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Monday, July 26, 2010

And yet we continue to pour money into this while Republicans say we can't afford to help the unemployed
Posted by Jill | 5:21 AM
There's no money to help the unemployed. There's no money to pay teachers in our country's public schools. There's no money for infrastructure. Everything is a question of how it affects the deficit -- except spending on war. It doesn't matter how many children go hungry, how many people lose their homes, how many schools close; all that matters is that the giant maw of the war machine keeps getting fed. Even if the war is one based on George W. Bush's lies, as is the one in Iraq, where our soldiers remain to this day, or if it is one neglected by the same former president and haplessly escalated by our current one, like Afghanistan.

Wikileaks is turning out to be today's Daniel Ellsburg, pointing out exactly what a complete and total waste of money this badly-run and ill-starred adventure in Afghanistan is:
A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year’s deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.

The archive is a vivid reminder that the Afghan conflict until recently was a second-class war, with money, troops and attention lavished on Iraq while soldiers and Marines lamented that the Afghans they were training were not being paid.

Those who weren't around during the Vietnam years may have a hard time imaginung just how disheartening and tiresome it is to read this. After all we went through during that futile war that lasted less time than this has and chewed up even more American kids, our so-called leaders learned nothing.

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3 Comments:
Blogger rjs said...
nearly $12B a month for war since 9/11, over $15,000,000 an hour for almost 9 years of killing children, and they couldnt even find $10B this year to help defray what could be 300,000 teacher layoffs...
7/26/10, 6:56 AM  
Blogger Unknown said...
I wonder if the Dems are starting to question the wisdom of having spent five years flogging Afghanistan as the "good and necessary" war?
7/26/10, 7:16 AM  
Blogger Nan said...
I was listening to a report on this on the news this morning, and what got me was the bizarre "Pakistan's been fucking us over? Golly, gee, who knew?" tone. What kind of alternate reality do policy makers and MSM talking heads live in anyway? There have been stories circulating for years about Pakistan's intelligence service being in bed with both Al Qaeda and the Taliban. This isn't news; it's verification of common knowledge.
7/26/10, 9:17 AM  
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