"CLASSIFIED" INFORMATION EMBARRASSING TO U.S. GOVERNMENT

Why is it when newspapers publish "classified" information it is always a threat to U.S. military personnel and an aid to America's "enemies?"

This is the response of politicians and government officials who hate to be embarrassed by information which casts doubt on their abilities and policies.

Witness Hillary Clinton's statement about the trove of classified information about the conduct of the Iraq War made public recently by Wikileaks. She said it was despicable and harmful. Oh yeah, right! This is the same response that the Obama people put out after the publication of information about the Afghan campaign. It was "illegal" and it could kill American soldiers and personnel of American allies. Has there been anyone who has been killed by the Afghan "classified" information? Do the uneducated cadres of the Taliban really sit down and read this stuff! Of course not!

The only reason for the sanctimonious huffing and puffing of American officials is because the public can see how incompetent the military and their supervisors in government really are.

STOP U.S. NIGHT RAIDS ON AFGHANI HOMES

I have long called for the Obama administration to end those notorious 2 AM raids on Afghani homes and villages. They inspire fear and generate deep and lasting animus towards Americans and the United States. When American troops bust in late at night, they violate the privacy of Afghani families and show disrespect for Afghan women, not to mention causing abject terror to Afghani children.

Andrew Lebovich blogs on this subject in Steve Clemons' The Washington Note. Writes Lebovich:

"The use of night raids by ISAF and non-ISAF American forces are among the most controversial aspects of the war effort in Afghanistan, because they sometimes result in the deaths or imprisonment of innocent Afghans.

"And while NATO has recently put in place new rules for night raids that are intended to prevent accidental deaths and cause less anger among Afghans, the raids will likely continue. As Gopal points out, many of the raids are carried out by American Special Operations Forces, who operate outside of NATO command and often with little oversight."

U.S.RAID AT 2 AM ON AFGHAN VILLAGE LEADS TO RIOT AND DEATH OF EIGHT AFGHANIS

The New York Times has a report in today's paper by Dexter Filkins on the Afghan protests against combined U.S./Afghan military raids conducted several nights before. Afghan police apparently fired on the demonstrators and eight fell dead.

Writes Dexter Filkins:

"When the riot was over, at least eight protesters were dead and about a dozen wounded, shot by Afghan intelligence officers. Much of the town of Garmsir blamed the Americans.

"The episode, which American officers said they were investigating, highlighted how easily suspicions and resentment can flare out of control in an area as contested as the Helmand River Valley."

Juan Cole in his post today in Informed Comment places blame on the Taliban for inciting the villagers to near riot. Writes Juan Cole:

"Similar controversies over Qur'an desecration provoked anti-American rallies by the Muqtada al-Sadr group in Iraq some years ago. This cycle, of charges of foreign blasphemy, big rallies to protest it, and then the shooting of protesters, is a deliberate ploy by the Taliban to turn locals against NATO and the Afghan army."

I don't disagree with Juan Cole on the influence of the Taliban to stir up hornets nests against the American military. But I also feel that the American practice of conducting raids in the middle of the night which entail storming into homes of suspects, rousing the whole family, scaring the children, wrecking furniture and personal belongings, must of necessity lead to resentment and feelings of being humiliated.

Furthermore, many Afghans see American raids at 2 AM as violating the sanctity of their homes and especially offending their wives and women. This is no small matter in Afghan or Muslim society.

Dexter Filkins describes the events and aftermath of the raid:

"The protest began when several thousand Afghans gathered in the central bazaar in Garmsir, after reports of abuse by American servicemen during a raid at a nearby village two nights before. Local officials said the protest was organized by the Taliban’s shadow governor for Garmsir, Mullah Mohammed Naim.

"“The Taliban were provoking the people,” Kamal Khan, Helmand Province’s deputy police chief, said in a telephone interview. “They were telling the people that the Americans and their Afghan partners are killing innocent people, bombing their homes and destroying their mosques and also blaspheming their religion and culture.

"“The Taliban were telling the people, ‘This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.’ ”

"No witnesses to the disputed raid could be located; it took place Sunday night in the village of Darweshan. American officers in Kabul said that Afghan soldiers conducted a nighttime operation in the village, with the Americans in support. But they said that no shots had been fired and that no one had engaged in any inappropriate conduct."

I thought Gen. Stanley McChrystal and Gen. David Petraeus were aware of the severe and lasting damage to U.S. interests that raids at 2 AM can cause. Consider how you would feel if foreign troops banged on your front door at that hour and forced their way into your home, saying that they were searching for weapons or other contraband. How would your children react?

That's why I want to see Pres. Obama order an immediate end to U.S. forces entering anyone's home after 9 PM.

OBAMA SHOULD BE PROMOTING HEALTH CARE REFORM, NOT A FOOLISH WAR IN AFGHANISTAN.

Instead of putting on a big show at West Point Military Academy this evening, in which he rehearsed and re-tread all of the Bush bromides on how "we have to kill them because they represent a 'serious' national security threat to America," I would have liked to see Pres. Barack Obama end a foolish purposeless war and concentrate instead on pushing health care reform in the Senate.

I find it dismaying that Obama has been relatively silent on health care. He should be out stumping for passage. He should be buttonholing reluctant and recalcitrant senators the way Lyndon Baines Johnson did. He should be arguing incessantly why health care reform is essential to future prosperity and peace.

But please, Mr. Obama, no justifying a baseless unjustified war in Afghanistan.

TED KENNEDY OPPOSED BUSH'S WAR IN IRAQ, WHY DOES OBAMA PUSH WAR IN AFGHANISTAN?

Sen. Ted Kennedy was one of the Democratic voices in the Senate totally opposed to the stupid War in Iraq. Thanks to his speaking out, and thanks to the others, especially Sen. Robert Byrd and VP Al Gore. But where were the others? Why did they go along with the hated Bush/Cheney war machine?

Sen. Barack Obama came out early in 2002 against the War. Yet he remained somewhat muted about it probably due to campaign pressures. But why does Obama now president push and prosecute the War in Afghanistan and even enlarge it?

Afghanistan is worse than Iraq for education, social services, hospitals, schools, roads, infrastructure. Nothing will be solved there by dropping cluster bombs and firing phosphorous or spent nuclear shells. To think that an Afghan farmer, with no primary schooling, with no television, with no radio, is going to be changed by American soldiers, renounce conservative Islam, or become a political progressive calls for a psychological examination. It will never happen.

So why does Obama persist in keeping U.S. troops there? Obama should be smarter than what his foolish military policy indicates. And all the while, U.S. troops fall as casualties in a needless and purposeless war.

BIDEN HAVING DRUNK BUSH'S KOOL-AID DEFENDS WAR IN AFGHANISTAN AS JUSTIFIED AND NECESSARY

Why is it that so many Washington insiders think that American wars are "justified" and "worth" the casualties? All this sounds so much like Bush-speak. Now we have VP Biden saying the same rubbish about the war in Afghanistan.

Mark Tran writes on The Guardian's web page today:

"Speaking in the deadliest month for British troops since the US-led invasion in 2001, Biden insisted that the current offensive against the Taliban in Helmand province was worth the effort and was a "prerequisite" to get the country ready for presidential elections next month.

"In an interview with BBC Radio 4's Today programme Biden said: "In terms of the national interests of Great Britain and the national interests of the United States and Europe, it is worth the effort we are making and the sacrifice that is being felt and more will come.""

No war is worth the lives of any soldiers or of any civilians. This applies to the war in Afghanistan. There is no such thing as a "justified" war. Soldiers never solve anything because, at the root of all wars, is a political problem that statesmen just don't want to solve diplomatically.

Biden is in effect saying that U.S. and British soldiers must first kill the Taliban in order to get Afghanistan ready for elections. This is outrageous bull and pure sophistry. The Taliban are Afghanis, they know their own country, they have their own social system. Foreign armies of the U.S. and Britain are never going to defeat them or make them change their views. So Biden would have Afghani villagers killed, members of the Pashtun tribe eliminated, women and children bombed, all in the cause of preparing for Karzai's re-election.

Reports Tran:

"With the British government under increasing political pressure as casualties mount, Biden restated the case for Nato's presence in Afghanistan.

""This is the place from which the attacks of 9/11 and all those attacks in Europe that came from al-Qaida have flowed – between Afghanistan and Pakistan … It is a place that, if it doesn't get straightened out, will continue to wreak havoc on Europe and the United States.""

Biden wants to straighten out 20-year Afghani villagers who think they are waging a holy jihad in trying to kill American and British troops. Frankly, I don't see members of the Taliban boarding an airplane in Kabul and flying to London or New York to carry out some mayhem or havoc on Europe or the U.S.

Everything that Biden said about justifying this foolish war seems wrong and short-sighted. And this is a guy who opposed Bush's bellicose foreign policy. Now he himself has come under the spell of defending a misguided war.

BAGRAM PRISON DENIES LEGAL RIGHTS TO AFGHAN PRISONERS

I recently urged the Taliban to release the American soldier Bowe Bergdahl captured in Afghanistan. But at the same time I called for the release of the prisoners held by the U.S. at Bagram Air Force base.

All of those imprisoned by the U.S. have never received legal counsel, have never had access to an impartial court, have never been given any of the legal protections commonplace in the civilized world. A person could have nothing to do with Al Qaeda, but be sold into American captivity by people who for one reason or another have a grudge or dispute against him. Most of the prisoners at Bagram are rural Afghani farmers, with little schooling and little resources.

So I am happy to see in today's The New York Times a report by Eric Schmitt that Admiral Mike Mullen is calling for a reexamination of the harsh U.S. policy towards prisoners especially those being held at Bagram.

Writes Schmitt:

"The prison at this air base north of Kabul has become an ominous symbol for Afghans — a place where harsh interrogation methods and sleep deprivation were used routinely in its early years, and where two Afghan detainees died in 2002 after being beaten by American soldiers and hung by their arms from the ceiling of isolation cells."

How is it that the U.S. government and military set up Bagram as a "dark hole" in the first place? Here we have Americans, while claiming and bragging that the U.S. is the home of the brave and the land of the free, who then impose draconian and cruel conditions of imprisonment on other people, not giving a care about their individual rights or injustices meted out to them.

Reports Schmitt:

"“Throughout Afghanistan, Afghans are arbitrarily detained by police, prosecutors, judges and detention center officials with alarming regularity,” the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan said in a report in January.

"To help address these problems, Maj. Gen. Douglas M. Stone of the Marines, credited with successfully revamping American detention practices in Iraq, was assigned to review all detention issues in Afghanistan."

The prison situation in Afghanistan shows that even American soldiers and officers when left unchecked will set up systems that are inhumane and barbaric.

Schmitt reports:

"The problems at the existing American-run prison, the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, have been well documented.

"The prison is a converted aircraft hangar that still holds some of the decrepit aircraft-repair machinery left by the Soviet troops who occupied the country in the 1980s.

"Military personnel who know Bagram and the prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, describe the Afghan site as tougher and more spartan.

"The prisoners have fewer privileges and virtually no access to lawyers or the judicial process. Many are still held communally in big cages.

"In the past two weeks, prisoners have refused to leave their cells to protest their indefinite imprisonment."

WAR IN AFGHANISTAN KILLS 15 BRITISH SOLDIERS IN LAST 10 DAYS

John F. Burns writes in today's The New York Times web page on the growing casualties suffered by British troops over the last week in Afghanistan.

Reports Burns:

"Just as President Obama’s plan to nearly double American troop strength in Afghanistan gets into high gear, Britain’s involvement in the war has come under the fiercest criticism yet at home as a result of a steep increase in British casualties, including the deaths of 15 soldiers in the past 10 days.

"The latest losses are the heaviest British forces have suffered in any comparable period since the 1982 Falklands war. With the Defense Ministry’s announcement of eight soldiers’ deaths on Friday, Britain’s toll in Afghanistan is now 184 killed, five more than its total losses in Iraq, where Britain’s combat commitment ended this spring."

Why the U.K. has sent troops to fight in Afghanistan must be reexamined. I would argue that no one, not Gordon Brown, not Barack Obama, not Angela Merkel, has come up with a reasonable and cogent answer to this question. And the more time that foreign troops including those of the U.S. and the U.K. are stationed there, the more loss of life and the more maiming injuries, not only of American and British troops but of ordinary Afghanis.

Burns writes:

"The deaths have generated grim images that have led the nightly television news, of slate-gray transport aircraft carrying coffins landing at a military air base in Wiltshire and being driven slowly in hearses past crowds lining the high street in Wootton Bassett, a nearby town. When five coffins passed down the street on Friday, on their way to a mortuary in Oxford, women wailed.

"Britain’s casualties are far lower than those suffered by American forces, who have lost 732 troops in Afghanistan and 4,322 in Iraq, according to icasualties.org, a Web site that monitors the military losses in both wars. But with Britain’s far smaller population and troop deployments, the latest deaths — from a force of 9,000 that makes Britain’s the second-largest troop presence in Afghanistan after the United States’ — have been as much of a shock here as the heavy American troop losses in Iraq at the height of that conflict were in the United States."

There is no justifiable reason why British soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan. And whom are they fighting? Ordinary Afghan villagers and believers in jihad, people who think and really believe that they are doing God's work killing infidels.

So why does PM Gordon Brown continue to defend and support the enigmatic war that has caused such a large loss of life for British troops? Brown seems to be like George Bush who once the killings of American soldiers began to mount nevertheless stubbornly refused to reconsider his awful and erroneous decision.

John Burns writes:

"Speaking at the Group of 8 summit meeting in Italy on Friday, Mr. Brown said the increase in British casualties during an offensive in Helmand, where Taliban fighters have concentrated a summer offensive of their own, was part of a mission that aimed at breaking “a chain of terror” that ran from southern Afghanistan and Pakistan to the streets of Britain, and contributed to the transit bombings in London in 2005. “Britons today are safer because of the courageous sacrifice of British soldiers in Afghanistan,” he said.

"But his faltering voice as he predicted further casualties reflected a political reality he could not avoid. Although Mr. Brown voted for Britain’s involvement in Iraq in 2003, when he was chancellor of the exchequer, he made no secret in following years of his profound discomfort with the war, and he moved decisively after he succeeded Tony Blair as prime minister in 2007 to lay down a schedule for British withdrawal, which will be completed later this month.

"But like Mr. Obama, a vigorous opponent of the Iraq war during the Bush years who has become a proponent of a more vigorous American military commitment in Afghanistan, Mr. Brown has made the Afghan conflict his own. On Friday, as often before, he made an unequivocal commitment to staying the course. “We knew from the start that defeating the insurgency in Helmand would be a hard and dangerous job, but it’s a vital one,” he said."

NPR'S MORNING EDITION QUOTES AFGHAN POLICE CHIEF DEFENDING BOMBING OF CIVILIANS

This morning on NPR's Morning Edition, Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports on the U.S. bombing raid of a small Afghani village that left 140 people dead, many of them children.

Writes Sarhaddi Nelson:

"Abdul Ghafar Watandar, the provincial police chief, said foreign militants and Afghan Taliban are flowing into districts surrounding Farah city from their hideouts across the southern border with Pakistan. Their commanders — including a cleric who was the governor of neighboring Nimrooz province when the Taliban ruled Afghanistan — recently formed a "shadow" government in Farah.

"Watandar said these new Taliban officials are handing out money and weapons to the impoverished and illiterate majority with the aim of further destabilizing the province.

"Unlike previous Taliban cells, this new army of militants seems eager to take on not only the local police, but also the far better trained and equipped Afghan and NATO troops. And Watandar said there aren't enough of those in Farah province, making air support a crucial part of major fights.

""If the American airstrikes hadn't happened that day, there might have been a lot more deaths," Watandar said. "The Taliban had secured themselves good positions on the rooftops and streets of the village, and they wouldn't have left.""

But this argument that the U.S. airstrikes probably saved many more deaths is just pure speculation and self-serving. Whoever ordered the airstrike needs to be recalled. Killing over 140 civilians is unacceptable. Killing even one civilian or one child is also unacceptable.

Is this what the war means in Afghanistan? U.S. war planes dropping bombs on civilians in the American quest to eliminate the Taliban? If the answer is yes, then I don't want any part of that dirty war.

Bring all American soldiers out of Afghanistan. There has to be a better way of dealing with fundamental Islamists. Killing civilians is not the answer.

OBAMA IS A BIG DISAPPOINTMENT, CONTINUES HATED POLICIES OF BUSH/CHENEY

On certain decisions, Barack Obama has been a disappointing continuation of George W. Bush:

1. Obama resurrects the hated military commissions for prisoners at Guantanamo. See William Glaberson's article today on the web page of The New York Times.

2. Obama continues Bush's policies of trying to keep information out of the public's hands by claiming "state secrets."

3. Obama continues the dreadful war in Afghanistan. Just a few days ago, U.S. war planes bombed an Afghan village killing over 150 civilians, many of whom were just children.

4. Obama continues to threaten Britain and the British courts with non-cooperation in the future if a British court releases torture memos about what was done to former Guantanamo inmate Binyam Mohamed. See John Burns' report in today's The New York Times.

5. Obama refuses to release photos of American mistreatment of captives in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying it would threaten "national security."

6. Obama refuses to initiate an investigation of the Bush/Cheney policy of using waterboarding and other forms of torture of suspected terrorists.

STOP USE OF WAR PLANES IN AFGHANISTAN

To prevent civilian deaths and injuries in Afghanistan, I want to see the U.S. military ground all war planes permanently. Dropping bombs from F-16s will kill innocent civilians, no matter what precision guidance system the military says it is using.

Airplanes should be restricted to transportation and other peaceful purposes. They should not be used to fire at people on the ground or to drop high explosives on rural agrarian Afghani villages.

STOP U.S. AIR ATTACKS IN AFGHANISTAN

Taimoor Shah and Carlotta Gall report in today's The New York Times that U.S. bombing has killed up to 100 villagers in western Afghanistan, many of them women and children. Apparently Afghan forces attacked a suspected Taliban house and then called in U.S. war planes. The result is all too predictable.

Write Shah and Gall:

"Dozens of civilians, including women and children, have been killed during bombing raids by United States forces in western Afghanistan as Afghan troops battled Taliban fighters in heavy fighting, the Red Cross said Wednesday, confirming earlier accounts by Afghan officials.

"Enraged villagers brought between 20 and 25 bodies from their district to the capital of Farah Province to show them to officials, the officials said Tuesday. Villagers’ accounts put the death toll at 70 to 100, they said."

I have been long arguing for a complete cessation of U.S. air attacks. There is no way that such attacks are not going to inflict unacceptable civilian casualties. Perhaps the U.S. government still permits these attacks, misunderstanding who the "enemy" is. Members of the Taliban are just ordinary Afghanis, undereducated, simple farmers living with their families in agrarian villages. The Taliban thus represent a true insurgency against U.S. occupying and invading military. If the U.S. and Obama are going to "defeat" the Taliban, it cannot be by force of guns or war planes dropping bombs.

Consider the following from the Shah and Gall report:

"Villagers told Afghan officials that they had put children, women, and elderly men in several housing compounds away from the fighting to keep them safe. But the villagers said fighter aircraft later attacked those compounds in the village of Gerani, killing a majority of those inside, The A.P. reported.

"Mohammad Nieem Qadderdan, the former top official in the district of Bala Baluk, said he had seen dozens of bodies when he visited the village of Gerani.

"“These houses that were full of children and women and elders were bombed by planes. It is very difficult to say how many were killed because nobody can count the number, it is too early,” Mr. Qadderdan, who no longer holds a government position, told The A.P. by telephone. “People are digging through rubble with shovels and hands.”"

BAD NEWS FROM AFGHANISTAN

BBC Radio ran a piece last night on a study on rape and assault of female U.S. soldiers by their male comrades in Afghanistan. Sorry I have not yet found the cite. According to the study, over 30% of female soldiers in Afghanistan are assaulted or raped by other soldiers. This is shocking and an outrage. These female soldiers are just trying to do their job in the military, and then the Army allows them to be subject to abuse among their own platoon or company. Apparently no woman is safe from rape in the U.S. military. We need to hear from Barack Obama and Robert Gates on this reprehensible situation.

Second. C.J. Chivers reports today in The New York Times on the U.S. ambush of 13 Taliban fighters in the mountains of Afghanistan. All were killed. Is this the purpose of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to kill local militants? The U.S. has wasted thirteen lives, probably of very young men, resisting a foreign occupier in their land. Do we count this as a "victory" or a "defeat"? For each Afghani life taken in this ambush, how many more local village boys will volunteer to get revenge on the Americans? And how about the U.S. soldiers in this story? Having shot men and boys at close range, will these soldiers ever get over the psychological trauma that a firefight inflicts?

There is no good reason why the U.S. sends American soldiers to Afghanistan. All that results is bad, from the rape and assault of female soldiers to the wanton killing of Afghani men and boys, not even mentioning the purposeless death of American soldiers in pursuing this madness.

DON'T SEND MORE U.S TROOPS TO AFGHANISTAN

How can Barack Obama want to continue to send more troops to Afghanistan when Afghan society is so discriminatory to women? Obama wants to root out the Taliban and Al Qaeda but it seems that members of those groups are part and parcel of Afghan society. The recent You-Tube video of a young girl being flogged in Pakistan's Waziristan area shows how deeply embedded the discrimination is. Furthermore even those who are not Taliban or Al Qaeda seem to prefer a society where a woman is totally subjugated to her husband and cannot leave the home without permission.

STOP AMERICAN BUILD UP OF TROOPS IN AFGHANISTAN

I don't understand Barack Obama's thinking in sending 10,000+ more American soldiers to Afghanistan. Obama surely knows that killing people who you think are "enemies" cannot achieve the objectives you want, no matter how lofty they are. True, killing your enemies used to be the only solution, but that was before the Enlightenment, before we had due process and the rule of law.

Obama says his main goal is to stop Al Qaeda. Well then, Obama should try personal diplomacy, given his stardom and popularity in the world. Why resort to bombing and shooting members of Al Qaeda? Obama has the answer, not in airplanes or tanks, but in his self.

If Al Qaeda represents radical and fundamental Islam, then military force and compulsion will do nothing except exacerbate the hatred and distrust of Al Qaeda members for Americans and secular Western customs.

I have good advice for Pres. Obama - stop the buildup of American forces in Afghanistan. Stop the militaristic approach to solving a problem that can never be solved with drones and bullets.

OBAMA: STOP MILITARY FOOLISHNESS IN AFGHANISTAN

Pres. Barack Obama is making a huge mistake committing troops to Afghanistan. Yes, that country is still mired in the 8th Century, with women rarely seen on the streets and with the rule of law practically non-existent in the face of Islamic
fundamentalism.

So what role does the U.S. have fighting over there. Obama says he wants to rid Afghanistan and Pakistan of members of Al Qaeda. But Al Qaeda is composed of ordinary Afghanis and Pakis, young men barely in their twenties who have committed to Islam in the most fundamental way. There is no possibility that the U.S. and Obama are going to defeat those guys by force of arms or warplanes or tanks or special forces raids.

That's what I don't understand about Obama's move. I thought he was more committed to the use of America's soft power. Apparently he still believes in force of arms. Hasn't anybody ever told him the dirty little secret? - that military action never works, unless to create hatred and animosity that will last many generations if not hundreds of years in the minds of the invaded and occupied towards the invader and occupier.

I agree with Obama on this, that the U.S. should help build Afghanistan's schools, roads, bridges, hospitals, highways. That the U.S. should help train and outfit a rule of law police force that will keep public peace and welfare.

But I disagree with seeing the Al Qaeda problem as solvable by military means. Killing Al Qaeda adherents will have no beneficial effect. Shooting Afghan women and children by mistake will not make the U.S. safer, but just the opposite. Conducting special forces raids at 2 AM just reinforces the notion already in the hearts and minds of most Afghanis that the U.S. is a cruel and dishonorable people and nation that Afghans of all ages must repel and destroy.

MC CAIN/LIEBERMAN WANT U.S. EXPANSION OF WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

In today's The Washington Post, Senators Joe Lieberman and John McCain write an op-ed arguing that the U.S. should not be scaling down military operations in Afghanistan.

Write Lieberman and McCain:

"As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there -- for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists.

"The political allure of such a reductionist approach is obvious. But it is also dangerously and fundamentally wrong, and the president should unambiguously reject it. Let there be no doubt: The war in Afghanistan can be won. Success -- a stable, secure, self-governing Afghanistan that is not a terrorist sanctuary -- can be achieved. Just as in Iraq, there is no shortcut to success, no clever "middle way" that allows us to achieve more by doing less. A minimalist approach in Afghanistan is a recipe not for winning smarter but for losing slowly at tremendous cost in American lives, treasure and security."

Lieberman and McCain are notorious war mongers who think that all problems can be solved by dropping cluster bombs and shooting people with tank shells. These guys believe that the U.S. needs a war every ten years so that it can kill people who speak different languages and have different skin colors. Thank the stars we don't have McCains or Liebermans running the country. They would involve us in multiple wars, multiple lives lost, multiple civilians killed, blinded, maimed, multiple adventuristic invasions and occupations.

U.S.: STOP FIGHTING IN AFGHANISTAN

Today the BBC reports that a roadside bomb has killed four U.S. soldiers in eastern Afghanistan.

Writes the BBC:

"A roadside bomb attack in eastern Afghanistan has killed four US soldiers, the Nato-led Isaf peacekeeping force has confirmed.

"Taleban insurgents reportedly claimed responsibility for the explosion which killed the servicemen in the province of Nangarhar.

"Reports suggest that the bomb went off as a convoy was passing.

"More than 60 foreign soldiers have been killed in the country this year, many of the losses claimed by the Taleban."

I have longed argued that the United States has no business sending its troops into any foreign country, especially a country like Afghanistan. No foreign invading and/or occupying force has ever conquered the Afghanis since the time of Alexander the Great. The desire to arrest Oasama bin Laden and Mullah Omar is understandable, but this operation should have been a small police action, not a military one carried out by an invading and occupying American army.

Just as it is a serious mistake for Mexican president Felipe Calderon to send the Mexican Army into towns like Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez to help conduct anti-narcotic raids, so it is a serious mistake for Barack Obama to commit 17,000 soldiers, sailors and marines to Afghanistan. This is sheer madness, having no explainable purpose and designed to end in more needless loss of life, such as we see today, not to mention the hatred and anti-Americanism such an occupation generates.

OBAMA: STOP FOLLOWING IN BUSH'S STEPS

So far I am not happy with Barack Obama's policies on certain aspects of George W. Bush's "war on terror." My objections have relied on ideas posted by Steven D. Schwinn writing on Constitutional Law Prof Blog here.

First. I object to the whole concept of "state secrets." This is just a convenient euphemism for keeping secrets reports which would cause government and government officials public scorn and ridicule. Courts should not allow a sovereign to escape inspection by the public of government's actions.

Second. I want Obama to order the release of the 17 Uighurs still in custody at Guantanamo. They have never received any fair trial, charges of aiding terrorists have never been proved against them, they have been held illegally against their will for seven years. Obama, release the Uighurs.

Third. I condemn Obama and the U.S. government for continuing to attack villages in western Pakistan by firing missiles from drones into people's homes and villages. Obama seems to have accepted Bush's strategy that killing people by military means will succeed in making the U.S. more safe from terrorism. This is pure bull. All the killing does is to incite anti-American hatred and an unquenchable need for revenge.

Fourth. Stop the U.S. military build-up in Afghanistan. There has never been a successful invasion and occupation of that country since the time of Alexander the Great. History will not change for the Americans. Military force will only succeed in killing both Afghanis and Americans in larger and larger numbers.

UN REPORTS CIVILIAN DEATHS IN AFGHANISTAN

Obama has decided to send 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. This is a catastrophe to Afghan civilians. Last year, according to a BBC report on figures released by the United Nations, the number of Afghani civilian casualties rose almost 40%.

The BBC reports:

"The UN report into civilian deaths said the death toll in 2008 civilian was "the highest of any year" since the Taleban were ousted in 2001.

"The majority of the victims were killed in the south of the country - where international and Afghan forces are fighting a fierce counter-insurgency campaign.

"In one of the most-publicised incidents, US troops fighting off a Taleban ambush last November bombed a wedding party in the Shah Wali Kot area in southern Afghanistan, killing about 40 civilians - mainly women and children.

"The issue of civilian deaths at the hands of foreign troops is a hugely sensitive issue, says the BBC's Martin Patience, in Kabul, and is something that the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, has raised repeatedly."