Evergreene Digest A Journal of Progress for the Rest of Us

The report's most important contribution is to lay out a "consensus view" that the current strategy in Afghanistan is not working; that it's actually making things worse; that it's not making us safer; that it's coming at a staggering and wildly disproportionate cost in blood and treasure; and that there needs to be an alternative approach.

Dan Froomkin, Huffington Post

Nine long years into a war in Afghanistan that two out of three Americans no longer support, a group of disillusioned foreign policy experts is trying to kick-start an overdue national discussion about our goals in the region, and other ways that we might be able to achieve them.

Despite the growing opposition to the war outside the Beltway, there's been remarkably little serious debate about Afghan policy among those with the power to change it.

A new report by the ad hoc Afghanistan Study Group, officially unveiled on Wednesday, aims to change all that.
Flatly declaring what has become increasingly obvious over time -- that our efforts in Afghanistan are not only failing, they are actually counterproductive -- the report provides something that some anti-war activists say has been sorely missing until now: A coherent alternative to the current approach.

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• About 50,000 US troops remain in Iraq supposedly on 'training' and 'advisory' roles until a complete pull out.
• US officials are planning to employ thousands of private contractors mercenaries to conduct operations formerly performed by US troops.
• Fact Check: Is Iraq combat really over for US?

From Citizens for Legitimate Government, in PressTV

Despite US announcement of complete withdrawal from Iraq in 2011, Washington will reportedly keep thousands of soldiers in the war-torn nation. American military experts said the remaining forces are expected to stay in Iraq beyond 2011 as a 'peacekeeping force' for a decade, AFP reported.

About 50,000 US troops remain in Iraq supposedly on 'training' and 'advisory' roles until a complete pull out. Meanwhile, US officials are planning to employ thousands of private contractors mercenaries to conduct operations formerly performed by US troops.

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Related:

Fact Check: Is Iraq combat really over for US? Calvin Woodward, Associated Press, New York Times | NY

• Maybe if Simpson and the ruling class weren’t so damned bloodthirsty, we wouldn’t have choices like this to make.
• Veterans Group Calls for Removal of Alan Simpson
• Show Alan Simpson, Vet Hater, the Door

David Dayen, FireDogLake

Alan Simpson’s scorn for people who use federal money goes beyond… well, everyone, in the form of Social Security. He also doesn’t like it when Vietnam-era soldiers breathed Agent Orange and put their greedy little hands out to cough into them because they had respiratory trouble the rest of their lives.

The system that automatically awards disability benefits to some veterans because of concerns about Agent Orange seems contrary to efforts to control federal spending, the Republican co-chairman of President Barack Obama’s deficit commission said Tuesday (Aug 31).

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Related:

Aging vets' costs concern Obama's deficit co-chair

Brian Beutler, Talking Points Memo

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Thomas Sklarski

National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility co-chairman Alan Simpson

If Social Security is "a cow with 310 million tits" then what's the proper metaphor for veteran's benefits? We don't know. But Alan Simpson seems to think they're too expensive. Or too overused. Or something. Anyway, it's bad.

"The irony (is) that the veterans who saved this country are now, in a way, not helping us to save the country in this fiscal mess," said Alan Simpson, co-chair of the White House's fiscal commission, according to the Associated Press.

God's reasoning is in inverse proportion to the Pentagon's. Then with the gift of God's son Jesus, the whole calculus of war is subtracted. "Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you. Mt 5:44.

Michael McCarthy, Pax Vobiscum

Submitted by Evergreene Digest Contributing Editor Gary Kohls

“…a former targeting expert who'd worked for the Pentagon in the initial "Shock and
Awe" campaign said (on National Public Radio’s “This American Life”) that the threshold ratio not to be exceeded was 30 civilians to be killed in order to execute one high value target.1

“There you have it--the morally callous thinking that is prohibited by the principles of our Christian faith. Decapitate the leadership to end the war sooner, despite "taking out" innocents at the same time. The concept of "collateral damage" has been invented to obfuscate the fact of the certain unavoidable deaths of great numbers of civilians in all of these wars fought in population centers, large and small.

“In Afghanistan / Pakistan this has been one of the major issues in the conduct of the war, with many innocents being killed in bombings and raids. Our armed forces are given woefully insufficient information on who is friend and who is foe, and more enemies are being created daily as more civilians die in Predator drone attacks and special forces missions. We might sometimes "get our man" but the local community is more deeply turned against us.