The battle du jour is the budget and as usual it’s little more than irrelevant tribal warfare. No politician who wants to get reelected is going to take on Social Security – the corporatist Republicans hate it because it is so popular. Medicare is a double third rail – a lot of the Republican base is on Medicare and the the medical industrial complex is becoming increasingly dependent on medicare for paying customers and will fight reductions. And then we have military spending. The only way the US can escape becoming a failed empire is to give up it’s desire for empire.
As we have noted before while the voters what to cut the deficit they don’t really want to cut anything. There is one place where nearly 70% of the voters agree – the misadventure in a bad investment at 100 billion dollars a year. Over at Newshoggers Derrick Crowe explains how the year old surge in Afghanistan has been a failure and there is no reason to believe things will ever change.
Although President Obama, General Petraeus and others have repeatedly asserted in public remarks that the U.S. has reversed the insurgents’ momentum, reports from the Pentagon and from NGOs agree that the insurgency continued to grow in size and sophistication throughout 2010. By one measure, insurgent-initiated attacks this January are up almost 80 percent from last January. Worse, a new report from Alex Strick von Linschoten and Felix Kuehn at the Center on International Cooperation warns that the U.S. targeted killings of senior Taliban leadership is not only failing to retard the growth of the insurgency, but it’s providing opportunities for much more radical junior leaders to take control of the operation, making the Taliban more susceptible to al-Qaeda influence and making the insurgents less willing to negotiate. In short, over the year in which the U.S. was pursuing its escalated military strategy, the insurgency got larger, smarter and more radical.
Yes, we are dumping 100 billion dollars a year into Afghanistan and things are getting worse and we don’t have the resources to increase our futile effort. It will soon be an American war – even Great Britain will soon be forced to abandon the futile adventure. It’s time to realize that the best way to defend our borders is at out borders and with a failing state at our southern borders that may be necessary. In addition our efforts in Afghanistan are radicalizing and destabilizing the nuclear Pakistan.
Go read Derick Crowe’s entire post and if you agree it’s time to end the unwinnable misadventure in Afghanistan then go join Rethink Afghanistan on Facebook and Twitter.