The Orderly Withdrawal and Stabilization for Afghanistan Act addresses the economic roots of the renewed insurgency.  Until 2005 Afghanistan was relatively peaceful, as the vast majority of Afghans waited in extreme hunger, poverty, and deprivation for jobs designed to rebuild their country.  The insurgency is largely the result of a failed reconstruction as well as weariness with ongoing civilian casualties caused directly or indirectly by the occupation.

"The Orderly Withdrawal and Stabilization for Afghanistan Act" brings stabilization, supports the troops, and wins the war all at the same time.  

The Orderly Withdrawal and Stabilization for Afghanistan Act

Whereas, We support the troops at all times, and demand an end to the war in Afghanistan;

Whereas, The United States has a national interest in a stable and secure Afghanistan;

Whereas, No national security interest can be secured by the conduct of an open-ended, drawn-out war,

Whereas, Our commanders have stated that jobs for fighting-age Afghan males, as an alternative to joining the insurgency, are a vital part of bringing stability to Afghanistan;

Whereas, H.E. Ehsan Zia, former Minister of the Ministry of Rural Rehabilitation and Development for Afghanistan, a vital and effective ministry, has called to the attention of Congress a critical shortfall in funding for the highly acclaimed National Solidarity Program, which works with over 22,000 village councils in administering effective job development in Afghanistan, guided and owned by Afghans, relating to basic infrastructure,

Whereas, The American people can no longer sustain the enormous cost of a war which is draining our treasury and costing the lives of America's finest, our troops,

And Whereas, We must use these funds now spent on the wars for our national priorities, including health care, jobs, and deficit reduction, not foreign adventures,

We hereby enact this Orderly Withdrawal and Stabilization for Afghanistan Act, which appropriates $14 billion for the orderly withdrawal of US troops, to be fully-supplied as the withdrawal proceeds.  $5 billion of this amount shall be appropriated for stabilization through a robust job-creation plan administered by the National Solidarity Program (NSP), paying a wage of between $7 to $10 per day.  Troops shall begin to be withdrawn at the rate of one battalion per week beginning in June of 2010, as job creation proceeds under NSP administration.  United States troops will complete their withdrawal by December 31, 2010."

Minister: U.S. Shortchanging Afghan Development (Wired Magazine)

HOW MUCH DOES YOUR CONGRESSMAN RECEIVE FROM THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY? (MAPLIGHT.ORG)

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As the world prepares for a turkey shoot in Marjah village, Helmand Province in which civilian lives will matter less than body counts, we may as well look at the corruption which has hindered the jobs and reconstruction programs which might have prevented young men from joining the Taliban for the ten dollar per day wage, in country with 40 percent unemployment. As Ann Jones reported, in "The Road to Taliban Land"

:

Most Afghans, after the dispersal of the Taliban, were full of hope and ready to work. The tangible benefits of reconstruction -- jobs, housing, schools, health-care facilities -- could have rallied them to support the government and turn that illusory "democracy" into something like the real thing. But reconstruction didn't happen.

What might surprise folks is that it was not the warlords and corrupt ministers who stole most of the money, which was not that much to begin with. OXFAM puts the lion's share of the blame on American contractors like Louis Berger Group who scooped up 40 percent or more of the funds before any ground for a project was ever broken. In 2008 Matt Waldman of OXFAM wrote:

Just $15 billion in aid has so far been spent, of which it is estimated a staggering 40% has returned to donor countries in corporate profits and consultant salaries.

This is the report which is required reading for anyone wishing to know happened to all the money that was supposed to keep hope alive and the insurgency from rearing its head again, as it did in 2006. Before then there was relative peace in the country, and Americans were still fairly well-liked.

If we're going to have a turkey shoot, at least let's understand how we came to this point. General Karl Eikenberry told the House Armed Services Committee in 2007: "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families." On this there is now wide agreement, although as casualties rise and "offensive operations" get cranked up to fix what was an economic problem to begin with, hatreds will harden and it will get tougher to leave in any face-saving fashion every day.

Imagine if every time some nut took a hostage and barricaded himself inside someone's house the police just called in an F-16 to level the place. Wouldn't that win them friends!

And how much is the $15 billion total spent on jobs and reconstruction as of 2008? Going by General Barry McCaffrrey's "burn rate" of $9 billion per month for military operations in Afghanistan, that entire budget is what we throw into the fireplace of war in a mere 2 months.

Stop the madness. You are on the verge, and the world is watching Marjah.

Please go to Robert Naiman's End the War in Afghanistan Action Page and send an email to your representatives. The diarist is the co-founder of Jobs for Afghans. 

 

 

So much hope.  Last summer I blogged from Kabul about Afghans in sports and predicted that they would become a world power once the futile, pointless nonsense of war was over:

I saw a couple of boys, maybe eight or nine, laughing and throwing a sock stuffed with sand or something, all you can afford for a ball. Their arms were great, and they were winging that thing 70, 80 feet and nailing each other, just fooling around, and any little league coach would have drafted them. Afghan is a mountain country, and everyone has the balance, coordination, and endurance of a mountain goat. After 9/11 Special Forces reported seeing Taliban fighters hopping from rock to rock barefoot in the snow...When these people pick up baseball bats and gymnastic equipment, and start getting proper nutrition...That will be something.

Sure enough, today it was reported that at the South Asia Games Afghanistan won a Gold Medal in basketball:

First the Afghan basketball team beat Pakistan, then Sri Lanka, then India, and in the semi-finals they crushed Nepal 104 to 36. Today, Afghanistan did it once again, and beat India one more time to win a gold medal in basketball in the 2010 South Asian Games (SAG) being held in Bangladesh.

The news was reported in the poignantly-named site "Good Afghan News: Afghan News That Will Make You Happy."

All told, they so far have 6 medals, the Gold, and 5 Bronze, 4 in Judo and 1 in weightlifting.

Afghans are tired of war.  One competition bodybuilder -- bodybuilding is the all rage here, even if they use old car parts and pulleys for equipment -- said last year:

"We are tired of war.  We want to be healthy. We want to be famous in the world, not for our fighting, not for war. We want to be famous for our good behavior, our health."

Next to the Afghan hero Massoud, the likeness you'll see most of on billboards in Afghanistan is of Arnold Schwarznegger.  Whatever his politics, he is seen to embody the values of discipline, determination, and persistence.  In Kabul on almost any night somewhere you can catch a showing of "Pumping Iron."

Although the Taliban is doing the usual dance of rejecting talks before all US forces leave, a radio report from Kabul indicates that the back-channel talk, i.e. what really counts, is continuing.

"Plan to negotiate with Taliban leaders gains world support"

A top security adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai said today that the government is talking with Taliban leadership. He said the meetings were ongoing on the "local, regional, national and broader political level." This contradicts a statement released over the weekend by Taliban leadership that denied that they were talking with the Afghan government.

The US State Department and the Obama administration is having an "internal debate" over Karzai's overtures for peace talks with Taliban leadership.  That the Taliban high command is even considering this is a sign of weakness, and readiness to renounce Al Qaeda and come in from the cold.  The Pakistan Daily reports:

   The Taliban leader in Afghanistan, Mullah Muhammad Omar, is also ready to break with his al-Qaida allies in order to make peace in the country, according to the former Pakistani intelligence officer who trained him.

   Brigadier Sultan Amir Tarar (known as Colonel Imam), a retired officer with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, said: "The moment he gets control, the first target will be the al-Qaida people. He wants peace in the country, he doesn’t want adventure. He has had enough of that."

The Taliban leadership's relation to Al Qaeda, who they often refer to as "the Arabs," has always been problematic.  Afghan culture and its language groups are descendants of the Indo-European Farsi, spoken in Iran and distantly related to English rather than the Semitic languages of the Middle East.

In an interview with bin Laden's fourth eldest son Omar, Reuters reported in a piece entitled "No Love Lost for Al Qaeda" that:

Omar bin Laden witnessed a 1998 encounter in which the Taliban leader demanded the al Qaeda chief leave Afghanistan following al Qaeda bombings of East African U.S. embassies that drew U.S. strikes on Afghanistan.

In tense exchanges, Osama bin Laden won a reprieve by telling Mullah Omar the demand was "giving in to infidel pressure" and therefore un-Islamic, the book says.

But according to this account, Mullah Omar ended the encounter by refusing to eat a meal bin Laden's men had prepared and did not bid farewell, an insult his father had to accept.

"He (Osama bin Laden) could not afford to get into a battle with the Taliban. He would lose, and he knew it," wrote Omar.

 

Perhaps the war contractors are seeing all those billions slipping away.  There is no good reason to avoid talking to the leadership, since they resemble nothing more than a spent force looking for a face-saving way out.  Any posts they are offered will be largely ceremonial.  Afghanistan will never return to Shiara law.

Please join Robert Naiman's campaign to push the Obama administration into supporting talks.  It's okay; Afghans are rather used to shooting at each other one day and then eating goat stew together the next.  It's no big deal.  It's a warrior society.  Go to Robert's End the War in Afghanistan Action Page and send an email to your representatives.  

Perhaps this long-suffering people's time in the sun can finally begin, after the tragic misfortune of being born in a place which powerful empires consider a "chess piece," to be buffetted in one direction or another by backing one extremeist faction over another as the people starve.  It's time for the real games to begin.

The diarist is co-founder of Jobs for Afghans.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Codepink co-founder catching a lot of flak for suggesting that all troops out of Afghanistan immediately would lead to a Taliban takeover and bloodbath.  It began with a Christian Science Monitor article in which Medea Benjamin said after a trip to Afghanistan "We have been feeling a sense of fear of the people of the return of the Taliban. So many people are saying that, if the U.S. troops left the country, would collapse. We'd go into civil war.  A palpable sense of fear that is making us start to reconsider that."

Scott Horton followed up with an interview of Medea HERE.

Anything but everyone and everything out of the water NOW is neo-imperialist stooge?  I guess that would have to include Robert Greenwald, who is circulating a petition calling for a civilian solution to stability. This is the film-maker who blew the lid off war profiteering in "Iraq for Sale."

What's happening here is a long-overdue discussion that goes beyond "troops out now" for the peace movement.  Does troops out now mean everything out now, even humanitarian aid?  EEETS IMPEERIALEEISM, MON!

First, there is no such thing as "troops out now" because even a full withdrawal would take six months to a year, as there are logistics of troop transport, bringing back equipment or just leaving it and burning it (the military-industrial complex loves that one woo hoo! More contracts).  You don't get 60,000 troops into a country overnight.  You don't take them out overnight either.

We take a pre-bombed country, bombed because Ziggy Brzezinski  couldn't wait to arm Islamic extremists to give the Russians "their own Vietnam", then bomb it some more then split. Nice! In the Seventies women were wearing mini-skirts in Kabul.  Brzezinski and US policy fixed all that.

Leave them to work their own problems out now?  With what? They are already starving, have nothing to grow but poppies, their irrigation and canal systems are still trashed with Russian bomb rubble because we haven't helped them clear it, and this winter if we just split thousands of more children will starve and freeze. Prosecute Brzezinski  as a war criminal if we must, but these people don't know or care who made the mess. Only that they are starving, and someone is always bombing them.  When will the world have pity on this country?

There is a solution. Get money to the poorest people in a way which "tunnels" through the corruption, so that they don't have to depend on the Taliban for the $8 a day they pay for insurgent work, and they will turn on the Taliban themselves. The Taliban is hated by most of the population as it ruled only by fear, not any popular consent.

We identified one functional ministry of the Karzai government which has done the work of building more than 25,000 community development councils (CDCs) which work with the villages and the elders on work projects which benefit the communities, not corrupt foreign contractors like Loius Berger or corrupt Afghan warlords. Details are in our White Paper "Stabilizing Afghanistan Through a Cash-for-Work Initiative."

Everyone knows it's an imperial war; everyone knows we should get out. How do we do this without making the people pay who ALWAYS pay? Dirt poor Afghans. Even when the Russians were bombing they did a few good things, like build lots of sturdy apartment buildings you can see all across Kabul and a bread factory that put out a million loaves a week.

The ministry is the MRRD, Ministry for Rural Rehabilitation and Development. Google it and you will see that reviews are positive, that their bureaucrats are generally honest and dedicated, and that they get help to the villages efficiently. It's time to get the poorest people out of the middle of the "Great Game." We have proposed a "Mini-Marshall Plan" which targets the most desperate Afghans for cash-for-work projects, meaning they get cash into Afghan hands at the end of a day or week of labor, so they can feed their families. We have proposed legislation which diverts funding which would be used for a troop escalation to the MRRD, which has the capacity to implement thousands of small cash-for-work projects across the country, according to what we learned from an extensive round of meetings while we in Kabul this summer.

"An Exit Strategy for Afghanistan"

We want troops out, but if we don't give these people other means of support, the Taliban is the only employer in town. The Taliban originates in the madrassas in Pakistan backed by the ISI. Imperialists are not nice, but neither is the Taliban. It's downright evil that we starve Afghans so they have to work for the Taliban, then bomb them because they are now insurgents. Good for Halliburton, good for Dyncorp and Lockheed. Bad for everyone else on the planet. Public support for the war depends on people not understanding the game the military-industrial complex is playing: making enemies so we can have a war. Calling for all troops and every bit of aid out now plays into the military-industrial complex's game, because the Taliban would take over, given the shambles economy, and that shores up popular support for the war. Showing people that stability can be had without military occupation is what screws up their game.  The profit is in war, not helping people.

We have taken the step of making the following film, which interviews unemployed Afghans, to improve the general public's understanding, and to cause a drop in the polls of support for the war. Please help put it on your community access TV station, instructions HERE.

"Afghan Marshall Plan: Winning With Jobs, Not Guns" (watch online here, 26 minutes)

As we have seen from the continuing Iraq debacle, the politicians don't care what a tiny number of activists alone think.  But the combination of a "surge" in opposition and a drop in public support for the war could be the knock-out blow for the escalation, then onto withdrawal of troops.

Food and shelter for the winter, and cash-for-work projects for poorest Afghans now, implemented within 2 months.  Begin troop withdrawal.  With a little help, Afghans will take care of themselves and the Taliban.  Without help, they die.  Again.

FILM DESCRIPTION: "Afghan Marshall Plan: Winning With Jobs Not
Guns" (filmed in Kabul)

"In the midst of the superheated debate over the course of the war in Afghanistan, two activists and film-makers, one an American, one an Afghan citizen, release this provocative look at the underside of an insurgency. In a country with 40% unemployment, they talk to those whose voices have been missing: ordinary Afghans.  See and hear them up close in the squares where they gather by the thousands looking for work, and struggle to feed their families. Ranked as the fourth poorest nation in the world, many have never even heard of 9/11, nor the Twin Towers.   But someone is always hiring at a good daily wage: the Taliban.  The documentary reveals that an civilian solution to stability would cost but a small fraction of the present occupation.   Troops in Afghanistan are counterproductive. Help for Afghans is not.  (26 minutes)"

Find your public access TV station here:

Send them this link to the film, which can be downloaded in the format required by professional broadcast outlets:
http://www.pegmedia.org/index.php?q=msvr /showall/253/detail

Ralph Lopez is co-founder of Jobs for Afghans

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