</p</p>

With Taliban looking on approvingly, these tearful children in Afghanistan swear that they will now be suicide bombers after losing people they love in the only thing that more war funding gets you: More war.  Film-maker Robert Greenwald  ("Iraq for Sale") urges us to keep calling the swing Democrats in the War Supplemental up for a vote, as we are now just three short of sending it back to the drawing board, for an exit strategy and a renewed focus on civilian aide rather than bombs for Afghans.

No one deserves this, and yes the Taliban plays it to its advantage.  That's why they look so happy in this video.  Greenwald points out, more bombs are not going to address 40% unemployment, and a rampant picking-through-garbage-for-food scale of poverty. U.S. Generals and command staff in Afghanistan are desperate for more jobs on the ground, to keep young men paid and tired and not fighting for the Taliban's $8 a day, since they are the ones who have to ride out in helicopters and apologize for the bombs falling in the wrong place.

They feel terrible, the pilots feel terrible, the soldiers on the ground feel terrible.  But the Taliban has a bullet-proof strategy.  Create more and more kids like this, swearing vengeance, and their little insurgency takes off nicely.  Pretty soon the Taliban won't even have to pay most of the kids to fight, like they do now.  They'll do it for free.  From a paid insurgency we are obliging the Taliban in helping to create their dream: a generation of true haters, who will kill any Americans they see.  They will be taught who pays for these bombs.

The Taliban wants desperately for people to hate Americans, because people already hate the Taliban, what with the cutting off of hands and all that Afghans well remember.  Why do we have to make their job so easy?

Where is Obama on this?  I daresay if he tacked on an exit strategy without being forced to he would be savaged from the right for surrendering.  It's up to us.  I recall an idealistic presidential candidate telling us to stand up for our convictions.  I daresay, even if it costs him more time on the War Supp Bill and another vote, he would be proud of us.  

Here are the key hold-outs.  It's easier than ever to call them, HERE, with this automated dialer and quick script. It dials the swing votes in random order so even if you only get through a few, it is very effective.  VOTE NO ON THE WAR SUPPLEMENTAL APPROPRIATIONS BILL.  EXIT STRATEGY AND CIVILIAN AID.

Peace.

   Leaning No:

 1.  Steve Cohen
  2. Keith Ellison*
  3. Chakah Fattah
  4. Mike Honda
  5. Doris Matsui*
  6. Ed Markey*
  7. Jim McDermott*
  8. Gwen Moore
  9. Jared Polis*
 10. Jan Schakowsky*
 11. Jackie Speier
 12. Mike Thompson*
 13. John Tierney
 14. Mel Watt*
 15. Anthony Weiner

Undecided:
  1. Andre Carson
  2. Donna Christenson
  3. Jim Cooper
  4. Danny Davis
  5. Bill Delahunt
  6. Al Green
  7. Phil Hare
  8. Maurice Hinchey
  9. Paul Hodes
 10. Carolyn Maloney
 11. Jim Moran
 12. Grace Napolitano
 13. Donald Payne
 14. Charles Rangel
 15. Laura Richardson
 16. Linda Sanchez
 17. Bobby Scott
 18. John Tanner
 19. Ed Towns
 20. Peter Welchs

There's more...

Leaving for Kabul in a few hours, navigating New York city transit to JFK and then on to Dubai.  I can't believe in 20 hours I'll be touching down someplace which seems to me like the moon.  I have never been outside of the states in my life.  Been in the same house for twenty years, with a trip on the Boston subway more than 3 stops away a bothersome adventure that makes me think twice.  And now I am going to Afghanistan.

The people at embassy in New York and along the way leading to this moment have been extraordinarily kind.  They seem so happy that someone is trying to push for civilian aid to go for the creation of jobs, simple, unskilled labor $10 a day jobs, which would help the country become something more than the sink hole of misery it now is.  Blind elderly and deformed children begging in the street everywhere, one out of four babies dies by the age of five from malnutrition and-or dysentery.  Two-thirds of population without clean drinking water.  We've been here how long?  And all we've managed to give them is bombs and bullets.  

My hosts are sponsoring my Afghan friend and I, a recent Harvard Kennedy School of Goverment graduate I met in my hometown in Boston, to fill them in on what we are asking the U.S. to do, which is simply to spend the non-military assistance we are already spending there in a way which helps the people, not foreign contractors like Halliburton.  Half the Taliban would throw down their weapons and run for $10 a day jobs, digging ditches, leveling rural unpaved roads using shovels and gravel, simple work.  Instead we insist on ramming schools down their throats.  

Schools are nice, but you've got to eat first, and that is what too many Afghans are not doing.  Anytime I hear someone say, forget creating jobs for them, we need to create our own jobs, I am reminded of the most selfish, stupidest kinds of behavior.  It's like the gay marriage debate: since we are already spending that money on reconstruction funds, as taxpayers, and all they are asking is that it be spent better, it's no skin off anyone.  That money is gone and appropriated as of this budget cycle, with a Senate Subcommittee hammering out final details.  If it doesn't affect you, or cost you anything, why care, what reason is there to oppose it, except it makes other people happy?  The U.S. is not leaving Afghanistan any time soon.  Obama has made that clear.  It's not going to happen.  So why not spend the money to create $10 a day jobs so men don't have to join the Taliban to feed their families, because the Taliban pays $8 a day, that's right, $8 a day, and at 40% unemployment, it's the only job in town?  

I don't care who gets married.  That doesn't affect me.  And if the little reconstruction money we spend in Afghanistan gets spent on helping actual Afghans with jobs, instead of making Halliburton rich, that doesn't affect me either.  To say "don't think about their jobs," even though it would amount to a paltry, tiny fraction of what we are already spending on the military occupation, is an idiotic mindset that will come back to haunt us in the form of a hideously expensive, protracted war.  That hurts our economy, not helps it, if it's our economy one is worried about.  If that's what makes them happy, fine.  We're already spending the money.  What does it hurt?

Americans have never been known to be particularly forward-looking or prescient thinkers, at least not since the New Deal or the Marshall Plan.  That's when a little thinking about someone else's job besides your own gave us decades of peace and prosperity, for everyone, not just a few.  Now wouldn't that be nice again?

The way your reconstruction money is getting spent in Afghanistan is now getting hammered out in a conference committee on War Supplemental Appropriations bill, co-chaired by:

Sen. Daniel Inouye, Ph: 202-224-3934 Fax: 202-224-6747

and Rep. David Obey.  Ph:(202) 225-3365 Fax: (715-842-4488)

The key pressure points are manageable now, and you can make a huge difference by calling these two at this time, asking them to adopt something like the plan described here, then fax it to them.

Ralph will be blogging from Afghanistan this week.  You can follow it at JobsForAfghans.org.

Starvation in Kandahar

There's more...

As the House Supplemental Appropriations Bill goes to the Senate, now is the time to call Sen. Dan Inouye (D-HI) and your own senators to ask them to bring an early end to the war by conducting it the smart way. The House Supplemental contains $1.5 billion for civilian reconstruction assistance, a pittance compared to the military component.

Perhaps a bigger problem is that it is set to get wasted in large quantities like previous civilian aid, due mostly to foreign contractors being hired for unaccountable work and taking huge profit margins. Up to 50% of foreign assistance for the Afghan reconstruction has been taken via multiple layers of subcontracting before a dime reaches the country.

In the end there is no assurance that the funds will end up helping many ordinary (read, dirt poor, the vast majority) of Afghans. These are the people who have seen absolutely no change in their lives since the Taliban was driven out in 2001, and for whom if anything, things may have gotten worse.  The former commander of US forces in Afghanistan, Karl Eikenberry, now the ambassador, has said "Much of the enemy force is drawn from the ranks of unemployed men looking for wages to support their families."  A police chief in Farah District told the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, "Farah is now dominated by unemployment and poor living conditions.  This is what makes young men join the opposition." (Read this article "The Occasional Taleban.")

OXFAM's Matt Waldman summarized the "aid effectiveness" problem in a report 2008 sponsored by ACBAR, the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief:

  * Over half of aid is tied, requiring the procurement of
donor-country goods and services (i.e. equipment and material are purchased outside Afghanistan, even if they are available inside.)

  * Over two-thirds of all aid bypasses the Afghan government.

  * Less than 40% of technical assistance is coordinated with the government.

  * Profit margins on reconstruction contracts for international and Afghan contractor companies are often 20% and can be as high as 50%.

  * Most full time, expatriate consultants, working in private consulting companies, cost $250,000-$500,000 a year.

The bill working its way through Congress does not change the way funds are disbursed by USAID, the agency which will handle most of that $1.5 billion. It's not all USAID's fault. These are for the most part dedicated development professionals who do the best they can with the way the rules are written.  The rules are written by Congress, and the Obama administration.

Jobs for Afghans is lobbying for a major cash-for-work program to be inserted into the Supplemental Appropriations bill.  These projects address a root cause of the insurgency: 40% unemployment and desperate poverty.  Such projects bypass most of the problems Waldman describes and gives traction to reconstruction assistance. They have already been tried and proven successful in Jawzjan Province, Uruzgan, and Balkh Province. The challenge for Congress is to expand their implementation on a large enough scale, and place Afghans on a stable enough economic and political footing to allow US forces to withdraw within one year.  What Afghans need is a "jobs surge."

Cash-for-work projects have the advantages of:

- Being tried and proven on a small scale.

- Accountability.  Cash-for-work projects are labor-intensive and easy to audit, since little machinery or building materials are required. Most cash-for-work projects require only hand tools, involving projects such as clearing debris and rubble from canals, or digging miles of ditch for future water and electricity infrastructure.

- Being inexpensive.  A competitive wage in Afghanistan for day labor is $10 per day.  $5  per day compares with pay on the Afghan National Police force.

- Allowing the prioritization of projects which are useful to the community.  Afghanistan is currently in a pre-development stage of economic growth, in which basic infrastructure in water, sewage, and electricity are completely missing.  Three-fourths of the population has no access to safe drinking water, and many die from preventable, water-borne disease.

- Cash-for-work is easy to manage and supervise.  Most supervision is indigenous once the project is defined, so that many foreign engineers are not needed in the field, which is a security risk.

- Economic sustainability.  Such a program will encourage small capital formation which is critical to the evolution of the small business sector, and will complement all other development initiatives.

Afghans are weary of economic misery.   Eight full years after liberation from the unpopular and oppressive Taliban, malnourishment is widespread, it has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world, the highest maternal mortality rate in the world (women dying during childbirth due to lack of basic midwifery and sterile supplies.)

Jobs for Afghans is proposing that a fund, equal to no less than $4 billion, be administered by USAID.  Funds would then be disbursed to a mix of NGOs and Afghan government departments submitting qualifying proposals, and agreeing to USAID reporting requirements, including random headcounts of workers at work sites and spot audits.

If the U.S. Congress can spend $700 billion of taxpayer money to bail out the bad investments of banks, it can spend $4 billion to stop a war.   With most of the population disaffected with the Taliban, there is no reason a semblance of stability cannot be achieved in a year, hopefully much sooner, allowing for withdrawal to begin. Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, is the target of our call campaign. Please call him at 202-224-3934, and fax a letter to him, fax: 202-224-6747.

After you call Sen. Inouye, please call as many of these Senate Appropriations Committee members as you can, with the message to insert a cash-for-work program equal to just five percent of the total budget.  Tell them it's the "Five Percent Solution" and fax or email the details from this page:
http://jobsforafghans.org/lettertocongress.html

Ralph Lopez is the co-founder of Jobs for Afghans.  His co-founder is an Afghan citizen and recent graduate of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

There's more...

Earlier today, I cross-posted at my blog and Daily Kos a quick write-up of an interaction I had this morning during a fundraising phone call from the DCCC.

It boiled down to this. I told the caller that my policy (which was true even before I was laid off last week) is to give only to targeted candidates. It's a policy I've more or less stuck to, although I did give some money to Sen. Feingold's Progressive Patriots Fund and the DNC. I expressed some unhappiness with the passage of the funding bill, thinking that would end the call, and not really wanting to get into an argument about politics with someone who was in all likelihood a full-time phone bank caller.

That was when she asked me if I wanted the troops to be cut off from their supplies.

It escalated pretty quickly, with her claiming the President hade the veto, with me saying that no funding bill would have meant no veto, and her claiming that the troops would starve in Iraq without the funding bill. Literally, that was what she said: "starve".

There's more...

It is a dark day in our nation's history. That sounds melodramatic - but it is true. Today America watched a Democratic Party kick them square in the teeth - all in order to continue the most unpopular war in a generation at the request of the most unpopular president in a generation at a time polls show a larger percentage of the public thinks America is going in the wrong direction than ever recorded in polling history.

The numbers are not pretty. First, 216 House Democrats cast the key vote to send a blank check Iraq War funding bill over to the Senate. As I reported at the beginning of the day and as the Associated Press now confirms, the vote on the rule was the vote that made it happen. As the AP said: "In a highly unusual maneuver, House Democratic leaders crafted a procedure that allowed their rank and file to oppose money for the war, then step aside so Republicans could advance it." Nauseating.

In the Senate, we saw lots of promises and tough talk from senators telling us they were going to do everything they could to stop the blank check. Some of them bragged that they were going to vote against the bill - as if that was the ultimate sign of heroics. Then, not a single senator found the backbone to stand up to filibuster the bill a la Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. To quote the Big Lebowski, "These men are cowards," because apparently, Senate club etiquette comes even before the lives of our troops.

The blank check sailed through the upper chamber on a vote of 80-14 with 38 Democrats (the majority of the party) voting yes. In all, at a time when 82 percent of Americans tell pollsters they want Congress to either approve funds for the war with strict conditions or cut off all funding immediately, 90 percent of House and Senate Democrats combined voted to give George W. Bush a blank check.

The worst part of it all was the overt efforts to deceive the public - as if we're all just a bunch of morons.

There's more...