Interesting article here by a thoughtful writer and former Army Public Info Officer.  Perhaps when she asserts the military is not following orders, we ought to pay attention. Whether they are going rogue, or our president is weak, we’ve got a big problem.

Walk a Mile…

This year, 30,000 additional American troops will be deployed to Afghanistan – despite the fact that the U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan expressly opposed troop escalation in two strongly worded cables sent to the White House in 2009.

The White House ignored his warnings and sent troops anyway.

As the House Armed Services Committee begins to write the Defense Department’s budget for 2011, we urge its members to read Eikenberry’s memos. HASC members should write strong language into the 2011 Defense budget that requires the Pentagon to begin withdrawing our troops by July 2011 as stated by President Obama.

Next Steps: Join the Twitter vigil against the Afghanistan war!

I like to think of myself as a technology evangelist (I guess that makes me a born again technologist!), so it may sound strange coming from a technologist to say that technology is not the solution to all data quality ills – but it is the reality.

I was talking to the Head of Client Reporting in a global asset manager recently and they were explaining to me that their IT department was going to build a data warehouse to fix all the issues they are having with data quality. I asked them “is the data warehouse going to take responsibility for fixing the inaccurate data?” and the response was that the IT department was going to service the platform, and that the rules engine would detect bad data and the IT/Operations team would fix-it-up before distributing it to the client reporting solutions and micro-sites. I wasn’t hugely surprised by this approach –  I guess it was better than trying to get the client reporting or marketing teams to “own” data quality.

Let’s be honest here – this is not the way to address data quality issues.

Technology has a role, as do the IT/Operations departments, as do the client reporting and marketing teams – but their role is not to build a just-in-time data quality servicing platform.

If you want to deliver high quality data to your clients you do not handover ownership of the data to a team who are neither the source of the data, nor possess the business domain knowledge to manage the data.

The best data quality initiatives in the industry today all have 2 common traits:

(1) Ownership at Source: ownership and accountability for all data should be driven back to the original source of that information. There must be a culture of responsibility for “data quality at source” throughout the organization. If data quality is being resolved ‘just-in-time’ at the pre-publication stage then you will have multiple streams of the same data – with error and without error – in the organization.

(2) Centralized Oversight: organizations with good quality data all have a centralized oversight function with a strong culture of data quality that is driven by a C-level mandate. Different companies implement this in different ways and there is no wrong or right way. The ‘Chief Data Officer’ title is no longer new, nor are titles like ‘Data Czar’ or ‘Data Quality Steering Committee’. Some organizations tackle this in a top-down approach, other in a bottom-up – who cares – as long as the approach is aligned with the company’s existing culture and that ownership/accountability is clear for all to see.

At the end of the day it should be clear that the solution to Data Quality is a combination of People (culture), Process and Technology – using and applying the correct balance of each sub-solution is important.

Technology should  frame a process and empower the people to carry out the process efficiently – it is not the solution in itself.

So what role does technology have to play?

• Framework: technology has a definite role to play in the provision of a structured framework, within which the data quality process can be operated efficiently.

• Ownership: we can use technology to formalise the ‘ownership’ of data sources – forcing such sources to be accountable for issues they originate using process flow and feedback loops

• Alerting, reminding and escalation: technology is an excellent foil to alerting a source to data quality issues originating from them, reminding that source if they have not taken action and escalating issues that are not being dealt with a timely manner. Using technology in this way empowers the people operating the process to take ownership and be accountable for their actions.

• Operational oversight, trend monitoring, management reporting: management requires many different slices and dices of the data quality process. We should use technology to automate the production of KPIs and Balanced Scorecard views of the process – ideally on central platforms accessible to all participants and interested parties to the process. Good MIS data allows the data quality owner (CDO, Data Czar etc) to understand which sources are not taking ownership, which sources are slow to deliver corrections, and to delve into the root causes of the problems being discovered – assuming that root cause is being tracked by the exception clearing process.

• Business rule application and exception management: technology has a definitive role to play when it comes to automating the application of business rules and the management of exceptions generated by those rules.

• ETL: Extract, Transform and Load….. clearly technology has a role when it comes to centralizing the data into a single view / vision / source.

• Workflow: creating an event driven process within a strong technology framework will further enable people to take control of the data, allowing them to be accountable and take ownership for data quality issues they created.

• Data mining: if you have taken the approach to centralize your data into a high quality data repository then obviously technology has a clear role to play when it comes to mining and querying that data. Just ask yourself, how many asset managers wished they had a single query that could have reported their exposure to Lehman paper in September 2008?

So all technologists out there, please adopt some pragmatism when it comes to implementing your data quality initiatives - technology is not and never will be the solution – but it certainly helps!

Another three weeks of gaming, and another round of our Escalation League is over. Looking over the score sheets, it was obvious that quite a bit of gaming took place, with very few people playing the same person twice. One of the goals I had in mind when putting the league rules together, was to force people to play against those whom they may not get a chance too. We all get set in our ruts and often times play the same few people over and over. With the requirement that you not play the same person twice until you’ve played everyone else (or at least tried too), it forces us to play against people we may not know as well, and hopefully bring all of us tighter as a gaming group.

We’ve also seen the attendance of quite a few new people this month. January alone saw 6 new people visit the barn to see our gaming group. All had nothing but great things to say about our group and the gaming atmosphere that we’ve developed. The last few weeks, we’ve been averaging between 12-15 people each night, which is just amazing if you stop to think about it. We’ve come along ways these past few months, getting more terrain and doing renovations on the barn to make it more habitable this winter. The flyers I have up and word of mouth is now starting to get around town, and more people are hearing about what a great group we’ve got set up. I only hope that things progress as well in the future as we start heading into spring and summer.

Enough of the rambling though, as I know everyone is excited to see the standings after this latest round of games. Well wait no longer, and feast your eyes on where you stand as we head into Round 3 of the Escalation League!

1. Austin – 49
2. Dave B – 30
3. Dale M – 28
4. Mike V – 19
5. Brian H – 19
6. Jeff M – 18
7. Mike W – 18
8. Josh H – 18
9. Kyle B – 16
10. Jeremy A – 10
11. Chad – 5
12. Eric – 2
13. Joshua – 2

Austin still dominates the rankings. While you could chalk his high score up to his wins in Round 1, he’s won the majority of his games in Round 2 and has a substantial lead. People need to learn how to beat his Daemonhunters to have a chance at knocking him out of first. Both Dave and Dale have also had great rounds. Dale has gotten in more games this past round, many of them wins to shoot up into third place. Dave and his Angry Marines had better keep one eye behind their backs, as I think Dale has his eyes set on those two slots ahead of him.

Next week, February 5th will see the start of Round 3! 1500 point battles will bring many armies into their sweet spots for points, and we could see some shifting of places over the next few weeks. We’ll only have 1 week where there won’t be any gaming, so the end of the month will see the end of this round. That will bring us into March and Round 4, where we all make the jump to the 2000 point range. Keep those brushes and paint jars nearby, because we’re only half way done with the league. About 2 more months and we’ll find out who the final victor is going to be!

Cliff Kindy & Neil Wollman

After an intense review, President Obama recently ordered about thirty thousand more U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The question is, should this decision have been made by the U.S. government? The goals for the United States are to prevent an Al Qaida threat in the homeland and to stabilize the Afghan situation, allowing for some level of central government control and a face-saving withdrawal. But who else could or should have weighed in on this decision, and what are their motivations?

The Afghan government realizes that any downsizing of the U.S. presence could threaten its hold on political power. President Karzai recently stated that he expects the U.S. military presence to continue until 2024. The U.S. public is split, mainly along party lines, between those who want an early withdrawal of troops to prevent a quagmire, and those who support the U.S. military presence and fear that withdrawal would squander the investment already made.

The missing voice among these acknowledged players is that of the Afghan public. No country can impose on another a decision that country cannot abide. History is filled with attempts by strong powers to force actions upon weaker ones. This has worked sometimes in the short run, but usually crashes in the long term. The power of democracy is its dependence upon the will of the people who are impacted by a decision.

Indeed, the Afghan citizenry seems to have no say, yet is the group that stands to gain or lose the most from the U.S. occupation. Modern warfare kills and wounds more local civilians than armed actors (about 80 percent, compared to 20 percent). Yet those civilians have little or no ability to choose their own participation.

What if Afghani citizens were to determine whether the U.S. military continues a surge or withdraws troops? Certainly this is a fitting step in encouraging democracy. It would also provide the incentive for Afghans to really own and support a chosen policy on the ground. And perhaps the Afghanis themselves know best how to create a stable nation that does not house terrorists.

In January 2010, Iraq was to hold a referendum on withdrawing the remaining U.S. troops. This plan was scrapped when it became clear it would only reduce U.S. presence by a few months and so was not worth the logistic and financial costs. If a referendum on U.S. troop presence is of merit for Iraqi citizens, is it not also for Afghans, before U.S. troops become more firmly entrenched there?

Who knows what the Afghans would decide if the choice was theirs. Poll results in Afghanistan have varied by region and ethnicity, with a fairly large margin of error. But Afghanistan could hold a national binding referendum on U.S. military presence at the same time as planned parliamentary elections in May. (Given the experience of their last public vote, for president, improved preparations and precautions are needed.) First, the U.S. President or Congress must assert their intent to open a space to hear the voice of the Afghan people. They could encourage Afghan lawmakers to consider such a referendum as a way of respecting the will of the people and of seeking the support of their own citizens.

Would a referendum change the dynamics of the war? If the Afghans voted to keep troops there, then the U.S. could expect better cooperation from the public (in both Afghanistan and the U.S.) and would be confident it is respecting the will of the citizens. (This is especially so if there is strong voter participation and the results show a wide margin.) It might also convince mainly skeptical world opinion and governments to provide more military and other aid. If the Afghans voted against the troops remaining in Afghanistan, and the U.S. honors that, again we are respecting what Afghans want for their own country. Then U.S. options might include undertaking training of police and military personnel; providing support for building the country’s economic, political, and educational systems; and making payments to militia in the same way that the U.S., perhaps in large part, bought its way out of an insurgency in Iraq. Significant resources could be made available in all these ways if there was no combat presence to financially support.

Our nation asserts that it sends its military overseas to protect freedoms at home and promote freedom and democracy elsewhere. The United States can take another step toward democracy in the world by encouraging it in Afghanistan—and it might even bring other benefits, as well. The United States can let the people of Afghanistan choose.

PsySR Member Neil Wollman is Senior Fellow, Bentley Alliance for Ethics and Social Responsibility, Bentley University. Cliff Kindy is an organic market gardener and has for the last twenty years worked frequently with Christian Peacemaker Teams in the war zones of the world. This essay first appeared on CommonDreams.org. Neil can be contacted at NWollman@Bentley.edu.

Hello everyone, we hope you had a wonderful time ringing in the New Year wherever in the world you may be!  That is somewhat belated, but there it is.  Tonight, I am proud to present The Quelle Source, who we previously covered quite briefly on FAIBW.  You remember, I thought they were French or something, but their name is actually German.  More on that later.  FAIBW has gotten away from us recently, but The Quelle Source has not, and now they have released their debut LP, called Enjoy the Ridge.

I’m very excited about this band, and about the flashbacks I’ve been having recently to my middle school punk-loving days.  It wasn’t really real punk, I don’t think–I don’t really know anything about the punk movement, to be honest–it was just MxPx and whatever they played occasionally on the radio.  But I loved it/liked it a lot because my mother would not allow me to love it, and there’s an element to some of the music I’ve been listening to this past year that reminds me of those days.  It’s the energy.  The energy is there, and a little bit of angst, and the feeling of wildness & freedom…but it’s now much more mature and backed by perhaps more training and just plain musical validity than the stuff I used to listen to as a bitty little 12-year old trying to be cool.

That’s what makes The Quelle Source incredible.  Enjoy the Ridge is alive, and it makes you want to see them live  because you know it would be an awesome show.  I would love to see them with Born Ruffians, for that matter.  So, their energy makes them awesome, plus the super cool guitar riffs (“OT5″), the fact that their album title is a sarcastic jab at their neighborhood (I so want to record an album for the sole purpose of saying that I hated my neighborhood and stupid high school also), their proven ability to slow it down (“Wives’ Tale”), the lead singer’s sweet voice, and the angsty lyrical genius reminiscent of Dear & the Headlights or the Format.  I love intelligent songwriters, especially after listening to Britney Spears on the radio this afternoon (who would have thought she’d come back?).  Honestly, I would probably listen to the same couple chords over and over again if the lyrics said something brilliant…thankfully, because of bands like this, I don’t have to make that kind of sacrifice.

Here’s another reason we know they are intelligent–thanks to Dan for picking up on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_document.  I guess technically we don’t know if they intended that or not, but we’ll just go with a yes, they did.

My favorite tracks on the album are, for their sound and for the sharp lyrics, “That’s What Bees Said,” “State Line,” and “Escalation.”  You won’t be disappointed.  And if you, like me, have a special place in your heart for fake punk (is MxPx real?) or music you listened to in years past and have since abandoned, maybe you can put down that torch and jump on board with The Quelle Source.

I believe you can hear all, or at least a lot, of their album streaming here.  You can also buy it, though.  We like when people buy things.

Marc Pilisuk

Protest now seems to be divided among many issues and hampered by disillusionment with the insufficient capacity of the Obama presidency to produce change that limits the transnational corporate agenda and by a fatalism about whether the cycle of escalating military responses to provocations by Middle East extremists can ever be stopped.

As I try to understand this, the administration response to the unsuccessful suicide bomber is instructive. Extended wars involving military occupations against dissenting groups in their own country are not popular. Each new one needs a media-assisted depiction of a fearsome and demonized enemy. Given that Vietnam and Iraq are still relatively fresh examples of disastrous military actions and the rather low credibility of governments promoting military escalations, symbols of evil terrorists are needed to lull popular opposition, just as high unemployment is needed to recruit soldiers for escalating the war in Afghanistan.

The widening web of countries in which extremists are being produced — Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and even the U.S. — suggests that the strategy of creating governments willing to buy into a military response to anti-terrorism efforts provides little hope for reducing extremist bombings. In Afghanistan the issue is highlighted where identities are primarily tribal, where highly armed groups, created or enhanced by earlier Soviet and U.S. interventions, vie for power against a corrupt Karzai government, where a deeply impoverished country with a narcotics-based economy, shows little interest in becoming an outpost for the U.S. plan to create a friendly government capable of curbing militancy. Certainly public support for U.S. military intervention in NATO countries is quite low. Why then is the rush to war still happening?

It is useful to step back from the sanitized military briefings that assume that the war must be fought and look at the most powerful interests that have concerns. The world of transnational corporations and military suppliers and contractors who protect them is in crisis. Global capitalism is in trouble. Its continuation requires a culture of consumerism, a low-wage work force, corporate consolidation with bailouts to assure the largest companies are too big to fail, and an environment devastated by contamination and global warming. The changes needed for a sustainable planet are immense. They involve a cultural recognition of the evidence that accumulation, growth, and domination of resources are actually proving antithetical to happiness. People are already recognizing widely that the current model of corporate capitalism has failed to provide jobs, prevent global warming, or provide security through the military operations undertaken.

Local responses to this failure are impressive. People are using more locally-produced solutions, from farmers’ markets and community banks to voluntary non-violent police forces and loans to poor women. Unfortunately, however, some issues do require a national or global response — and these remain our challenge.

First, the escalation of war in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond preserves the contracts for weapons, for security contractors and retired military personnel who lobby for them, and for the DOD and CIA media infiltrations that promote war. That effort needs congressional approval for funding. Congress therefore must hear about the under-reported costs of untreated PTSD in the VA; the civilian casualties that produce both suffering and the recruitment of extremists; the decline in U.S. support from other countries; and the cuts in non-military community services. Congress must hear about the costs and our unwillingness to support them.

Second, despite the widespread anger over what the corporate economy has done to the economy of ordinary people, status quo supporters have been successful so far in removing any correctives beyond modest regulatory actions. Meanwhile, the normative belief is that “the economy” — based upon more debt, more spending, and more consumption — will return to its pre-meltdown state, and new “green” bubbles in the stock market will help pull us through.

This belief removes from public dialogue the question that should be on everyone’s mind: Just what is the system that has failed and what would a better one (more equitable, more sustainable, and less dependent upon violence) look like? People who work and people who consume goods have been victimized — but they have been left out of the decision process. The disillusionment is widespread. The courage to speak out about community control, economic democracy, and worker participation is needed. It will be labeled un-American and socialist as shown by the healthcare debate, but the time to label the failed system, and to raise the dialogue about its alternative, is now.

Third, the threat posed by nuclear weapons increases as wobbly governments find their authority enhanced by military means. The existing complex of weapons has now been spread. Closed eyes to proliferating stockpiles — in Pakistan, India, and Israel for example — and new nuclear weapons research and design make a mockery of efforts to dissuade the rogue state of the day from obtaining nuclear weapons. With persons willing to engage in suicide to hurt their enemies, we delay nuclear weapons abolition at great risk.

For 2010, then, step up the local options, demand an economic system better than the failed one, stop the funding for escalated war, and honor all provisions on the treaty to prevent nuclear proliferation.

PsySR member Marc Pilisuk is Professor Emeritus, the University of California, and Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center. Marc is the author (with Jennifer Achord Rountree) of Who Benefits from Global Violence and War: Uncovering a Destructive System (Greenwood/Praeger, 2008). He can be reached at mpilisuk@saybrook.edu.

Remember that arcade-like game ‘Doom’, which was the ancestor of First Person Shooter? It exist in 1993. That was like 17 years ago and people still play it today. Although, the game engine is enhanced but it still has the classic feelings. The engine developer had come up with many advance feature which was unavailable in the original game engine such as mouse look, external wad, key binding, and so on. One of my favorite doom engine, a.k.a. Source port, is GZDoom. It uses OpenGL as the default rendering.

The original Doom

Enhanced gameplay with GZDoom

Total annihilation is also a classic game. Released in 1997, this Real Time Strategy (RTS) is 13 years old and people still play it today. Like Doom, developers enhanced the game to make it even better. One community has develop a new engine to play the game in 3D. It’s called TA3D

The original Total Annihilation

TA : Escalation mod

TAUniverse, a place you can modify your Total Annihilation. It provides resource for units, maps, and mods

Question of the Week:
Would Twitter be more valuable if everyone was allowed only 1 Tweet per day?

• Is Twitter out of control?

• Would “quality” be better than quantity?

• Would less Tweets to post and follow cause us to care more about listening?

• Of all the Tweets with links you read in a day, what percentage of the links do you actually click on to check out the content?

• When the robots rise against us (they’ve already started), will an explanation of 140 characters or less be at all surprising?

Reenactment of future non-fiction conversation between the humans and the robots:

Humans:  Why are you murderdeathkilling us?  We made you…poorly and cheaply, and with a limited 90-day warranty…but nonetheless….Oh, the huge manatee!

Robots:  #TheJerseyShore #PaulyShore #StarWarsEpisodesI-III #TerrellOwens #GoBots #Transformers2 #JayLeno #ElectoralCollege #Yanni END LINE RUN $MDK!

DISCUSS!…(I probably won’t get much discussion, but now I have an excuse to post this completely related and relevant video):

- Jake

Old Glory Insurance

http://www.sheltonblog.com/archive/2007/11/01/how-to-video-programmatically-escalating-an-overdue-task-document-workflow.aspx

The politically sensitive strikes Thursday signal an escalation of the Obama administration’s fight against the terrorist organization

Source:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/12/18/launched-missile-strikes-al-qaeda-yemen-sources-say/

Boy, those Iranians sure are afraid of our strong and courageous president, aren’t they?

They’re moving full-steam ahead in their quest to develop a nuclear weapon.  They just successfully test fired a medium range ballistic missile that could carry nukes to Israel, Europe, and a number of vital US bases, in an in-your-face gesture.  And just in case Obama failed to see Iran’s defiance, they just seized an oil well from a country where Obama still has 100,000 troops.

DECEMBER 18, 2009, 12:16 P.M. ET

Iraqi Oil Officials Accuse Iranians of Holding Iraqi Oil Field

By HASSAN HAFIDH and CHIP CUMMINS

Iraqi officials said Iranian troops occupied a disputed oil well along the two countries’ border, the latest in a string of sometimes-contradictory statements Friday about the incursion, fueling worry about an escalation in tensions between Baghdad and Tehran.

Iranian and Iraqi oil officials have frequently tussled over territory along their shared border, and in particular they have traded accusation about oil resources at the shared field at the center of Friday’s reports.

Still, some reports indicated gun fire had been exchanged and Iranians were still holding one well, representing a significant escalation if those reports were confirmed. The reported incursion also comes as Iraqi politicians, many of whom are campaigning on platforms critical of Iranian influence, prepare for parliamentary elections slated for March. That timing could enflame political rhetoric over even a relatively minor incident.

International oil prices spiked briefly on the reports, but appeared to settle back down in midday trading in New York.

Attempts to reach the Iranian mission in New York for comment weren’t immediately successful.

Iraqi Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Haj Aziz told the Associated Press late Friday that Iranian troops seized the area around an oil well in the Al-Fakkah field. He said he didn’t know if the Iranians were still in control of the territory. Earlier in the day, Iraqi officials had denied any incursion had taken place.

Mr. Aziz said late Friday the Foreign Ministry and the Oil Ministry were coordinating over what steps to take and were considering summoning the Iranian ambassador to discuss the issue on Saturday. Iraq’s state-run Iraqiya television reported the National Security Council, headed by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, was meeting Friday night to discuss the issue, according to the AP.

Senior oil ministry officials weren’t immediately available to comment late Friday, the start of the weekend in Iraq.

Deputy Interior Minister Ahmed Ali al-Khafaji, reversing statements made earlier in the day, told Reuters that Iranian soldiers had crossed into Iraqi territory and had taken up position at the field. The minister said the incursion on Friday was the latest in a series this week, further muddying the waters.

A local oil official in the area where the field is located said Iranians were still in control of Well No. 4 at the field. The official said a group of less than a dozen Iranian soldiers occupied the well, but did so two weeks ago. They opened fire briefly, raised the Iranian flag and continue to occupy the area, the official said.

[Continue reading]

It strikes me as very interesting that this development almost immediately followed an admission by Hillary Clinton that Obama’s foreign policy (which she personally opposed and even mocked as a candidate for president) has been an unmitigated disaster:

US outreach to Iran has ‘produced very little,’ Clinton says
Posted : Mon, 14 Dec 2009 18:16:00 GMT

Washington – US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday that more international pressure will be needed to rein in Iran’s nuclear programme, acknowledging that US efforts to reach out to Tehran have not worked. “I don’t think anyone can doubt that our outreach has produced very little in terms of any kind of positive response from the Iranians,” Clinton said.

Since President Barack Obama took office, the United States has sought more dialogue with Iran, hoping to resolve the nuclear stalemate. The administration has wanted to see progress by the end to the year or pursue additional UN Security Council sanctions to persuade Iran to comply with demands to clarify its nuclear activities.

“Certainly additional pressure is going to be called for in order to do that,” Clinton said during a press conference with Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos.

Clinton’s comments came following a report in the Times of London saying documents it obtained show Iran is seeking to develop a device that his used in a nuclear bomb to trigger an explosion.

But no true liberal would ever have been able to imagine that a presentation of utter weakness would not have worked.

Soon this already failed president will have to contend with a belligerent nuclear-armed terrorist state.  He (and we as a result of our idiotic vote for him) will have to contend with the fact that the Iranians have no fear of or respect for Obama at all.

Then we will truly begin to experience the “blessings” of the Chinese curse that we live in ‘interesting’ times under the Obama era of hype and chains.

Tomgram: Jo Comerford, Afghan War Costs 101

Ashton Carter, undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics, put the matter this way recently: “[N]ext to Antarctica, Afghanistan is probably the most incommodious place, from a logistics point of view, to be trying to fight a war… It’s landlocked and rugged, and the road network is much, much thinner than in Iraq. Fewer airports, different geography.”  In other words, we might as well be fighting on the moon.  In translation, this means at least one thing: don’t believe any of the figures coming out of the White House or the Pentagon about what this war is going to cost. 

As Jo Comerford, executive director of the National Priorities Project points out below, the president’s $30 billion figure for getting those 30,000-plus new surge troops into Afghanistan is going to prove a “through-the-basement estimate.”  As for the dates for getting them in and beginning to get them out?  Well, it’s grain-of-salt time there, too.  According to Steven Mufson and Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, some of the fuel storage facilities being built to support the surge troops won’t even be completed by the time the first of them are scheduled to leave the country, 18 months from now.

And keep in mind the endless, and endlessly vulnerable, supply lines on which so much of that fuel — and almost everything else the U.S. military has to have to survive — travels.  Along those mountainous roads, trucks are “lost,” or Taliban-commandeered, or bribes are paid for passage, or some are simply destroyed in what can only be thought of as an underreported supply-line war.  All of this adds immeasurably to the staggering expense of the project.  According to August Cole of the Wall Street Journal, in fuel terms alone, to support a single soldier in Afghanistan costs between $200,000 and $350,000 a year.

And while we’re at it: don’t expect all those surging troops to make it into Afghanistan any time soon.  In the heroic tales of presidential surge deliberations (based on copious White House leaks) that appeared soon after the president’s West Point speech, much was made of how Obama himself had insisted on speeding up the plan to get the extra troops in place.  All would arrive, the White House said, within six months.  That was quickly changed to approximately eight months.  Now, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez, deputy commander of American and NATO forces there, has just announced that it will take nine to eleven months (or maybe even “up to a year”), and that’s if none of the factors that could go wrong do — something not worth putting your money on when it comes to the Afghan War.

If all this leaves you with lingering worries about the success of both the surge and the war, you can put them to rest, however.  NBC’s Richard Engel found a “military schematic,” a single chart from the office of the Joint Chiefs, that offers a visual representation of the military’s full surge/counterinsurgency strategy.  It has to be seen to be believed.  (Just click here.)  It lays out as a flow chart (or perhaps overflow chart would be the more accurate description) just how our war will achieve success.  What could possibly go wrong with such a plan?  It’s hard to imagine.  In the meantime, let Comerford give you a little lesson in the economics of the Afghan War, and what we could have done with that low-ball figure of $30 billion, had we chosen not to fight a war on the moon.  Tom

$57,077.60
Surging by the Minute
By Jo Comerford

$57,077.60. That’s what we’re paying per minute.

In response to President Obama’s early December announcement, PsySR has issued the following statement opposing the proposed U.S. military escalation in Afghanistan. Highlighting key psychological and human rights considerations, we instead call for a heightened focus on development and diplomacy.

In Afghanistan, Escalate Development and Diplomacy, Not War

In a national address on December 1st, 2009, President Barack Obama detailed his strategy to send 30,000 additional troops to Afghanistan and to thereby escalate the war.

As an organization committed to the application of psychological knowledge and expertise in promoting peace, social justice, human rights, and sustainability, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) received this news with great concern. While acknowledging the President’s careful thought and deliberation, we believe that his decision is ill-advised and counter-productive because it fails to adequately recognize the following key considerations:

• Military escalation will almost assuredly stimulate heightened armed resistance. Psychologically, military escalation supports the images of the U. S. as the occupier and the dominator of Muslims that the Taliban and other radical elements use to gain the support of the Afghan people. The increased violence and destruction that result from the escalation will undercut our aims by turning new generations to jihadist extremism, multiplying the terrorist threats facing the U.S. for decades to come.

• In embracing further militarization to promote the welfare of the Afghan people, we overlook the catastrophic toll that war brings to the civilian population, including the tragic loss of innocent life, the destruction of now fragile communities, and the grievous suffering borne by women and children — a far cry from the lofty goal of advancing human rights. At the same time, this state of continuous war inflicts severe psychological trauma on many of the Afghan people, adults and children alike, rendering the creation of a peaceful society all the more difficult.

• Especially after their years of repeated deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, escalation will further compound the enormous burden borne by our men and women in uniform. The dreadful consequences are already apparent, not only in lives lost and life-long debilitating injuries, but also in deeply troubling rates of post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide among our service members.

• Sending additional troops epitomizes the destructive effects of psychological over-commitment, whereby the investments we have already made and the losses we have already suffered perversely compel us to “follow through” so as not to “waste” the efforts we have already expended — even while we acknowledge that in fact there is no military solution in Afghanistan.

• The escalation decision appears to be the result of a too familiar psychological process whereby only a narrow set of alternatives receives serious consideration. In this instance, the additional deployment of troops likely emerges from the excessive influence of a bloated defense budget, experts with vested interests, defense contractors who benefit from endless war, and an unbending ideology glorifying American exceptionalism and military prowess.

Instead of the proposed military escalation, we believe progress can be achieved by building the resistance of Afghan communities to extremist takeovers through concerted work on human security. The heart of this work is an immediate and robust development effort that enables Afghan communities to make visible, rapid gains in meeting their basic needs for necessities such as food, health care, shelter, and education.

This non-military approach should empower communities and help to develop the civil society processes that are essential components of a healthy political system. Promoting and protecting the rights of Afghan women and girls should be a key priority of this effort for both the U.S. and Afghan governments. Meeting basic needs will also weaken radical influences over the population and undermine the image of the U. S. as the enemy of Muslim people.

This alternative strategy for success and for a stable Afghanistan that respects the rights of all its citizens depends upon a reduction — not an escalation — in U. S. military operations. It should include a transfer of physical security responsibility to Afghan forces and the commencement of multi-level diplomacy to reach a ceasefire and negotiated settlement among contending parties.

Therefore, for the long-term welfare of the people of Afghanistan and the United States, Psychologists for Social Responsibility calls upon the U.S. government to urgently change course from its current path of war to a principled path of peace and development.

December 14, 2009

Rethink Afghanistan

President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100 billion/year. But America cannot afford a war that does not make us safer, and Congress has the power to stop the escalation. Vote NO on any spending bill that would send more troops to Afghanistan.

SIGN THE PETITION TO CONGRESS

Rethink Afghanistan

President Obama has decided to send more than 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan, at a cost of more than $100 billion/year. But America cannot afford a war that does not make us safer, and Congress has the power to stop the escalation. Vote NO on any spending bill that would send more troops to Afghanistan.

SIGN THE PETITION TO CONGRESS

by matttbastard

Cosign with Thomas H. Johnson and M. Chris Mason, who incisively and cooly slice away the bullshit surrounding Obama’s Afghanistan escalation:

Obama’s new “strategy” is no strategy at all. It is a cynical and politically motivated rehash of Iraq policy: Toss in a few more troops, throw together something resembling local security forces, buy off the enemies, and get the hell out before it all blows up. Even the dimmest bulb listening to the president’s speech could not have missed the obvious link between the withdrawal date for combat troops from Iraq (2010), the date for beginning troop reductions in Afghanistan (2011), and the domestic U.S. election cycle.

[...]

The only conclusion one can reach from the president’s speech, after eliminating the impossible, is that the administration has made a difficult but pragmatic decision: The war in Afghanistan is unwinnable, and the president’s second term and progressive domestic agenda cannot be sacrificed to a lost cause the way that President Lyndon B. Johnson’s was for Vietnam. The result of that calculation was what we heard on Dec. 1: platitudes about commitment and a just cause; historical amnesia; and a continuation of the exact same failed policies that got the United States into this mess back in 2001, concocted by the same ship of fools, many of whom are still providing remarkably bad advice to this administration.

[...]

In office less than a year, the Obama administration has already been seduced by the old beltway calculus that sometimes a little wrong must be done to get re-elected and achieve a greater good.

As they say, read the whole damn thing.

(Photo: Peter Casier, World Food Program, used under a Creative Commons License)

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