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Category: Rethink Afghanistan

  • Rethink Afghanistan really needs to get a clue.

    I mean ever since I found out about the group from Derrick Crowe I have disagreed with most everything that they have put out. But more and more the statements seem to be more about wanting money for their own projects rather then any concern for Afghanistan. (Also I do not know why DC still is a member the IVAW on Facebook with links to “notyourSolider” on his Word Press page”)

    But stories like these really show where the priorities are for these groups.

    A trillion dollars is a baffling amount of money. If you write it out, use twelve zeros. Even after serving in Congress for over a decade, I, like most Americans, still have a hard time wrapping my head around sums like this. (Yet the Stimulus Bill was passed this year and she does not seemed as phased by it)

    This month, we mark the seventh anniversary of President Bush’s declaration of “mission accomplished” in Iraq, yet five American soldiers have been killed there in May alone. Iraqis went to the polls nearly three months ago, but the political system remains so fractured that no party has been able to piece together a coalition. There are some indications that sectarian violence is again on the rise.

    Or another one with the same theme.

    What could we have purchased with this $1 trillion? Today, we might be enjoying the fruits of a green economy, spurred by New Deal-like investments in wind and solar. Perhaps we would have created a single-payer health care system and used this $1 trillion to provide health security to every man, woman, and child in the United States for an entire year. Or, we might have made the smart investments in our domestic law enforcement capabilities and homeland security apparatus to provide true protection from Al Qaeda and others who would wish us harm. Sadly, we’ll never know, because our political leadership never explored alternative means of achieving peace, such as emphasizing rigorous regional diplomacy, and instead overextended our military forces abroad.

    If sacrificing progress at home wasn’t bad enough, it is now clear that the injection of our troops into a 35 year civil war is actually fueling the insurgency in Afghanistan and further destabilizing the region.

    Because in all of it it comes down not on if our efforts are helping, not on what will happen to the population when we leave, but how “cost effective” it is. I mean it is really all about the money.

    I know that I will still have disagreements on what should be done with DC and Our Journey to Smile who is working over there right now. But at least they seem to care about the Afghanistan people there. But these are the people that are going to be left high and dry to the Taliban. That is one of the reasons that I stopped watching OJS videos of the people of Afghanistan because I have a bad feeling that these people are going the be killed or worse.

    In the end if we leave this issue unfinished we will be dealing with it again in twenty years from now. Oh and the reason we will have lost it because “We” did not care because they were brown people.

  • No, just no.

    Ok this is just beyond stupid. The group Rethink Afghanistan trying to get people to send a pre-made message to the White House’s website that acts as a watchdog for Fraud Waste and Abuse.

    That’s why we’re asking you to report the Afghanistan War as an example of waste, fraud and abuse on the White House’s official economic recovery website, Recovery.gov, today. Simply scroll down to the field marked “What” and paste this message into the text box:

    “I’d like to report the waste of billions of dollars of our national wealth in Afghanistan on a war that doesn’t make us safer. It’s fraud to portray this as a war that increases our security, and it’s abusive of U.S. troops and local civilians to drag out this war any longer. End the war so we can have real economic recovery.”

    Really? I mean you really want people to take you seriously trying to pull stunts like this? What about the people that have real issues that need to be looked at. What your doing is encouraging the abuse of government resources wasting time looking at your political spam.

    Also some crazy to go out on.

    Americans only care about healthcare. They have ignored this abuse of power. If we didn’t spend so much on the wars, we’d have enough to pay for our OWN healthcare! We are taxed to death. Paying for these unconstitutional wars and other unconstitutional spending. People are just so stupid! Plus, the cost of caring for all … See Morethe vets with mental and physical repercussions from these illegal wars helps to bankrupt America. People just don’t get it! I’m so mad and frustrated with them!

    No, just…no.

  • This is getting really old.

    Seems that the people over at Rethink Afghanistan are upset that Brig. Gen. Nicholson said that civilian casualties are going to be unavoidable. Yet by their reaction you would think that the is a open statement that civilian casualties are being viewed as unimportant. Hardly the case that I have seen.

    So of course these people jump over it when it does happen. Of course our sources our always wrong and children seem to be be involved. Does not do well since half of the footage used is from Al Jazeera does not make me want to watch anything they say. Also not to mention the fact this news group is the only news group that video taped a Insurgent group in Afghanistan pulling people over at a illegal checkpoint looking for people who voted in the election. Now they want to come off with any sense of concern for the people of Afghanistan.

    But that seems not to bother some people.

    U.S. forces just fired a “precision munition” that landed 300 yards away from its target, butchering 10 civilians, including 5 children. Stop this war.

    DC I respect you but you and your group are dead wrong on this.

  • Huffpo nimroddery

    Some dolt who goes by the name of Ryan Grim did exactly no research or background on this article at Huffington Post about some IVAW schlubs schlepping through the halls of Congress spreading their halfwit opinions.These two IVAW members are new to me and don’t have profiles at IVAW; Brock McIntosh and Jake Diliberto. Neither has a DoD record at Military.com, so they’re probably new civilians. But this Grim guy is a dolt. He writes about Vets for Freedom;

    A new pro-war group calling itself Vets For Freedom plans to begin lobbying Congress Thursday, pushing for an escalation.

    Yeah, IVAW was formed 18 months before VFF, so VFF is a “new…group”. More than likely, Grim didn’t have the gumption or wherewithal to do a bit of googling and find out that VFF isn’t all that new. Just new to his ignorant ass. According to his bio at HuffPo Grim is “the senior congressional correspondent for the Huffington Post”. So much for any real news coming out of HuffPo’s congressional staff.

    So, master researcher Grim begins by taking shots at VFF’s Thomas Cotton with help from Diliberto;

    Diliberto went mano a mano on CNN with VFF rep Thomas Cotton. Cotton had a simple appeal to authority: He’s for whatever General Stanley McChrystal wants — and that’s more troops.

    Before they went on, says Diliberto, he could hear his opponent prepping himself. “He kept repeating, ‘General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal.’ ”

    Backers of escalating the eight-year-old war present a variety of complex arguments, but at their heart is Cotton’s mantra: “General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal. General Stanley McChrystal.”

    Yeah, here’s a transcript of the interview. Cotton mentions McChrystal twice – the same number of times the interviewer, John Roberts, mentions McChrystal’s name. But that doesn’t make the pro-victory guys sound as bad as Grim likes them to sound.

    Devon Read explains his child-like understanding of the conflict in Afghanistan;

    The kind of training Afghans don’t need, the soldiers say, is military. We’ve been training young men to fight in Afghanistan for decades, they note, and look where it’s gotten us. An overwhelming number of soldiers trained by the U.S. go on to fight for the Taliban instead, which was itself originally trained by the U.S., notes Read. “So if we train 400,000 soldiers and 200,000 go fight for the Taliban, what have we gained?”

    So, their solution? Just let Afghanistan go back to being an Islamist shit hole like we did in 1988.

    I watched Diliberto on Larry King last night to get his side straight from him since I can’t trust HuffPo. I’m beginning to wonder if Diliberto is even in IVAW. Larry King says he’s a member of “Veterans for Rethinking Afghanistan” which I suspect sprang from the intellectually vacuous, Leftist navel-gazing YouTube video entitled “Rethinking Afghanistan“. So apparently, Grim didn’t even get Diliberto’s affiliation right.

    But anyway, Diliberto’s plan for Afghanistan is to send cops out to arrest and imprison al Qaeda, I guess because no one is doing that already, huh? He claims more troops won’t solve our problem. He went up against that new VFF group’s ED, Pete Hegseth and Pete wore Diliberto’s ass out. I was hoping that Larry King would have video this morning, but alas, none.

    See I don’t get this; when Shinseki said we needed more troops in Iraq, the Left said we needed to listen to Shinseki. When Petreus said we needed more troops in Iraq, the Left said it was fruitless. Now McChrystal says we need more troops in Afghanistan, no one wants to listen to the generals.

    The thing about this Larry King interview is that no one mentioned IVAW, although this DIliberto has some kind of tie to IVAW, nor did they mention that Wes Clark (who was also on the show) is on the board of VoteVets. Funny, huh?