, the Western public wonders why the people of "uncivilized" nations hate us? They don't hate you. They hate the double standards of international bodies like UN. They hate double sensitivities of the general public. They hate how the value of an Iraqi life is far less than a French one, for instance. The general public cries a river if a few die in the West, but a thousand killed in the East don't even register a small tear.

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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/10/bombs-war-crimes-diminished-sensitivity-151013101634047.html

On April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso read the front-page headlines in L'Humanite: "One thousand incendiary bombs dropped by Hitler and Mussolini's planes reduce the city of Guernica to ashes. An incalculable number of dead and wounded. For how long can the world tolerate the terrifying exploits of international fascism?"

Though generally not much affected by political events, Picasso was devastated by the aerial bombing of civilians in his native country & immediately began to work on an enormous painting of protest & memorial. Executed in the same black-and-white as the harrowing newspaper pictures, Guernica was immediately adopted as both emblem & fund-raiser for international anti-Franco activism.

In the ensuing decades, it became so iconic an image of the horrors of war that a tapestry facsimile was placed in the lobby of the United Nations. In 2003, when Colin Powell went to the UN to present the US' case for military intervention in Iraq, this tapestry was covered with a blue curtain. As the New York Times commented at the time, "Mr Powell can't very well seduce the world into bombing Iraq surrounded on camera by shrieking and mutilated women, men, children …"

Picasso's masterpiece emerged from his epoch's general repugnance towards aerial bombing (in the streets, one million Parisians protested the Guernica bombing while he was painting inside), a now-diminished feeling that we would do well to revive.

Last resort

As HG Wells' 1908 novel, War in the Air, showed, it was not civilian air travel that people envisioned in the wake of the Wright brothers' early successes, but bombs. And, as was immediately recognised, the dominance of the skies by "air navies" would herald a different kind of warfare. Forget those soldierly qualities celebrated since Homer - courage, valour, chivalry & the like; in the future, you could defeat a people without emotion & without danger to yourself. Even generals demurred at a prospect both so brutal & so cowardly, & aerial bombing of civilian targets was banned by both Hague Conventions in 1899 & 1907.

But the Hague Conventions only governed the conduct of war between "civilised nations", which implied that such crude tactics could be used against those deemed neither "civilised" nor "nations". Therefore, naturally, there were experiments in Europe's empires. In 1920, Britain & France used bombs to terrorise civilians rebelling against their newly-installed regimes in Iraq & Syria, respectively. Britain also dropped bombs on civilians in Afghanistan, whose emir articulated the paradox that has obtained ever since: "It is a matter for great regret that the throwing of bombs by Zeppelins on London was denounced as a most savage act … while now we see with our own eyes that such operations are ... prevalent among civilised people of the West."

Western assumptions about which populations may be targeted with aerial bombardment have remained intact - & no one should be surprised if those populations have stored up a diabolical picture of the West over the course of the intervening century.

What has not remained intact is the basic repugnance towards aerial bombing which made it, even in the old empires, an unpopular last resort. Today, aerial bombing fails to generate the outrage that Guernica did, despite its inordinately more destructive effects. Of course, this is partly because the West now feels it will not itself be the target, which was not the case in the 1930s. But it is also because the great internationalist enterprise of which the Hague Conventions were a part - which included making war less brutal, &, if possible, ending it - has fallen into cynical disrepair, & one of the results is the diminished sensitivities of our era.

The Palace of Nations in Geneva ... is a relic of that enterprise, which sought a new and better world. Visionaries from every continent were united in the feeling that what must replace Europe's empires was some form of inter-national "society of societies": Just as in modern nations, free citizens freely congregated to resolve social disputes & determine their joint future, so in the "society of societies", free nations would do the same. Arbitration would replace war; the sphere of politics would be the world.

In an era threatened by total war, this vision captivated generations of idealists, including such disparate figures as Andrew Carnegie and HG Wells. It resulted in an impressive furniture of international laws, conventions & institutions, some of which still operate today. But it was severely damaged by the Cold War when both the US & the Soviet Union undermined international bodies so they could transform the world in their own interests. Since then, the US & its allies have pursued aggressive private policies on the global stage whose relationship with any residual idea of the international "community" is well expressed by that blue curtain across Guernica. Russia is now returning to a similarly extralegal role.

The envisioned "society" of societies has become instead a gangland, & one where there is no trace of the "democracy" that is its frequent war cry. The attack on the MSF hospital on October 3 is just another example of how battered the old civilising project, a key part of which was the inviolability of medical personnel in war zones, is.

Prosecuting war crimes

As far back as 1864, when a Swiss millionaire who had earlier witnessed the carnage of the Battle of Solferino established in Geneva an international medical force to care for the victims of war, regardless of their nationality, the red cross on the doctors' flag was a guarantee of immunity from attack. The Geneva Convention, at which the new organisation was announced, stated, "Ambulances and military hospitals shall be recognised as neutral, and as such, protected and respected by the belligerents as long as they accommodate wounded and sick." This provision was updated & expanded in the Hague Conventions & - during that last burst of internationalism before the Cold War - in the Geneva Convention of 1949.

Despite everything, the legal situation has not been diluted since. Any wartime belligerent knowingly attacking neutral medical staff & facilities without notifying them in advance is guilty of a war crime. ...

Our present world crisis is, in great part, a result of the assault over the last seventy years on the ideals & infrastructure designed between 1850 & 1950 to ensure world peace. It may be too late to rebuild them, but we do not have a better hope. The vision of a consensual internationalism built on parliamentary & judicial process remains the only way to restore to global affairs the kind of legitimacy that might give young people in Iraq or Syria or Afghanistan a feeling that the world is not entirely lawless & senseless - & it does not need to be burned down. And the starting point of such a "society of societies" must be that the strong - as in any society worth the name - be bound by the same rules as the weak.

An apocryphal story goes like this: Pablo Picasso, living in Nazi-occupied Paris, had his studio searched by the Gestapo. Coming across a reproduction of Guernica, a German officer asked the artist, "Did you do this?" "No," replied Picasso. "You did."

One wonders how such a conversation would go today.

Rana Dasgupta is a British novelist and essayist based in Delhi. He is the author of Capital: The Eruption of Delhi.

America's wars drag on no matter what officials say

A great opinion piece on how American troops once enter a country never actually leave; be it Germany & Japan (after WWII), South Korea (after Korean War), Vietnam (after Vietnam war), & now, Afghanistan & Iraq. Other than these well-publicized conflicts, American troops entered, & wrecked havoc, in several other countries around the world; in Africa & Latin America.

Regardless of how much American leadership says to their naïve, & ignorant, American public that American troops will be out of a country at some point in the future; in reality, they never do. Those troops become the expense, financial & social, of the host country. The military operations continue on for decades on end. Heck, nowadays, American military hand the military operations to "military contractors" (former military personnel) to offload operational costs to a third party & reduce its own liability in case something goes awry.

Furthermore, America needs a war(s) to keep its own populace in fear, which in turn, helps the government to keep control of the public. These wars are / will always be started & fought over false pretenses & the military-industrial complex needs wars like an addict need its addiction. After all, all those billion-dollar budgets won't be passed by the Congress for the military in absence of a war(s).

One more point the opinion piece makes is that these wars, & their continuation, are done without any input whatsoever from the general public. Isn't that against the basic concept of "democracy"? So, can the American public please enlighten me then what's the difference between a Saudi prince waging a war against a poor country, Yemen, without any input from its general public (since, it's an authoritarian regime) & an American government starting wars against poor countries like Afghanistan, Libya, & Iraq, without any input from its general public (especially since, it's a "democratic" country)?

One last point the opinion piece makes, & which hit home, is that billions are spent, & essentially, are being wasted, in these wars. American troops suffer heavy losses in terms of death (almost 10,000 troops have died in Afghanistan & Iraq in the past decade) & life-long physical & mental disabilities. These recent wars against Afghanistan & Iraq have also pretty much bankrupted one of the richest countries in the world. Its general public work hard & still, millions are merely surviving on meagre incomes. Homelessness has substantially increased in the past decade. Poverty keep increasing & shows no signs of abating in the foreseeable future. But billions are wasted on "foreign fighters" who have no allegiance to America, its ideals, & its people.

But, then, America needs wars like a drug addict needs its drugs.
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http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/22/america-war-iraq-libya-afghanistan-endless

In all three of the countries where the Obama administration declared US wars “over” in the past few years - Afghanistan, Iraq & Libya - the US military is expanding its presence or dropping bombs at an ever-increasing rate. And the government seems to be keeping the American public in the dark on the matter more than ever.

Pentagon leaders suggested ... that the US military wants to keep remaining 9,800 troops in Afghanistan from withdrawing in 2016, despite the fact that the Obama administration declared combat operations in the country “over” ... months ago. The gradual extension of the Afghanistan War hasn’t been a secret to anyone who’s been paying close attention, but sadly it has happened far away from the pomp & circumstance of Obama’s now embarrassingly false State of the Union announcement that the Afghanistan War had ended.

Shortly after his January speech, the president signed a secret order that would keep the military fighting & killing in the region through 2015, then delayed any troop pull-out through 2016. ...

As the Council on Foreign Relation’s Micah Zenko remarked: “First it was al Qaeda, then the Taliban, now ISIS will be reason US military remains in Afghanistan.” There’s always going to be someone. What unnamed group will be holding our attention in 2020 when we still have troops fighting & dying there for nebulous reasons?

Away from the headlines, Libya continues to deteriorate since the US & NATO allies bombed the region & deposed dictator Muammar Gaddafi in 2011. ...

As a result, the US military to desperately look to build another drone base near Libya that they can start launching regular drone strikes from - targeting both Libya & “elsewhere in North Africa.” This news comes around the same time as yet another retired US general, former director of the Pentagon’s intelligence unit Michael Flynn, indicated ... that drone strikes are actually creating more terrorists than they’re killing. Flynn’s comments echo the same point that has been made over & over by former generals & many other smart people recently, yet has evoked no change in policy or even public debate.

This potential expansion of the Isis war to a third country has all happened without congressional approval. Hardly anyone seems to care that we’re engaged in a generational war spanning multiple continents that we haven’t legally declared, almost a year after it was started.

Meanwhile in Syria, after months of delay, the first US-trained rebels finally entered the Isis-controlled regions and the process is already being accused of “mission creep” by defense experts, given its further entrenching US into the war there (again, without so much as a formal announcement by the government).

The rebels also come at an astronomical price-tag for the US of $4 million for each rebel, & there is no indication that it will have any effect on the chaos that now engulfs Syria, besides potentially causing more of it. Zenko called the program “one of the more poorly conceived and implausible foreign policy schemes in modern history.”

The Obama administration & CIA knew full well that funding rebel armies in foreign countries almost always ends in disaster, yet did it anyways - & hid the conclusions of a CIA study saying as much from Congress along the way.

What’s troubling about all of this is that it is happening with little debate in Congress & almost no input from public. The US is ramping up its war efforts across the Middle East & now North Africa. They want to increase drone strikes, continue to spend billions to train Afghanistan & Iraqi troops, despite the fact that the last decade of “training” has been a disaster where whole armies have deserted & billions of dollars in US weapons are now in the hands of Isis. And of course, the specter of adding more US ground troops always lurks in the background.

There is growing realization from experts that we’re not going to be able to bomb our way out of this. Is there no one in charge in Washington who is willing to admit that doubling down yet again on military force is only going to keep making matters worse?

Drones kill any chance of peace in Afghanistan

A good opinion piece. When the developed countries are not actively selling arms & weapons to developing countries, they are actively bombing them through drones. Of course, US is far ahead in this activity around the world, but others are not far behind, either.

As the writer plainly states that these drone strikes kill civilians (or as we call them, "collateral damage"), which in turn, angers the surviving relatives & neighbours of those killed, & hence, force those surviving loved ones to take up arms against foreigners. The words "collateral damage" brings an Arnold Schwarzenegger's 2002 movie in my mind of the same name, in which, his family is killed in a bomb blast & his family was "collateral damage" & how he wants to avenge their deaths. Anyway, so of course, in their seething hatred, the surviving family members will kidnap & kill any foreigner, be he/she is working on a humanitarian mission in that conflict zone.

The consequence of killing even one innocent person, be it in Afghanistan or Somalia or Syria or Iraq or Libya or Yemen, that it creates hatred & anger among the survivors & then, as General Stanley McChrystal (former US & NATO forces commander in Afghanistan), said: "for every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies."

Since, the drones & drone strikes result in far fewer military casualties for the country which is using drones, it becomes a much more useful option. Coupling that option with the policy of "shoot first, ask questions later" only makes life hell for all people, innocent & guilty, alike, on the ground below. American military was using napalm 40 years ago to kill innocents in Vietnam & now using drones to destroy the lives of people on the ground in large balls of fire.

The irony is that after selling military wares, supporting authoritarian regimes (who use those weapons of mass destruction on their own people), & then also using drones to make lives of poor people even more miserable & hellish, people in the West very innocently claim that Afghanis, Yemenis, Somalis, Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans etc. hate their way of living & want to destroy it.

As I have always blogged previously that the most simple solution for the developed countries to save their own countries from so-called "terrorists" & "terrorism" is become selfish, which essentially means, that stop selling arms & weapons to developing countries & stop intervening, militarily or non-militarily, in national matters of other countries. Since, you are keeping yourself to your own business, no one would then has any reason to bother you. After all, if terrorists are so hellbent on spreading Islam everywhere & want to kill anyone who is not a Muslim, then why Brazil, Argentina, Switzerland, Mexico, South Africa, South Korea etc. are not being attacked? They are all emerging or developed economies & are Christian-majority countries, but no one cares about these countries, because they keep to themselves. So, Mind Your Own Business is the perfect solution to end most, if not all, major conflicts in the world.
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http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/06/drones-kill-chance-peace-afghanistan-150628132016117.html

The use of unmanned US drones in Afghanistan has stepped up since January. With the launch of the new US counterterrorism mission, Freedom Sentinel, the ongoing & intensifying drone campaign has reportedly killed around 400 people in Afghanistan over the last 6 months.

But insurgents are not the only ones being killed.

Targeted drone attacks kill scores of civilians & armed opposition forces alike. These strikes violate Afghan sovereignty & international law, & severely undermine human rights while underscoring the ongoing threat to civilian lives in Afghanistan. Yet, the Afghan national unity government remains silent on the issue.

Beyond the civilian casualties caused by these strikes, drones also fuel terrorism, increase anti-government sentiment &, as a result, increase recruitment opportunities for the armed opposition in Afghanistan.

Extrajudicial killings

Afghan President Ashraf Ghani's government must take seriously the issue of civilian casualties from US drone strikes & put an end to the extrajudicial killings of Afghans by the unmanned machines of our so called "strategic partner".

Over the past decade, US drone missions in Afghanistan were unilateral. Unlike Pakistan, the use of drones lacked the agreement of the country's leadership. The large number of civilian casualties in drone & air strikes caused increasing tensions between Hamid Karzai, the former Afghan president, & US officials.

So why has Afghanistan become the most heavily drone-bombed country in the world? What is the legal justification for the US' drone mission in Afghanistan when there is no mention of drones in its Bilateral Security Agreement (BSA) with the US?

Since the establishment of the Afghan national unity government in Afghanistan, Ghani's government has given "American commanders a freer hand on night raids & air strikes", according to a recent New York Times report.

Recent attacks show that drone operators are now authorised by "eased" counterterrorism guidelines, which permit them to hit a target even without having "the knowledge of the identities of the individuals marked for death".

Despite the US administration's repeated announcements of the end of its combat mission, US forces in Afghanistan now have "a more aggressive range of military operations" - mostly drone missions & special operations.

Several attacks a week

Focused in the south & east of the country, US drones are hitting Afghanistan frequently, at a rate of one to several attacks every week. Nangarhar, Paktia, Paktika, Kunar, Nuristan, Khost, Farah, Helmand, & Logar are all provinces that have been targeted by US drone operations.

According to international & national media reports & the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, civilian casualties are involved in most of these incidents, but these go without any acknowledgement from the current Afghan government.

Some Afghan TV channels report misleading & misinforming stories on the "effectiveness" & the "role" of drones in Afghanistan. Early this month, according to Afghan MPs & media reports, a US drone strike in the Alisher district of Khost province southeast of Afghanistan, killed more than a dozen civilians, reportedly "members of two families".

On the condition of anonymity, a government official in Khost confirmed the killings to Pajhwok, an Afghan news agency.

The media office for foreign troops in Kabul also confirmed the attack with a routine addition that "reports about civilian casualties were being investigated".

As the Afghan national unity government continues to keep silent & neglects to send any delegation to investigate the incident, Afghan MPs & the former Afghan president have "strongly condemned" the strike in Khost.

Ending the secrecy

It is time to end the secrecy on the matter. The Afghan government should conduct its own investigation & assessment of each drone incident.

Now, as the US "war on terror" in Afghanistan increasingly becomes an open-ended conflict, reports suggest that the US will "maintain an aerial capacity beyond 2017 ... to conduct air strikes".

More US drone strikes means more civilian deaths for Afghanistan. These civilian casualties can severely risk the Afghan national unity government's legitimacy & sustainability.
...

As Ann Wright, the former American deputy ambassador in Afghanistan, put it, drone killings, "because of the number of civilian casualties", are "jeopardising US national security & creating large numbers of people who despise the United States".

The US administration & the Afghan government should take the advice of former US & NATO forces commander in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who once rightly said: "For every innocent person you kill, you create 10 new enemies."


Aimal Faizi is an Afghan journalist & former spokesperson for former Afghan president, Hamid Karzai from 2011-2014.

My rant on Refugee crisis (second one)

Few points were mulling around in my head after continuously reading comments & social media posts that Muslims & Arab countries are not doing enough to ease the refugee crisis from Iraq & Syria:

1. Muslim countries have taken millions of refugees:
Although, Muslim countries can certainly do more, they are/have done a lot already. Syrians are taking refuge in Turkey (1.9 million refugees), Jordan (650K), & Lebanon (1.3 million) for the past 3 years. That totals up to 4 Million refugees in 3 Muslim countries alone. Source: UNHCR

From a Sept 4th article on Bloomberg, "Nabil Othman, acting regional representative to the Gulf region at the United Nations' refugee agency, UNHCR, told Bloomberg there were 500,000 Syrians in that country [Saudi Arabia]. Saudi Arabia, like all of the Gulf states, is not a signatory to the UN refugee convention, so these displaced people are not officially designated as refugees." Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait & UAE have not taken refugees themselves, but UAE, Kuwait & Qatar, for example, are providing financial help to refugees through UNHCR. These countries have donated millions of $$$. These countries are smaller in size & cannot cope with a large influx of refugees. Those refugees will overwhelm their local economies & labour markets.

2. Quite a few of the refugees entering in Europe are actually just getting there to search for a better economic life. They are taking this issue as a perfect opportunity to enter Western developed countries without all the hassles of immigration process. They are not running away from Syria to save their lives. For example, the instigator of this issue, Abdullah Kurdi's family (Aylan Kurdi's family), was already safe in Turkey since 2012.

After all, why are Afghanis & even Pakistanis & Bangladeshis are in these refugee crowds who are trying to enter into Europe. Afghanis have claimed asylum in Pakistan & in Iran for decades, now. It's easier for Afghanis to enter into Pakistan & Iran as refugees than go all the way to Europe. Same question can be asked for Pakistani & Bangladeshi "refugees". These are not refugees. They are "economic opportunists." That's why, European government leaders are now trying to distinguish between the words, "migrants" & "refugees". Angela Merkel even said that all those "refugees" from Balkans will be sent back (which emphasizes my point that people into Germany & Austria are not all "refugees"). David Cameron emphasized that UK will only take "refugees," & not migrants looking for a better life.

3. Pope's call is similar to all those Christian missionary teams which used to go to Africa, South America, South East Asia. It was famous that these missionaries were brutal in their faith conversion tactics; accept Christianity & we will give you food & shelter or don't accept Christianity & you won't get anything. Of course, Pope's call is not that radical, but there are already stories coming out that some Iranians & Afghanis are converting to Christianity. (Source: Daily Mail) Their thinking is that as Christians, they can easily claim asylum in Europe by claiming that they fear persecution in Middle East.

4. Germany is taking almost 800K refugees because it has a hidden agenda: Germany is running a huge shortfall of labourers & it needs low-tech workers for its workforce. Every refugee wants to eventually work, & unlike, Arab countries, where the majority of population is young & educated, European countries are aging & need younger workforce. Although, Jordan, Lebanon, & Turkey are housing these refugees, these refugees are not allowed to work there. Most of the Western countries, depending on their own labour markets & economies, will either permanently resettle some refugees or send these refugees back to their countries of origins after a certain amount of time has passed.

My rant on Refugee crisis (first one)

Public, nowadays, has ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder).

This week's topic is Refugee crisis. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone is feeling "so sad." Why?

Where was this sadness when Israel killed children in Gaza last year?
 
Where was this sadness a few months back when Rohingya Muslims were dying in boats near the East Asian countries' seashores? (btw, is that issue resolved ... does anyone care anymore?)

Where was this sadness when US & its allies were bombing "children" in Iraq?

Where was this sadness when Afghanistan was getting bombed by NATO forces (which include all these Western countries) & small children were being killed there?

Why is Canada selling 15-billion Cdn $$$ of armoured trucks to Saudi Arabia, which will most likely be used against innocent Yemenis & its own public, esp. when Canada is supposed to be such a "kind" & "compassionate" country?

Weren't UK, France, Italy, & American forces were bombing indiscriminately Libyans a couple years back? Do you really think no kids must've died in those bombings?

(FYI, these refugees are not only from Syria, but from several war-torn countries; Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, & even Palestine).

Don’t blame migrants – the West helped to create their plight

A great opinion piece by Yasmin Alibhai Brown.

A lot of it what she said I have been saying all along in my blog posts (June & July 2015), especially the ones about how the West is busy selling arms & weapons to the developing countries in Asia, Middle East, & Africa.

First, the Western countries looted current-developing countries through invasions, occupations, & wars. Then, they concede those territories to the locals but they still keep meddling in the internal politics of the regions of Asia, Africa, & South America. For them, it's a game of political chess to keep their superiority intact.

In the piece, the author, although, does concede that all the blame cannot be put on the shoulders of first world leaders, since a lot of the developing countries are ruled dictatorially by corrupt leaders. But whoever has read my previous blog posts may recall that I put the blame of those corrupt leadership on the first world leaders, too.

Those corrupt leaders of the developing world are propped up by the staunch support of the same first world leaders, who, so proudly, extoll the virtues of democracy, human rights, & free speech.

Saddam Hussein was a good friend of the American leadership. So was Bashar Al-Assad. So is current Saudi ruling family. And they are such good friends that American governments still censors the documents & reasons why Saudi royals were quickly shipped out of US, right after the 9/11 incident. UK government flies their flags at half mast at the death of Saudi King. Canada obliges to keep the sale of billions of $$$ of armoured vehicles secret, at the request of Saudi ruling family.

The main reasons the developed countries keep such despots in power in developing countries are:
1. developing countries keep transferring their financial wealth to these developed countries through arms purchases.
2. conditions in developing countries keep & stays horrible, so the intellectual brain drain starts to happen.
3. That intellectual brain becomes a "legal" slave in the West, working in jobs for which he/she is way overqualified but he/she works there because he/she needs money.
4. developing countries also lose their mineral & agricultural wealth (as mentioned in the piece, too)

All in all, this truth has to be spoken. Problem is that the majority of the population of the West either doesn't know or doesn't want to know how their governments have destroyed, & are still destroying, the developing countries. But ignorance is not the answer when comeuppance comes along.
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http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/dont-blame-migrants--the-west-helped-to-create-their-plight-10273545.html

... . After years of ferocious migrant-bashing, the national psyche has been successfully reprogrammed: millions of our citizens truly believe that humans from the old Soviet Union, Africa, Asia & the Middle East are flocking to get at those gorgeous council flats & big, fat, state handouts.

So easy isn’t it? Just blame those who can’t answer back. Don’t think too deeply about why there is this movement of peoples & how they feel before, during & after they leave their homelands.

...

Most migrants carry that sense of loss, even those who went off voluntarily to seek better fortune. Those who have never felt the need or pressure to emigrate can’t empathise with them, for that would be a chink in their fortress mentality. Fear is a terrible thing. It depletes compassion.

To many Britons, the current crisis is disconnected from history, & from global geopolitics. Again, it is so much easier to think of “them” & “us”, & disregard Western culpabilities, past & present.

In 2011, David Cameron, on a visit to Pakistan, accepted that Britain was responsible for many of the world’s intractable problems. It was the first & only time I recall a British leader accepting that colonialism left fractures & stains which have led to discord & failed states. (Margaret Thatcher, as well as Tony Blair & Gordon Brown, extolled the Empire & the subjugation of millions.) Mr. Cameron was savaged by the right-wing press & Labour’s Tristram Hunt. Maybe that is why he never again spoke candidly about that history. Silence is the path of least resistance.

No, you can’t just blame white people for post-colonial chaos & failures. Since independence, leaders have almost all been incompetent, corrupt & callous. Dictatorships & one-party rule, profligacy & greed, have despoiled potentially productive nations, turning them into hopeless, dependent, unsustainable entities. But the case against old European imperialists is strong & indubitable.

Last week, one Drusilla Long had a letter in a newspaper about desperate & desperately unwanted migrants. She was raised in Ghana during British rule. “I believe [we should] return some of the immense wealth we all stole from these countries, such as gold, diamonds, etc, which we have long used to build up our own wealthy ‘fortress’ Europe,” she wrote.

Brave woman, saying the unsayable.

Then there is the continuing support this country gives to oppressive regimes, the arms we sell, & the wars we have launched in the past 20 years. Iraqis never chose to become resented refugees, nor did Afghans.

Libya is now the export depot for hungry, frightened, distressed people. The allies who bombed the place have gone & feel no obligation for the mess they left. Many ISIS insurgents are from Saddam Hussein’s old Baathist army. True, we did not intervene in Syria, but for decades Bashar al-Assad was propped up by us, as was his equally heinous father. Many of the migrants trying to get into Europe come from these places. They are hated perhaps because they remind us of our bad policies & actions. Are these then our noble British values?

When bigots tell me to go back to where I came from, I remind them I am here because the British government supported Idi Amin’s bid for power. A million or more black Ugandans fled or were killed. Some fled to the UK. Has Britain ever admitted this was a big mistake? ...

Among the flotsam & jetsam of wandering humans are “economic migrants” who are seen as the biggest threat of all. They, too, are victims of Western games & unending austerity measures. We know how that affects the vulnerable & should understand why people die trying to escape poverty.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) & World Bank have driven down spending on health & education across Africa & elsewhere. Developing world debt is used by the West to cut the cost of raw materials & steal resources. Privatisation is the condition for borrowing money. It stinks.

Anup Shah is the editor of the excellent www.globalissues.org. He writes about the unjust trading system. The West protects its interests & pushes poorer countries to supply materials, labour & goods at the lowest costs. To be a dumping ground, too.

The EU, IMF & World Bank must transform the system; our leaders need to tell more truths about the dispossessed. Xenophobia, withdrawal of welfare & gunboats won’t stop the tide of humanity coming to our shores. They come because they have no choice. But the West does.

Pentagon slammed for building $36 Million 'white elephant' facility in Afghanistan

So, while the residents of the developing world thinks that corruption is non-existent in developed world, the bastion of democracy & honest government in the developed world (US) keeps showing to the world that how much it is a corrupt country.

US unilaterally invades countries & wages wars for one reason only; military & defence industries need more money. Wars in Afghanistan & Iraq, financially helped high-ranking military officials, defence contractors, large businesses involved in defence & military (Raytheon, Lockheed Martin etc.), & of course, all those politicians who not only receive huge sums of money from defence lobbyists, but they also may have personal financial interests with those companies.

Who loses out in these wars? Common foot soldiers who lose their lives, & if not dead, then suffer horrific physical & mental injuries, & of course, the common citizen; the taxpayer.

Common foot soldiers have always been considered expendable by the rich elites, who use them to achieve their own objective; horde more wealth. Romans use to invade neighbouring villages & force the men of those villages to join the Roman army. British & American did the same thing during multiple invasions around the world & Civil War etc., where Indians or African-Americans were forced to fight in wars.

Now, American military uses more sophisticated approach, but the real result is the same. Education is so expensive that poor students think that a few tours of war zones is worth the risk of a free education & boarding. Those poor kids are usually have a non-American background, for example, Latinos or South Asians. They enlist in the army, get trained, go to a foreign country, commit heinous crimes, die or suffer horrific injuries, & come back to America (dead or alive). If alive, American government leaves them alone, to fend for themselves on their own, & all the while, rich elites got their oil & gas contracts (like Halliburton's contracts in Iraq), construction contracts (to build useless facilities like the one profiled in this article), & military & defence contracts to build more weapons or to provide more security to government officials.

The rich business & political elites also don't pay or pay minimal taxes, anyway. Since, they always find some loopholes to get out of paying the government their fair share of being a citizen, somebody else has to pick up the tab. Come the common & poor citizen; the single mother who works multiple shifts to earn enough to support her young family, the hardworking & poor student who works & studies in the hopes of earning a degree one day & making his/her future a bright one, the young couple who tries to earn enough by working multiple shift jobs & seldom seeing each other, just so they can provide all they can to their little family.

Government very regularly, & with strict punctuality, takes taxes from these poor souls, all in the name of providing social benefits to them. But, social benefits are continuously being cut. Those poor citizens don't benefit from those taxes. Those taxes are used as subsidies to large, international businesses to extract more fossil fuels from the ground, to build more weapons for useless wars, & to pay continuously increasing salary packets of career politicians.

Imagine how much American citizens would have benefited from these $36 Millions of their own taxes being used on them as social benefits; how many homeless would've gotten social housing, how many poor kids would've gotten healthy meals with government subsidies, how many poor families would've been able to buy healthy, organic foods for themselves with government subsidies to lower the costs of organic foods, how many poor students would've gotten some help in reducing their education loan (if not completely eliminating those loans) etc.

After all this, the world still thinks American government thinks of its people, first, & then someone else. The world still thinks American government is honest, fair, & free of corruption. The world still thinks America is a land of equality & justice. What America has definitely accomplished is that the world thinks of only great things about America. As someone wise once said that "the Devil's greatest accomplishment was convincing the world that he didn't exist."
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http://www.rt.com/usa/260861-us-pentagon-afghanistan-army/

John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a report ... on the construction of the 64,000-square-foot command-&-control facility at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province, Afghanistan in 2010. The need to build the facility was justified under plans by President Barack Obama’s administration to increase the number of US troops in Afghanistan.

The building was completed in April 2013, despite requests from some senior Pentagon officials to halt construction. According to the investigators, who visited the site, the facility was “well built” & equipped with new furniture.

However, by that time the US had already begun to withdraw its troops – so there was no need for it. "Ultimately, construction of the building was not completed until long after the surge was over, & the building was never used," the report said.

“The building was never occupied & on Oct. 29, 2014, Camp Leatherneck, including the … building, was closed by the US & transferred to the Afghan government,” the Washington Times quoted the report as saying. “In the end, $36 million in US taxpayer funds was spent on a building the US never used.”

The Afghan Army, which has taken over security duties from US-led forces, is not currently using the building. There were various proposals for the facility, including transforming it into a movie theater & fitness club.

Senator Claire McCaskill of Missouri, the top-ranking Democrat on the US Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, who first inquired about the case, said: “This is one of the most outrageous, deliberate, & wasteful misuses of taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan we’ve ever seen.”

Sopko, the special inspector general, published a letter calling for an inquiry into the case in July 2013. The Department of Defense conducted two investigations, accusing those responsible for the project of corruption, as the facility allegedly cost $25 million, instead of $36 million. But nothing followed the inquiry.

“When it was clear this building wouldn’t be used, & when 3 commanders requested its cancellation, the Army not only built it anyway but completely failed to hold any officials accountable after all the facts came to light — so I’ll now be fully expecting answers from the Army,” McCaskill said, McClatchy DC reported.

SIGAR recommends holding to account 3 US officers: General-Lieutenant Peter M. Vangjel “in light of his decision to construct…building over the objections of commanders in the field, resulting in the waste of $36 million,” Army Major General James Richardson because of his “failure to carry out a fulsome investigation” & Army Colonel Norman F. Allen for his attempt to "discourage full cooperation" with the report.

Wars in Iraq & Afghanistan have witnessed many cases of misuse of money by the military. For instance, a police base in an Afghan village built, which cost $500,000 from the US military budget, fell apart 4 months after completion because of faulty construction.

The US has the largest military budget in the world – in 2016 it plans to spend more than $600 billion, & some experts believe that even this figure is underestimated.

The Western Premise on Vietnam was dead wrong

Great opinion piece by Eric Margolis.

As the saying goes, "those who forget the history are doomed to repeat it," because we, humans, always think that other man was stupid & I won't make that mistake, & ironically, he makes that same mistake (at least the net result is same).

Other man was stupid or not (we can only justify it if you are better educated or know more than that guy or have some kind of a better knowledge about the case at hand than that other guy); the primary problem is the person, who is currently in change of the situation, has never tried to understand the situation, old or new.

US wouldn't have gone into Afghanistan, albeit in a fit of rage like a little kid or a teen with raging hormones, or Iraq, if the leadership would've sincerely looked at why did we ever fail in Vietnam. What was the real underlying causes for that failure & then try not to repeat those actions.

But, since, US never looked / analyzed those failures with a critical eye, they went, guns blazing, in both countries & after sacrificing manpower & billions of dollars on countries, whose citizens still hate US (America never won their "hearts & minds"), & the end result is that one country (Iraq) is in complete chaos, while in the other one (Afghanistan), Taliban have amassed enough power that Americans have to negotiate with them (just so they can still come out of the country unscathed & claim that "adventure" as a "win").

So, in a way, just like the lives of 250,000 American soldiers were wasted in the Vietnam conflict, the lives of some 4,000 American soldiers are now wasted in the Afghanistan conflict. I don't even know how many died in Iraq conflict. And I am not going to even put the numbers here for the injured soldiers, who are injured physically & mentally (PTSDs etc.). American economy is also in shambles that billions are spent in those countries but American veterans & own patriotic citizens are going hungry & homeless.

So who actually destroyed America? Foreign terrorists or the hubris of its own leadership?
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http://www.khaleejtimes.com/article/20150503/ARTICLE/305039871/1098

LIFE CAN only be understood in retrospect. With the wisdom of hindsight, most people consider the 20-year long Vietnam War a terrible mistake, even a crime. But at the time, US military involvement in Indochina appeared to make sense. It certainly did to me. I was proud to wear my nation’s uniform.
General Douglas MacArthur warned Americans “never fight a land war in Asia.”

But that is exactly what the Kennedy administration foolishly did. At the time, US power was at its zenith. Washington was gripped by post-war arrogance & hubris.
 
There was also a very compelling geopolitical reason. At the time – the later 1960’s – it appeared certain that the Soviets & Red China were working together to dominate all of Indochina. “If we don’t make a military stand in SE Asia,” was the consensus, “the Reds will take the entire region.” So it looked in 1967. So we hear again today. Just replace “Reds” by Al Qaeda or Daesh.
 
But the basic Western premise back then – as now — was dead wrong. In one of history’s biggest intelligence failures, we failed to see the seismic split between the Soviet Union & Mao’s China, one so profound that the two super-powers almost went to war over their contested Manchurian borders in 1968-1969. Just as our intelligence services also missed the impending collapse of the Soviet Union three decades later.
 
Had the US been aware of the violent tensions between Moscow & Beijing, it would likely have avoided expanding the Vietnam War, or just left it to its own devices.
 
Instead, the US & its allies waged a long struggle against the Vietcong local guerillas & the battle-hardened North Vietnamese Army that had defeated some of France’s finest soldiers a decade earlier. President Lyndon Johnson drove the US deeper into the war by staging the phony Gulf of Tonkin naval incident.
 
It did not take long for US troops in South Vietnam to realise the war was a pointless bloodbath. Without the 24/7 support of US airpower, the American army & marines in Vietnam would not have been able to hold out. Today, without US airpower, American forces would be driven from Afghanistan. By the January, 1968 Tet offensive, it was clear to many of us in uniform that the war was lost (I was stateside at the time). The US won almost every battle thanks to air power, but it lost both the military momentum in the war, the strategic direction & the political struggle. America’s South Vietnamese allies often fought bravely but their political leaders were hopeless.
 
Much of Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia were ravaged by US bombing & toxic chemical defoliation. In the process, some 250,000 American soldiers were killed or wounded; 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died. At least three million Communist soldiers & Vietnamese civilians were killed, mostly by US air power. As I look back, it’s very painful to realise that the war was, to paraphrase the wicked Tallyrand, “worse than a crime, a mistake.”

The red hordes did not swamp Indochina nor did they march on Cleveland. Our side committed as many crimes as our enemies. The CIA-run Phoenix programme, for example, “liquidated” up to 41,000 communist cadres. Our “counter-terrorism” campaign today in Afghanistan, Iraq & Somalia follows the same pattern.
 
Today, the US & united Vietnam have $36 billion in bilateral trade & warm commercial & diplomatic relations. Vietnam is becoming an important ally for the US against China.
 
Alas, we seem to have forgotten everything about Vietnam & learned nothing. The new bogeyman is Iran instead of China, but the song remains the same.