RETHINK AFGHANISTAN:Filmmaker Launches Film Opposing Escalat

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Rethink Afghanistan: Filmmaker Robert Greenwald Launches Film Opposing Escalation of War

This is an interview to watch about the country Afghanistan one of the top 10 poorest countries in the world and what is really happening to it's people. The country is a lanlocked and we don't really see how expensive it is to fund this war, WE Need To Get The Fuck out of there so these people can Live once again well atleast it will be their own created misery. Take a look at this.

As the eighth anniversary of the US-led bombing of Afghanistan draws closer, the Obama administration continues to debate the best way to fight this ongoing war. Senate Democrats voted Thursday to delay a congressional briefing by General Stanley McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, a NATO air strike on a compound in southern Afghanistan has reportedly killed a family of six. As the civilian death toll in Afghanistan continues to rise, we turn now to an excerpt from a new documentary by filmmaker Robert Greenwald of Brave New Films.

Here at the 39:40 mark you can watch where some of are tax dollars is really spent and where it gets FLUSHED down the toilet.

AMY GOODMAN: Robert Greenwald, I want to turn to another clip of your film. This is about the costs of war in Afghanistan to the US taxpayer.


LINDA J. BILMES: In today’s dollars, the amount that we spent per troop in World War II was $50,000. We’re spending ten times that per troop in Iraq. We can expect that the per troop cost in Afghanistan is higher than that. I would expect that it will be between 20 to 50 percent higher cost in up-front cost per troop.


LAWRENCE KORB: Afghanistan is very difficult to supply, and it becomes much more expensive to ferry the stuff either through Pakistan or to come in the other way from Russia and through the Caucasus states.


LINDA J. BILMES: The whole situation in terms of supply routes into Afghanistan is very, very different than it is in Iraq. Now, in Afghanistan, you have a country which is mostly rural, which is mostly mountainous, which is not desert.


LAWRENCE KORB: Afghanistan is completely landlocked. And so, what we’ve had to do is, up until now, we’ve been sending the majority of the supplies—for example, oil—through Pakistan.


WINSLOW WHEELER: We’re opening up this alternate supply route that gets into Afghanistan from the north that requires the cooperation of Tajikistan and several of the other “stans” on the northern border of Afghanistan. It’s much longer and torturous. It’s going to be a more expensive logistics route. So those costs are going to go up in a manner not commensurate with the numerical increase in troops, but above and beyond that.


JO COMERFORD: Right now, the United States, through fiscal year 2009, will have committed and/or spent more than $185 billion on the US war in Afghanistan.


SSG. CHRISTOPHER BENTLEY: I feel like we haven’t done the right thing on our part, you know? We spend so much money over here, but we don’t spend it the right way. You know, we have HESCO barriers shipped in from the United States. We probably pay more on the shipping to get that over here than we could pay local people to build a wall around this base.


AHMED RASHID: These enormous funds that did go out to Afghanistan, but they were given—the money was given to contractors, who subsequently subcontracted and subcontracted. And by the time you get to how much money reaches the ground, maybe 40 or 50 percent of that money actually reached the ground for the projects, because all these subcontractors were taking ten percent off as profit.


ANAND GOPAL: Let me give you an example. The United States recently spent $160 million on building roads and digging wells and this sort of thing in one province here in Afghanistan. But the way that works is they are giving that $160 million to a preferred contractor, who then goes and subcontracts this out to a local Afghan company. And the Afghan company will maybe get ten percent of that. And everything in between is just pocketed by that middle company. So this is a massive amount of waste for American taxpayers.


But also, there’s no oversight for the projects that are actually being constructed. I’ve talked to construction contractors that go and take—who are tasked with the job of building a well, for example, and they’ll go and take a picture of some well out there that they’ve already—that has already been built and show it to the Americans and say, “This is the well that we’ve built.” And they’ll say, “OK, thank you very much. And here’s your money.” There’s no oversight, no accountability. Nothing whatsoever.


SSG. CHRISTOPHER BENTLEY: Those wells, like those handpump wells you see everywhere, how much did you say? That it’s like $700 to $1,000 to build one of those?


US SOLDIER: Mm-hmm. Yeah, to build.


SSG. CHRISTOPHER BENTLEY: We’ve been paying like ten grand per well.


PRATAP CHATTERJEE: The local Afghans from rural communities, when they come to Kabul and they see these international consultants, who drive in Toyota Land Cruisers, who live behind barbed wire and blast walls, who have, you know, highly paid security guards, that are buying—that have swimming pools, that are importing food from America, you know, realizes and gets angry that the money that was supposed to be for them is actually going really to sustaining a Western lifestyle for foreign consultants, as opposed to providing them with sanitation and wheat and, you know, local education.

Peace

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This came from the front page of The Washington Post on the battle of Wanat in Afghanstan. This shouldn't be happening to our US troops but it continues along with ALL our missteps along the way.

As someone said on here a new word I learned and I think it was clusterfuck yes that's it. That's what this war is turning out to be and could end up far worse than ALL the occupational damage we've done in Iraq.

The time has come to bring them home.



'Almost a Lost Cause' One of the deadliest attacks of the Afghan war is a symbol of the U.S. military's missteps.

The rocket-propelled grenade and rifle fire was so intense that most of the soldiers spent the opening minutes of the battle lying on their stomachs, praying that the enemy would run out of ammunition.


The Road to Wanat
They had been in the tiny Afghan village of Wanat, near the Pakistani border, for four days. The command post of their remote base was still just a muddy hole surrounded by sandbags.

The radio crackled. About 50 yards from the base's perimeter, nine U.S. soldiers manning an observation post were on the verge of being overrun. Several soldiers were already dead.

"We need to get up there!" screamed 1st Lt. Jonathan Brostrom, the platoon leader at the main base. He and Spec. Jason Hovater grabbed as much ammunition as they could carry and someone popped a yellow smoke grenade to cover their movement. The two soldiers sprinted into enemy fire.

It was a predictable reaction from the 24-year-old lieutenant -- courageous, reckless, impulsive. When Brostrom joined the military, his father, a retired colonel and career aviator, had tried to steer him away from the infantry and toward flying helicopters. "I don't want to be a wimp," the son chided his father.

Brostrom and Hovater dove into the observation post. A sergeant who was too hurt to fight handed Brostrom his M240 machine gun. As the lieutenant turned to set up the weapon, someone spotted an insurgent: "He's inside the [expletive] wire!"

Nine U.S. soldiers were killed and 27 were wounded during the July 13, 2008, attack, which raged for several hours and was one of the bloodiest of the Afghan war. Among the dead was Brostrom.

Peace

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Being in the military a loong time ago it's hard to believe the amount of money that's being constantly being appropriated to these wars we can't properly supply and protect these troops from a known potential catastrophe like this.

Here's some video from that battle and Jonathan Brostrom....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/sp ... -of-wanat/

The Battle of Wanat
On July 13, 2008, Taliban fighters launched a major assault on a small U.S. Army outpost in Afghanistan, killing nine soldiers and wounding 27. This timeline chronicles the battle from the perspective of a lieutenant killed in the fight, Jonathan Brostrom, and his father, who has sought answers to what went wrong. It was researched partly in collaboration with CBS News, whose report on the battle of Wanat airs Monday on the CBS Evening News.

Nothing about the Wanat mission went as planned. Brostrom and his soldiers were supposed to have 16,000 pounds of construction material to build defensive bunkers, big earthmovers to fill seven-foot-tall Hesco barriers, and a five-day supply of water, a senior military official said.

This Story
The Battle of Wanat | Inside the Wire: 'Almost a Lost Cause'
The Road to Wanat
But the Afghan construction firm that was supposed to ferry the construction supplies and build the base refused to make the four-mile drive into the valley because it was too dangerous. A small Bobcat earthmover was delivered to the base by helicopter, but it ran out of gas after one day. Brostrom's soldiers, working in 100-degree heat, chipped away at the rocky soil with shovels to fill sandbags and dirt barriers.

The five-day supply of water also never made it to Wanat, and by their second day at the base, most of the troops were "mildly dehydrated," one soldier told Army investigators.

Two days into the mission, a Predator surveillance drone -- one of only two in Afghanistan -- was shifted from Wanat. No attacks had occurred there during the opening days of the mission, and U.S. commanders decided there were more pressing priorities.

"There should have been a lot more done to help us," said Sgt. 1st Class David Dzwik, who replaced Kahler as Brostrom's platoon sergeant. "The real problem was arrogance. Everyone thought they knew the enemy."

'This Was Going to Be It'


A few days after the platoon arrived, a Wanat village elder gave Brostrom a list of Afghans who had been killed in a helicopter attack the previous week. The dead included insurgents but also several local medical personnel who had worked closely with U.S. soldiers. The incident had infuriated people throughout the valley.

On July 13, their fifth day at the Wanat base, Brostrom and Dzwik ordered all of the soldiers to rise at 3:30 a.m. and man their fighting positions. In Afghanistan, the hours just before dawn are typically the most deadly.

Shortly after 4 a.m., an estimated 200 insurgents let loose a torrent of rocket-propelled-grenade fire, destroying the base's anti-tank missile system and its mortar tubes. Then they trained their guns on the observation post.


The initial blast threw Spec. Tyler Stafford onto his back. He screamed that he was on fire. Next to him, Spec. Matthew Phillips was rearing back to throw a grenade when a rocket came roaring at them. The tailfin ricocheted off Stafford's helmet, leaving a jagged dent. When he looked up, Phillips was dead.

A few feet away, Spec. Christopher McKaig and Spec. Jonathan Ayers prodded each other to raise their heads above the observation post's sandbagged wall. "I am going to count to three and then we are both going to jump up and shoot at whatever we see," McKaig recalled screaming.

The two soldiers leapt to their feet, fired a short burst from their rifles and collapsed. When it came time to rise again, Ayers hesitated. So McKaig started counting. On three, the men rose and a bullet struck Ayers. He coughed up enough blood to fill a teaspoon and fell over dead.

A few minutes later, Brostrom and Hovater sprinted up to the observation post. They were killed within minutes of their arrival.

With the enemy closing in, Stafford, McKaig and Sgt. Matthew Gobble -- woozy from a loss of blood -- abandoned the observation post. In the chaos, they accidentally left behind Sgt. Ryan Pitts, who could hear the enemy fighters barking orders just a few feet away. He whispered into a radio that he was alone and out of ammunition.

"I knew this was going to be it," he later told an Army historian. Soldiers at the main base called to him over the radio, but Pitts didn't answer. The wounded sergeant couldn't afford to let the enemy hear him.

Another team of reinforcements sprinted to the observation post, pulled rifles and ammunition off their dead comrades, and fired back at the insurgents. An hour into the battle, Apache helicopters arrived and swung the momentum in favor of U.S. troops.

Brostrom's friend, Brandon Kennedy, arrived at Wanat a short time later to find soldiers coated in sweat and blood. Thick clouds of smoke spewed from burning Humvees. "I had been in firefights before, but this was totally different," he said. "It was like a movie."

It fell to Kennedy to escort Brostrom's body back to the United States. He asked a sergeant who had done it before what to expect.

"It is always the same," the soldier replied. "The moms just want to know about their son. They want to know what kind of man he was. The dads want to know how their son died. They want someone to explain to them what happened."

Peace

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As Afghan War Enters 9th Year, Rep. Barbara Lee—Lone Lawmaker to Vote Against 2001 Authorization—Seeks to Block New Troop Surge

On the anniversary of the occupation of Afghanistan I salute the lone Congressperson to vote against the 2001 resolution for war in Afghanistan. You can give it a watch when she spoke 3 days after 9/11 at the 10:10 mark. It took supreme GUTS to stand before Congress and urge restaint at a time when the country was angry and was seeking revenge. Even today she appears to be right that this war has turned in a clusterfuck of an occupation.

I like what she says here 8 years later and the consequence of the then President's GWB being given a blank to go to war. Future President's including Obama will be able to go to war without the approval of Congress.

REP. BARBARA LEE: Eight years later, I feel the same way, of course, still very sad about the loss of life, still praying for the families of those who lost their loved ones. It was a very difficult time, and it still is a very difficult time for our country.


During that time, you know, we had to, I understand, figure out a strategy to respond. However, as I said on the floor, military action is not going to combat or be the appropriate counterterrorism strategy, because it’s very complicated. Secondly—and we need a more comprehensive approach to dealing with global terrorism.


Secondly, as I think about eight years ago, it’s hard to believe that we gave the authority to the President to use force in perpetuity. Only Congress can declare war. And in fact, this blank check that was given to then President Bush, now any future president, was really, I believe, unconstitutional. Congress should never cede our authority in our declaration of war making ability, and that is just based on what the Constitution requires. And we did not do that. And so, it was a blank check. It allowed for the military operation, the war in Afghanistan. It served as the basis for the war against Iraq. It could be used over and over again, unless we put an end to this.


You can’t have endless war forever. And so, we have to figure out new ways to combat terrorism. And in fact, I am proud and pleased that the President is really trying to think this through and trying to come up with a way to approach the world, really, in terms of our global peace and security strategies that are a new direction from the past.

Peace

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A bit more on why the US needs to Re-Think The Afghanistan War (Part 6)

Even General Patraus says there's no Al Queda in Afghanistan......so why are we REALLY there? Please don't tell me about the Taliban is about as strong an argument as WMD.

Peace

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i went to a screening of this movie over the weekend. the movie upset me. why the kcuf
are we there? why will congress fund this 'war'? how many lives will be lost before it ends?

dennis kucinich is also speaking up against this 'war':

http://kucinich.house.gov/News/Document ... tID=157597…

Washington, Dec 2 -

Following a speech on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“Why are we still in Afghanistan? Al-Qaeda has been routed. Our occupation fuels a Taliban insurgency. The more troops we send, the more resistance we meet. If we want to be truly secure, we need to redefine national security to include financial security. Yet America has record debt, skyrocketing unemployment, huge trade deficits, record business failures and foreclosures.

“The people of Afghanistan don’t want to be saved by us. They want to be saved from us. Our presence and our Predator drones kill countless innocents, creating more US enemies and destabilizing Pakistan. The US-created Karzai government is hopelessly corrupt and despised by the Afghan people. Our solution: Provide him with a high-level US minder which will make him even less legitimate. Another strategy: Buy or rent "friends" among would-be insurgents and give them guns and cash. But when the money runs out they shoot at U.S. soldiers. We've played all sides in Afghanistan and all the sides want us out. They do not want our presence, our control, our troops, our drones, our way of life. We are fighting the wrong war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. What part of "get out" do we not understand?”





http://kucinich.house.gov/News/Document ... tID=158151


Following a speech on the Floor of the House of Representative, Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) today made the following statement:

“America is in the fight of its life and that fight is not in Afghanistan -- its here. We are deeply in debt. Our GDP is down. Our manufacturing is down. Our savings are down. The value of the dollar is down. Our trade deficit is up. Business failures are up. Bankruptcies are up.

“The war is a threat to our national security. We’ll spend over one $100 billion next year to bomb a nation of poor people while we reenergize the Taliban, destabilize Pakistan, deplete our army and put more of our soldiers’ lives on the line. Meanwhile, back here in the USA, 15 million people are out of work. People are losing their jobs, their health care, their savings, their investments, and their retirement security. Trillions in bailouts for Wall Street, trillions for war; when are we going to start taking care of things here at home?”

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Obama's Empire...US Soldier's Are Waking UP

We the US live in a world of constant WAR when will it end?

They gotta war for oil, a war for gold
A war for money and a war for souls
A war on terror, a war on drugs
A war on kindness and a war on hugs
A war on birds and a war on bees
They gotta a war on hippies tryin' save the trees
A war with jets and a war with missiles
A war with high seated, government official
Wall street war, on high finance
A war on people who just love to dance
A war on music, a war on speech
A war on teachers and the things they teach
A war for the last 500 years
War's just messin' up the atmosphere
A war on Muslims, a war on Jews
A war on Christians and Hindus
A whole lotta people just sayin' kill them all
They gotta a war on Mumia Abu Jamal
The war on pot, is a war that’s failed
A war that's fillin' up the nations jails
World war one, two, three and four
Chemical weapons, biological war
Bush war 1, Bush war 2
They gotta a war for me, they gotta a war for you...lyrics from *We Don't Stop*....Michael Franti & Spearhead

Peace