`The Comeback Kid' and the Kids Who Won't

By Amy Goodman
TruthDig
December 28, 2010

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_combeback_kid_and_the_kids_who_wont_20101228/

President Barack Obama signed a slew of bills into law
during the lame-duck session of Congress and was dubbed
the "Comeback Kid" amid a flurry of fawning press
reports. In the hail of this surprise bipartisanship,
though, the one issue over which Democrats and
Republicans always agree, war, was completely ignored.
The war in Afghanistan is now the longest war in U.S.
history, and 2010 has seen the highest number of U.S.
and NATO soldiers killed.

As of this writing, 497 of the reported 709 coalition
fatalities in 2010 were U.S. soldiers. The website
iCasualties.org has carefully tracked the names of
these dead. There is no comprehensive list of the
Afghans killed. But one thing that's clear: Those 497
U.S. soldiers, under the command of the "Comeback Kid,"
won't be coming back.

On Dec. 3, Commander in Chief Obama made a surprise
visit to his troops in Afghanistan, greeting them and
speaking at Bagram Air Base. Bagram is the air base
built by the Soviet Union during that country's failed
invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Now run by U.S.
forces, it is also the site of a notorious detention
facility. On Dec. 10, 2002, almost eight years to the
day before Obama spoke there, a young Afghan man named
Dilawar was beaten to death at Bagram. The ordeal of
his wrongful arrest, torture and murder was documented
in the Oscar-winning documentary by Alex Gibney, "Taxi
to the Dark Side." Dilawar was not the only one
tortured and killed there by the U.S. military.

Obama told the troops: "We said we were going to break
the Taliban's momentum, and that's what you're doing.
You're going on the offense, tired of playing defense,
targeting their leaders, pushing them out of their
strongholds. Today we can be proud that there are fewer
areas under Taliban control, and more Afghans have a
chance to build a more hopeful future."

Facts on the ground contradict his rosy assessment from
many different directions. Maps made by the United
Nations, showing the risk-level assessments of
Afghanistan, were leaked to The Wall Street Journal.
The maps described the risk to U.N. operations in every
district of Afghanistan, rating them as "very high
risk," "high risk," "medium risk" and "low risk." The
Journal reported that, between March and October 2010,
the U.N. found that southern Afghanistan remained at
"very high risk," while 16 districts were upgraded to
"high risk." Areas deemed "low risk" shrank
considerably.

Advertisement And then there are the comments of NATO
spokesman Brig. Gen. Joseph Blotz: "There is no end to
the fighting season.. We will see more violence in
2011."

Long before WikiLeaks released the trove of U.S.
diplomatic cables, two key documents were leaked to The
New York Times. The "Eikenberry cables," as they are
known, were two memos from Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the
U.S. ambassador in Afghanistan, to Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton, urging a different approach to the
Afghan War, with a focus on providing development aid
instead of a troop surge. Eikenberry wrote of the risk
that "we will become more deeply engaged here with no
way to extricate ourselves, short of allowing the
country to descend again into lawlessness and chaos."

A looming problem for the Obama administration, larger
than a fraying international coalition, is the
increasing opposition to the war among the public here
at home. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll found
that 60 percent believe the war has not been worth
fighting, up from 41 percent in 2007. As Congress
reconvenes, with knives sharpened to push for what will
surely be controversial budget cuts, the close to $6
billion spent monthly on the war in Afghanistan will
increasingly become the subject of debate.

As Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz
repeatedly points out, the cost of war extends far
beyond the immediate expenditures, with decades of
decreased productivity among the many traumatized
veterans, the care for the thousands of disabled
veterans, and the families destroyed by the death or
disability of loved ones. He says the wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan will ultimately cost between $3 trillion
and $5 trillion.

One of the main reasons Barack Obama is president today
is that by openly opposing the U.S. war in Iraq, he won
first the Democratic nomination and then the general
election. If he took the same approach with the war in
Afghanistan, by calling on U.S. troops to come back
home, then he might truly become the "Comeback
President" in 2012 as well.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
______________

Amy Goodman is the host of "Democracy Now!," a daily
international TV/radio news hour airing on more than
800 stations in North America. She is the author of
"Breaking the Sound Barrier," recently released in
paperback and now a New York Times best-seller.

c 2010 Amy Goodman

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