Opinion -- We Promised to Protect Him. We Lied.

By Tony Pentimalli

Sayed Nasir didn’t sneak into the United States. He didn’t hop a fence or break a law. He followed every step, played by every rule, and trusted every word of a promise this country made: Help our troops, and we will protect you. That promise was supposed to mean something.

On June 11, in a San Diego courtroom, that promise was shattered.

Nasir served the United States military as an interpreter in Afghanistan for over three years. He helped American soldiers navigate hostile terrain, interpret tribal negotiations, and survive the chaos of war. He risked his life daily. The Taliban noticed. They killed his brother. They abducted his father. His wife and children fled for their lives.

When the U.S. military pulled out, Nasir did what any man trying to survive would do. He escaped to Brazil, secured a humanitarian visa, and walked over 6,000 miles—including through the hellish Darien Gap—to reach the U.S.-Mexico border. There, he scheduled an appointment through the CBP One app and was lawfully paroled into the country to begin the asylum process.

He followed every step. He showed up to every hearing. He complied.

And still—agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tackled and arrested him in the courthouse hallway. His case, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lawyer said, had been “improvidently issued.” No clarification. No due process. No hearing. Just handcuffs.

What happened to Sayed Nasir isn’t an isolated case. It’s a pattern.

ICE has begun using the vague legal phrase “improvidently issued” as a bureaucratic loophole—one that allows them to dismiss active asylum claims on a technicality, detain applicants with no criminal records, and ship them off before the courts can intervene. It’s not justice. It’s not order. It’s a numbers game.

And in Trump’s second term, the numbers are everything.

Internal memos from DHS and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reveal aggressive targets: 3,000 arrests per day, regardless of threat level or legal status. To meet those quotas, ICE is detaining everyone from asylum seekers to status adjusters to U.S. allies who risked everything for American troops.

This is what that looks like:

In San Diego, flashbang grenades exploded outside Buona Forchetta restaurant while ICE agents attempted to extract a detained migrant. Family members and neighbors surrounded the van. They begged for a warrant. The agents responded with war-zone tactics. Windows shook. Patrons screamed. A waiter dropped to the floor.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, ICE agents shoved a teenage girl to the pavement as she tried to protect her mother—an undocumented woman with a baby—during a street arrest.

In New Bedford, ICE officers used a hammer to smash the window of a couple’s car. They dragged Juan Francisco Mendez into custody, called him the wrong name, and discovered later he wasn’t even the target. Mendez was mid-process in a legal status change.

None of these stories made front-page news.

None prompted a press conference from the president.

But something about Nasir’s arrest did break through. Maybe it was the footage—his trembling voice repeating, "I worked with the U.S. military. I have all the documents." Maybe it was the cold-blooded nature of it: arresting a man at a hearing he was legally required to attend. Maybe it was the fact that even Fox News Pentagon reporter Jennifer Griffin wrote, simply, "This should anger every American."

It should.

Because it exposes what we’ve become.

We told men like Sayed Nasir that we’d keep them safe. We let them risk their lives to support American operations, and then when it was no longer convenient, we tossed them aside.

The Biden administration entered office promising not to forget our Afghan allies. “We will keep our commitment,” the president said in 2021. “They stood with us, and we will stand with them.”

That commitment now lies broken, buried beneath the flashbang smoke.

The Trump administration is doing more than breaking a promise. It is weaponizing the backlog.

There are still over 150,000 Afghans who served alongside U.S. troops waiting for protection. Many have been killed. Others—like Nasir—are now being rounded up by the very country they helped. By contrast, the Obama administration processed over 8,500 Afghan SIVs in 2016. Trump’s second term has admitted fewer than 600.

This isn’t immigration enforcement. It’s betrayal.

And it sends a clear message to every interpreter, fixer, guide, and ally in every future war America wages: Don’t believe our promises. Don’t trust our word. Because when the time comes, we will abandon you. We will forget your face. We will call you illegal.

And we will hand you back to the men who want you dead.

Representative Jason Crow, a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, put it plainly: “If we can’t protect those who risked their lives for our troops, we lose credibility—not just in Afghanistan, but everywhere we deploy.”

The legal justification for Nasir’s arrest doesn’t hold water either. Multiple federal courts have warned ICE against making arrests inside courthouses, calling it a chilling violation of due process. That’s exactly what happened in San Diego.

The men behind these decisions—Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Trump himself—aren’t enforcing law. They’re staging a spectacle. They want America afraid, divided, and brutal. They want to make an example out of men like Nasir. Not because they broke the law, but because they remind us what honor looks like.

If there is still a conscience in this country, it must act now. 

Congress must investigate the “improvidently issued” loophole. Veterans' groups must speak louder. Civil rights organizations must file lawsuits. And Americans—of every party, in every state—must demand that we keep the promises we made.

Because if we let this slide, it won’t stop with Nasir. It won’t stop with Afghan interpreters. It won’t stop at all.

This isn’t just immigration policy. It’s authoritarian conditioning. The war tactics, the courthouse arrests, the spectacle—it’s all part of the same doctrine: make the public fear, and make the state feel godlike.

We are either a nation that keeps its word—or we are a nation that lies.

Sayed Nasir is still in detention. And America’s soul is right there with him.

And if we don’t fight for him now, no one should believe in us again.

*Tony Pentimalli is a political analyst and commentator fighting for democracy, economic justice, and social equity. Follow him for sharp analysis and hard-hitting critiques on Facebook and BlueSky

Editorial -- Joe Biden Prints Money for Taiwan Arms

The path towards a four front war continues. On Friday, the Biden Administration formally notified Congress of their intent to sell radars, anti-ship, and anti-aircraft missiles to Taiwan worth $1.1 billion. Some of that money would have come in awfully handy for fixing our pothole infested roads here in Northwest Missouri. 

And instead of doing the hard work needed to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, the politicians in Washington are looking at ways of making it easier to deliver such weapons to Ukraine and Taiwan. This is a tragedy waiting to happen. In the 1980's, the US sent weapons to Afghanistan in an effort to drive the USSR out and to overthrow the government there. Those weapons were later used on us, and some of the very allies we were helping attacked our country on 9/11. But I suppose it's a lot easier for the politicians in Washington to solve other peoples' problems than it is to solve our own.

The safeguards regarding weapons deliveries to foreign entities were put in place for a reason. How do we know that the weapons that Joe Biden is printing money for won't fall into the wrong hands? How do we know that Taiwan won't suddenly become the enemy down the road, like Osama Bin Laden? How do we know that these weapons won't fall into the hands of the Chinese when we decide 20 years down the road that propping up the regime in Taiwan is no longer sustainable?

And Joe Biden offers no way to pay for these new weapons shipments. And I didn't get a bill from the IRS. So apparently, he is just going to print the money to pay for it, no questions asked. 

Editorial -- Group of 50 Begs for War With Iran

While Joe Biden continues to play nuclear chicken with Russia and escalate the conflict there, and Nancy Pelosi grandstands for war with China over Taiwan, a third group of people, 50 congresspeople led by Josh Gottheimer (D-NJ), is clamoring for war with Iran.

In 2018, President Donald Trump tore up the Iran Deal, one of the signature achievements of the Obama Administration, and three times brought us to the brink of war. In 2020, Joe Biden ran on a platform of returning to that deal, which he has been dragging his feet on ever since. For anyone who thinks that our belief that the US is sleepwalking into a four front war with Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea is far-fetched, Mr. Gottheimer’s letter is an eye opener. 

His logic is that Iran and paramilitary allies like the Revolutionary Guard are state sponsors of terrorism and thus can’t be trusted. But assuming that he is correct, that makes it all the more important that we have a verifiable agreement in place to ensure that Iran can never be allowed to have a nuclear weapon. 

And even if Iran is supportive of Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, it is not in Russia’s interest to have a nuclear armed neighbor to its south. Russia started two wars, in Afghanistan in 1979 and in Ukraine this year, based on their belief that nuclear missiles were about to be stationed on their border five minutes from Moscow. If Iran suddenly fell to a coup and a new government was hostile to Moscow, the same thing would happen. There has been plenty of unrest in Iran in recent years, so this scenario is not far fetched.

The occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have drained the US treasury of trillions of dollars in reserves that could have been used to build roads and bridges, fund schools, and create energy independence from the likes of Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Given that Iran is three times the population, the cost of prosecuting such a war, even if the US were not already on the brink of war with Russia and China, would be astronomical. How does Mr. Gottheimer and his gang of 50 propose to pay for such a war? He won’t say, let alone what sacrifices we should be expected to make in the event that war breaks out between the US and Iran.

Word on the Street – Middle America, not the Middle East

If anybody wants to know why Sheridan is not getting money to fix their water system or why Worth County School has to make hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of budget cuts after already having made a bunch of cuts or why our lettered roads are not in good shape anymore, look at the Middle East.
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When Bill Clinton was President, his mantra was “It’s the Economy, Stupid!” We had eight years of economic growth under his rule. Surpluses were the rule of the day at the end of his term, not deficits.
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But now, it seems that our politicians on both sides of the aisle are obsessed with the Middle East instead of Middle America. And now, our roads are crumbling, our schools are having to make more and more cuts, and our towns are struggling to keep up water systems in the face of burdensome government regulations.
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George Bush had a personal vendetta against Saddam while Dick Cheney had personal interests in occupying Iraq.
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And now Obama is going to continue his drone attacks far into the future even though Bin Laden is dead and we have not been attacked since 9/11.
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The question is, when is enough enough? The more that Obama continues his drone attacks, the more that we plant the seeds for the next 9/11, just like our building of permanent bases in Saudi Arabia planted the seeds for the 9/11 attacks.
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We’re not excusing anybody’s actions. But we’re suggesting that there is a much better way of bankrupting the terrorists than the extrajudicial kidnappings and imprisonments of the Bush Administration or the Obama drone attacks – getting off of foreign oil and getting electric cars, wind farms and solar plants built in every city in the US.
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Actions speak louder than words. Most of us agree that we should have a strong national defense. But when certain politicians cry the blues about our escalating deficits and then turn around and spend trillions of dollars on Iraq and Afghanistan while making plans to cut 90% of federal funding from our schools over the next 10 years, we know that these politicians care more about the Middle East than they do about Middle America.
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And actions can have unintended consequences, no matter how heroic they might seem. The corporate media reports all of the good consequences about the raid that killed Bin Laden, but ignores the bad – such as the fact that Pakistan is running for cover from Polio immunization campaigns after it turned out that a US agent, Dr. Shakil Afridi, set up a phony public health immunization campaign in an effort to get Bin Laden’s DNA.
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Polio, for those of us who didn’t grow up in the 1950’s, was the biggest scare in the US following the fear of nuclear war during those days.
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But we eradicated Polio by making it a national priority. And we can bankrupt the terrorists by doing the same thing with energy.
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None of us have all the answers. Therefore, the best role for government is not to stick their heads in the sand under the guise of “All of the Above” or to dictate to small towns and small businesses and farmers how to run their operations. The best role for the government is to facilitate, providing resources and expertise to towns and cities and help them develop a vision of a country free of dependence on high gas prices and free from the fear of terrorism.

McCaskill: New Special Inspector General Offers ‘new chance at accountability’

More than a year after demanding that the Administration to take action, U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today released the following statement after the appointment of a new Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) to combat waste, fraud, and abuse of U.S. taxpayer dollars in Afghanistan:

“The White House took too long to fill this critical position, but now that we have someone ready to jump in, it offers us a new chance at accountability. As we work to cut spending and rein in the national debt, billions of taxpayer dollars have been lost in Afghanistan through waste, fraud, and abuse—and that’s why it’s so important that the taxpayers have a dedicated set of eyes and ears over the massive amounts of money being spent there.”

In November, McCaskill—a former State Auditor and prosecutor—strongly urged President Obama to appoint a new Special Inspector General and told the President that such an appointment should be a top priority.  That letter followed an earlier letter sent last May, in which McCaskill led a bipartisan group of Senators and Representatives who asked President Obama to fill the Special Inspector General position, which has remained vacant since January 2011.

More recently, McCaskill used a Senate hearing to chastise the White House for leaving such positions vacant for so long, listing the agencies which lacked Inspectors General: “We do not have SIGAR, we do not have DOD, we do not have State, we do not have AID, in terms of an appointed and confirmed Inspector General… I find it appalling that these people have not been appointed. And there is a long list of qualified people to hold these jobs… And I do not understand why this is taking so long. If you look at the world of Inspectors General, and the money that’s being spent—how these positions can go vacant for this period of time is beyond me. And I’m hoping that the White House gets busy.”

The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction position was created by Congress in 2008 with the purpose of detecting and preventing waste, fraud, and abuse in Afghanistan. McCaskill repeatedly raised concerns regarding the poor performance of the man who first held the position, Arnold Fields. She went on to successfully call on the President to remove Fields as Special Inspector General but the post was subsequently left vacant until today.  

As Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight, McCaskill has held multiple hearings investigating the mismanagement of reconstruction contracts in Afghanistan. Last year, the Commission on Wartime Contracting—a panel created through legislation by McCaskill—concluded that the U.S. has wasted as much as $60 billion through contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McCaskill seeks answers on whether contractors are hiring military veterans

U.S. Senator Claire McCaskill today continued her effort to strengthen employment among the nation’s military veterans, asking the U.S. Department of Labor for information on how government contractors are fulfilling their legal requirement to employ and promote veterans.

Under federal law, companies with government contracts must submit reports, known as VETS-100 or VETS-100A, which detail the number of new hires and current employees who are veterans. Contractors are also required to list certain job openings with employment service delivery systems and to create and maintain affirmative action plans for specified groups of veterans. The Secretary of Labor is then required to submit an annual report to Congress regarding contractors’ compliance with those requirements, and their impact on the employment of veterans

In a letter to Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, McCaskill requested detailed information on contractor hiring practices for the past ten years in order to determine whether contractors have been complying with the law.

McCaskill, Chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Contractor Oversight, expressed concern that contractors may not be accurately reporting their employment numbers. McCaskill said that requiring contractors to give preference to veterans seeking employment, particularly those who have recently returned from service in Iraq and Afghanistan, is a critical and timely issue.

Since joining the U.S. Senate, McCaskill has been an outspoken advocate for the nation’s troops and veterans. Last week, McCaskill helped pass the VOW to Hire Heroes Act, which was approved by the Senate with overwhelming bipartisan support. The legislation incentivizes the hiring of unemployed veterans by providing businesses tax credits.

McCaskill’s letter to the Secretary of Labor is available on her website, HERE.

Opinion: The Unchanging Imperial Paradigm

The Unchanging Imperial Paradigm
by Sheldon Richman

Despite President Obama’s trumpeted force drawdown in Afghanistan, by the end of next summer more than twice as many U.S. troops will be fighting in that country’s civil war as there were when he became president in 2009. His soothing words notwithstanding, a force of about 70,000 will remain there at least until the end of 2014. We can be sure, however, that that won’t stop the president from campaigning for reelection on a peace platform.

Obama’s speech the other night was mostly show, a spectacle to make the war- and deficit-weary public think he’s taking substantial steps toward disengagement. He did something similar in Iraq, though 50,000 troops remain and are still taking casualties.

It is easy for a president to manipulate public opinion, especially in foreign affairs and most especially when the mainstream media — conservative and “liberal” — are so compliant. The war will go on, but probably under the radar more than before, just as the war in Iraq does. The public and mainstream media attitude will be, “The president said the war is ending, so there’s no need to pay attention.”

One problem: Not much is changing.

In the coming months, politicians and pundits will debate whether Obama’s drawdown is too slow or too fast. The president explicitly took a middle position between those who wanted merely a token withdrawal, such as the top military brass and Sen. John McCain, and those who want an immediate exit, such as Reps. Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul.

But the pace, though not insignificant, is hardly the main issue. The main issue is the empire. If all combat troops were removed from Afghanistan tomorrow, the U.S. government would continue to treat that country like a protectorate, ready to send troops back if events are not to the policy elite’s liking. It’s the paradigm of empire that must be rejected. But Obama’s drawdown and disavowal of empire notwithstanding, the U.S. policy elite have no intention of reconsidering America’s hegemonic role in the world. To be sure, fiscal difficulties have forced a reconsideration of tactics, but the imperial framework remains. It was compactly summed up by President George H.W. Bush in 1991 as he prepared to move against Iraq’s Saddam Hussein after the invasion of Kuwait: “What we say goes.”

Empires always require myths, and the U.S. empire is no different. In the days before Obama’s speech, McCain and others campaigned for no more than token drawdown by asserting that Afghanistan would become a threat to the American people if the U.S. military disengaged, just as it did — supposedly — after the Soviets withdrew in 1989. “We withdrew from Afghanistan one time,” McCain said. “We withdrew from Afghanistan and the Taliban came, eventually followed by al-Qaeda, followed by the attacks on the United States of America.”

That is empire-serving nonsense. The policymakers did not abandon Afghanistan; they tried to micromanage it in defiance of Afghan history and culture. As Michael Scheuer, who once ran the CIA’s bin Laden unit, wrote in 2009, “In the immediate post-Soviet years, then, Washington spent tens of millions of dollars to try to form exactly the same type of strong and centralized Afghan government — the type of regime that historically causes war in Afghanistan — it is trying to form today.... The Afghans wanted no part of the secularism the U.S.-led West insisted on then....” Instead of letting the conflicting Afghan factions find some way to peace after a decade of brutal Soviet intrusion, American policymakers fanned the flames of civil war.

In any event, it was neither neglect of Afghanistan nor intervention there that prompted al-Qaeda’s attacks on 9/11. Rather it was half a century of U.S. support for brutality in the Muslim and Arab world, from Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians, to the corrupt monarchy in Saudi Arabia, to the torturous secular dictatorships in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

Regardless of what Obama does in Afghanistan, as long as the U.S. government eyes the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia the way an imperial power eyes its colonies, there will be threats to contend with. The path to American security lies in renouncing a foreign policy designed to rule the world.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) and editor of The Freeman magazine.

Opinion: Our Demand Must Be “US Troops Out of Afghanistan Now!”

By Brian Terrell



Given the fears and uncertainties of what might befall Afghanistan
upon the withdrawal of US and NATO troops, is it responsible for
American peace activists to demand that our government bring our
troops home now? I believe that it is crucial that we do and more
urgent by the day.



The future of Afghanistan cannot be settled by the US peace movement
anymore than by the US State Department or the Department of Defense.
Our positions on the war and occupation there need to be informed by
listening to Afghans and not solely by our own convictions. I
travelled to Afghanistan in December for three weeks, participating in
a Voices for Creative Nonviolence delegation that was hosted by the
Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers. From the many Afghans and foreigners
who live and work there, we heard varied opinions on what the
withdrawal of US troops would mean on the ground.



What support that we heard for a continued US military presence there
was always tempered by deep concerns that the occupation is clearly
settling in for a long haul. We heard no unqualified support for the
US military presence- even for those closely tied to Afghanistan’s
present government and who want the troops to stay, the occupation is
at best a temporary expedient, a lesser evil only in comparison to the
fulfillment of their worst nightmares. Those who fear the aftermath of
a quick US/NATO withdrawal are also outraged by the night raids, the
airstrikes and the civilian casualties that the occupation inflicts on
their people.



The Afghans who call for a quick end to the US/NATO occupation are not
so naïve as to believe that their country’s problems will end there
and neither should we indulge in such naïveté. The end of foreign
occupation will be a necessary if painful beginning of a process to
rebuild civil society after 30 years of war. As former parliamentarian
Malalai Joya insists, “The US and NATO occupy my country under the
name of all the beautiful banners of democracy, women’s rights, human
rights. And for this long time, they shed the blood of our people
under the name of war on terror… It is better (for the US and NATO) to
leave Afghanistan, then it is easier for us to fight one enemy instead
of two.”



The most urgent demands for withdrawal seem to come from those who,
like Malalai Joya who during the years of Taliban rule carried books
hidden in her burqa while teaching in an underground school for girls,
suffered greatly under the Taliban and who might also be most
vulnerable to the upheaval that might follow that withdrawal. The
young men of the Bamiyan based Afghan Youth Peace Volunteers who
accompanied us are all survivors of the attempted ethnic cleansing of
their home district by the Taliban. Most were internal refugees during
those years and witnessed the killing of family members, yet it is
from this group that comes the incessant demand, “we want you out!”



As a society we are more ready to take risks to fight a war than to
risk for peace. Perversely, the inevitable risks incurred by war
making are deemed acceptable, even if regretted, but the possibility
of any risk attached to peacemaking renders peace impractical. Daniel
Berrigan grieves, “We cry peace and cry peace, and there is no peace.
There is no peace because there are no peacemakers. There are no
makers of peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as
the making of war.” These courageous Afghan young people are among the
few willing to pay the cost required for peace and we should accept
their challenge to join them.



We need the courage, too, to take an honest look at what the presence
of US troops really means to Afghanistan, lest reservations over
withdrawal have foundation in residual delusions of American
beneficence. When President Obama released his “December Review” of
the situation in Afghanistan, I read it from our guest house in Kabul
and was struck by the apparent dissonance of Obama’s assurance that
the US/NATO operations were “on track” and “achieving our goals.”
International institutions, nongovernmental organizations, the Red
Cross, UNICEF, World Food Program, even the US National Intelligence
Estimate leaked the day before the president spoke, all confirmed what
we had been hearing and seeing from the broken streets of Kabul, that
the security and human and political situation in Afghanistan was
spiraling out of control.



President Obama’s optimistic assessment of the occupation is actually
reasonable unless one accepts the superstition of America’s good
intentions in the region. If the intention is to maintain and promote
in Afghanistan a permanent environment of violence, confusion,
distrust and fear, then it can be said that the US presence there is
on track. The occupation is meeting its goals if these include the
creation of an atmosphere there so poisonous that a civil society
intent on meeting the needs of the Afghan people, rather than allowing
the nation’s wealth to be plundered by foreign corporations can never
be nurtured.



Schools built, clinics staffed, roads paved by US and NATO armies are
widely reported and might “win the hearts and minds” of Americans and
so blunt criticism of the war, but they are not convincing to Afghans.
Referring to the recent surfacing of photos depicting the murder and
abuse of civilians by US troops, Malalai Joya writes, “I must report
that Afghans do not believe this to be a story of a few rogue
soldiers. We believe that the brutal actions of these ‘kill teams’
reveal the aggression and racism which is part and parcel of the
entire military occupation. While these photos are new, the murder of
innocents is not.”



It is difficult to argue with the many Afghans who believe that the
recent surge of civilian deaths and the callousness of US responses
prove a deliberate policy of targeting their children. Leading
proponent of nonviolence in Afghanistan and independent member of
their legislature, Dr. Ramazon Bashardost, said “These killings must
be stopped or the people will rise against the foreigners and we will
stand by them.”



Along with immediate withdrawal, we need to be demanding reparations
for Afghanistan, as opposed to the “aid” that has evaporated at the
rate of billions of dollars over the past nine years. Noam Chomsky, in
a telephone interview with our delegation, explained that distinction,
saying that along with Russia and Pakistan, the US owes “apology and
reparations” to Afghanistan. “They have played a miserable role in
destroying Afghanistan and should be responsible for doing whatever
they can to help the Afghan people overcome the consequences of these
interventions and atrocities. Again I stress that doesn’t mean aid,
that means reparations. Aid sounds like something we give out of our
good nature or good will. Reparations means what we are responsible
for providing because of the extreme damage we have caused.”



Some reservations over making the demand for immediate withdrawal seem
predicated upon an absurd premise that the peace movement in the US
has the clout to actually make that happen. It is as if some believe
that the US government could be persuaded by our marches,
demonstrations, petitions and blockades and concede to our demands and
pick up and leave tomorrow. While I sincerely wish that this were
possible, I am confident that our demand will not lead to a
precipitous withdrawal and the consequences that some fear would come
in its wake.



Even though the demand “US Troops Out Now!” is not immediately
achievable we should insist on no less than this. It might seem futile
to demand the impossible, but the real futility lies in US citizens’
pleas for a responsible time-line for withdrawal. History shows that
US troops will not leave Afghanistan one year or even two years after
a president pledges that they will be brought home in one year. The
admittedly patient process of bringing the troops home will not begin
in earnest until the American people, in our words and actions,
communicate that not one more day of this bloody and hopeless war can
be tolerated. Accepting the continuation of the war for three more
years or even one more year is to accede to an indefinite continuation
of the occupation. So long as the American people can tolerate even
one more day of war, the war will continue ad finitum.



Brian Terrell is a co-coordinator of Voices for Creative Nonviolence
and is at home at Strangers and Guests Catholic Worker Farm in Maloy,
Iowa.

Obama Sending Peace Feelers to Taliban.

Given all this talk about deficits, it seems that Obama is sending out peace feelers, seeing that the present war is taking a huge chunk out of our budget.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/02/19/us-usa-afghanistan-talks-idUSTRE71I2HL20110219?feedType=RSS&feedName=politicsNews&rpc=22&sp=true

MCCASKILL: AFGHAN POLICE TRAINING CONTRACT KEY TO U.S MISSION

The Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight’s Chairman Claire McCaskill today questioned top State and Defense Department officials about the continuing failure of government contractors responsible for training the Afghan police force, a task key to the success of the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

U.S. success in Afghanistan is dependent on our country’s ability to fight insurgents and maintain basic rule of law, and the Afghan police force is vital in achieving this objective. Over the past eight years, the United States government has spent over six billion dollars on police training contracts, yet numerous government watchdog reports have indicated serious problems with contractors’ work and agencies’ failure to adequately manage and oversee the contract.

“Training the police in Afghanistan is part of our military mission. It is as important as anything else we are doing in that nation right now,” McCaskill said. “So what has happened in that regard? It is an unbelievably incompetent story of contracting. For eight years we have been supposedly training the police in Afghanistan. And here’s what we’ve done. We’ve flushed six billion dollars. Six billion dollars.”

Watch video of McCaskill’s opening statement

Reports have repeatedly cited problems such as insufficient mentors, equipment shortages, inadequate pay, corruption, and deteriorating security conditions, with government officials and contractors failing to adequately address these issues. When David Johnson, the Assistant Secretary at the Department of State, tried to explain away problems by citing how many police officers have been through the training program, McCaskill responded by pointing out that there still is no effective police force.

“You can say all you want about how many [people] have been trained, but I think if we’re honest about how many are currently operative at an effectiveness level in the country of Afghanistan, Americans have not gotten a good deal on their investment,” McCaskill said.

The State Department and Department of Defense currently share control of the police training contract. McCaskill raised concerns that having the contract under control of more than one agency created a lack of clear authority and oversight, undermining the success of the mission.

“The ultimate recipe for disaster is not having one single agency with clear line of authority in charge, able to make sure the mission is accomplished with efficiency, effectiveness and that money is not walking away. None of that happened for eight years,” McCaskill said.

In December, a ruling by the GAO spurred the move of the contract to sole control by the Department of Defense. However, five months later, the Department of Defense still does not have a firm plan in place for moving forward with the contract. When McCaskill asked what the plan was for getting contractors committed and in place to train police officers in Afghanistan under the jurisdiction and supervision of the Department of Defense, David Sedney, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, could only say that they did not have a final answer.

“That’s unacceptable,” McCaskill responded. “The moment the complaint was filed all hands on deck should have been looking at this at the Pentagon to say, what’s Plan B? If this objection is upheld, what is Plan B?”

After being pressed by McCaskill, Sedney explained that the government has decided to hold a full and open competition to award a new contract.

Watch video of McCaskill questioning witnesses