Cartoon for December 13, 2009

Shut up, sit down, stand something.

Cartoon for December 7, 2009

Generals and right-wing politicians have convinced Obama not to tip his hand about our strategy in Afghanistan.

Cartoon for December 3, 2009

Finally: Obama creates a jobs program! The catch is, you have to join the Taliban first.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: War, More War or Morer War

Debate Freezes Out the Majority View: Get Out Now

The headline ran in The New York Times a month ago, on November 7th: "All Afghan War Options by Obama Aides Said to Call for More Troops." According to White House insiders, Obama considered three choices for digging our way deeper into the "graveyard of empires": General Stanley McChrystal, commander of the occupation forces, asked for 40,000 additional soldiers. Defense Secretary Robert Gates wanted 30,000 more. Other generals wanted to send 20,000 more.

Obama, reports U.S. state-controlled media, has chosen the "middle option"—30,000 more troops, bringing the total American occupation force to 98,000.

Obama is many things: cool, calm and collected. What he is not is unpredictable. Give the man a middle course, a happy median and a compromise to choose from, and he'll split the difference every time. "Hope"? "Change"? Awesome campaign slogans. The posters will make handsome collectibles.

The weirdest aspect of this Afghan spin game is that everyone is buying into it. Most American voters, after all, are against the war in Afghanistan entirely. (52 percent say the war isn't worth fighting, according to the latest ABC News-Washington Post poll. 44 percent say it is.) Objectively, therefore, the "middle ground" is immediate withdrawal.

(I don't know what's to the left of that. Retroactive withdrawal? We'd need Superman to do his flying around the world superfast thing for that, though, and I hear he got laid off last year.)

The real "middle ground" sure as hell isn't Obama's prescription: 30,000 more troops and completely out by the year 2017, by which time there'll be flying cars and stuff, and he won't be president anymore, and maybe the U.S. will be just a memory, so he's writing a check he won't have to cash.

What a joke! When you ask a bunch of generals and the secretary of defense for advice about a war, the results are pre-determined: more bang bang, more soldiers, more planes, more bombs, more coffins. The amazing part is how far we've traveled down the path towards all war, all the time: Obama didn't even have to pretend to consider pulling out of Afghanistan. He didn't even have to appoint a token peacenik to his cabinet. He didn't even have to talk to one.

Which perfectly mirrors the media. You could read newspaper after newspaper, listen to hour after hour of radio and watch day after day of television news, and never once be exposed to the opinion that the Afghanistan war sucks and should be ended yesterday.

"I've seen the public opinion polls saying that a majority of Americans don't support the [Afghanistan war] effort at all," Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on August 26th. "I say, good. Let's have that debate, let's have that discussion."

Nice sentiment. Very small-d democratic. And if you support the war, it's essential—no society can win a war without strong support on the homefront. But we haven't had any debate whatsoever, as notes Steve Rendell. "Rather than airing a full range of voices on the war, prominent media have downplayed proponents of withdrawal in favor of a debate that reflects the narrow range of elite, inside-Washington opinion," Rendell reports in Extra!, the magazine of the media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting.

Fareed Zakaria, a Washington Post columnist whose prognostications have consistently proven wrong since, well, always, encapsulated the corporate media's blackout of antiwar opinions in his September 14th column. He began: "It is time to get real about Afghanistan. Withdrawal is not a serious option."

Which is exactly what they used to say about Vietnam. Until we withdrew. And guess what? Nothing happened. Southeast Asia didn't turn communist. The dominoes didn't fall. Nowadays, even ex-"sky pirate" John McCain receives a warm welcome when he visits Hanoi. Of course withdrawal is a serious option. It's the only sane one.

The nation's two leading newspapers set the tone for the lack of debate in Washington. "In the Washington Post," found a FAIR study of op-ed pages during the first ten months of 2009, "pro-war columns outnumbered antiwar columns by more than 10 to 1: Of 67 Post columns on U.S. military policy in Afghanistan, 61 supported a continued war, while just six expressed antiwar views."

It's the same story—or lack of story—a six-hour drive up I-95. "Of the New York Times' 43 columns on the Afghanistan War, 36 supported the war and only seven opposed it—five times as many columns to war supporters as to opponents. Of the paper's pro-war columns, 14 favored some form of escalation, while 22 argued for pursuing the war differently."

There was only one major exception to the "bring 'em on" din. Times columnist Bob Herbert, said the report, is "by far the loudest antiwar voice in the study period, and the author of the majority of the Times' seven antiwar columns."

Alas, as it was in George Orwell's Oceania—where the "resistance" was a figment of the ruling Party's imagination—so it is in our own Ministry of Truth-run publications. Even though Herbert's December 1st column opposed Obama's escalation, he parroted the official state media line that Afghanistan had once been, in pundit parlance, the "right war at the right time."

"There was every reason for American forces to invade Afghanistan in the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001," he wrote. "But that war was botched by the Bush crowd, and Barack Obama does not have a magic wand now to make it all better."

Actually, there was no reason whatsoever for the U.S. to invade Afghanistan after 9/11:

On 9/11 Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. He has been there ever since.

There were only two Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan on 9/11. Both had been closed. There were, and remain, hundreds of camps in Pakistan.

There were very few Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan on 9/11—by some estimates, fewer than two dozen. All were low-level. The big fish and the big numbers were and remain in—you guessed it—Pakistan.

This information has been known by experts on South and Central Asia, all of whom—not coincidentally—oppose the U.S. war against Afghanistan. But none of them have ever been invited to the nation's op-ed pages...much less a meeting with the president.

(Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back" and the book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?" His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for November 26, 2009

After carefully considering three options for Afghanistan, none of which involved withdrawal, he decided to send more troops--in order to get out sooner. Of course.

LBJ, call your office.

Cartoon for November 21, 2009

Self-explanatory, methinks, and yet inexplicable.

Cartoon for November 2, 2009

It really does make a difference that Obama is president.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Drop the Drones

Remote Attacks Inflame Afghan Anti-Americanism

The killing of Afghan civilians, usually caused by inadvertent American and NATO airstrikes, has become the most sensitive issue between the Afghans and their Western guests." So reports The New York Times Magazine in the latest installment of its ongoing "There's a new general in charge and he's cool and maybe he can win the war" series. This decade's war: Afghanistan. week's star: General Stanley McChrystal. Alas, poor Petraeus, we hardly knew ye.

As a World War II buff, I mourn the fact that the Magazine wasn't around in 1943. Imagine the over-the-top insensitivity: "The killing of Jews, usually caused by inadvertent German and Axis deportations, has become the most sensitive issue between the French and their Teutonic guests."

"Inadvertant" airstikes?

"Guests"?

Many of the botched airstrikes have been carried out by Predator drone planes remote-controlled by CIA and USAF personnel watching computer screens thousands of miles away. One click of a mouse and a Hellfire missile bearing a 20-pound blast fragmentation warhead zooms towards its target. Despite numerous killings of civilians, drones are popular with the military because they keep soldiers out of harm's way.

Like a lot ideas, it only seems like a good one before you think about it. America's obsession with protecting its own people is at the heart of Afghans' contempt for the U.S. occupation. And Afghan resentment is the biggest reason the war effort has been doomed from the start.

To Afghans on the ground, drones symbolize American callousness and project a smug sense of superiority. Because they protect us at the Afghans' expense. New York Times reporter David Rhode, the journalist kidnapped by neo-Taliban militants and held in Afghanistan and Pakistan for nine months, describes their "terrifying presence":

"Remotely piloted, propeller-driven airplanes, they could easily be heard as they circled overhead for hours. To the naked eye, they were small dots in the sky. But their missiles had a range of several miles. We knew we could be immolated without warning."

To the dead, death is death—how you die doesn't matter in the end. To the living, it's all that matters.

Would you rather lose the love of your life to a drunk driver? Or because she rushed into a burning building to save a child? Afghanistan is a martial society. As an Afghan, how would you rather lose your son—in the heat of battle or to some alien contraption buzzing around in response to the movement of a joystick in Virginia?

Unlike his predecessors McChrystal knows that every "inadvertent airstrike" prompts a certain number of Afghans to join or support Afghan resistance forces. "Gentlemen," he tells a morning briefing of NATO generals, "we need to understand the implications of what we are doing. Airpower contains the seeds of our own destruction. A guy with a long-barrel rifle runs into a compound, and we drop a 500-pound bomb on it? If we lose airpower irresponsibly, we can lose this fight." Later that day, the Times reporter who recorded that statement wrote, McChrystal said he planned on "banning bombs and missiles in populated areas unless his men were in danger of being overrun."

An improvement, no doubt. But in Afghanistan and everywhere else, all use of airpower is irresponsible. Whether piloting a B-52 at 35,000 feet or wiggling a joystick 8,000 miles away, fighting a war at a distance means chucking ordnance willy-nilly into people and situations you can't see or know anything about.

And those people will hate you for it.

In the short term, remote drone warfare offers the tantalizing prospect of killing your enemies without risking your own forces. "In Pakistan, a CIA-led program using Predator drones to hunt down and kill leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban has proven remarkably successful, even if controversial within Pakistan itself," reports the Times. "To date, American officials say, they have killed 11 of the top 20 Al Qaeda leaders, without having to launch large-scale military operations across the border."

In the long term, however, the geopolitical risks eclipse any short-term gains. Note the "even if." Drone plane attacks brought Pakistani anti-Americanism to a boil and led to the collapse of the dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally. Meanwhile, like most cell-based guerrilla organizations, Al Qaeda's structure ensures that no man is indispensable. It simply appointed new members to the positions vacated by the Hellfire victims.

If the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan is destined to fail, it would be nice to see it end with more dignity. In an ideal world, President Obama would sign legislation outlawing the manufacture, deployment or use of Predator and similar drone bomber technology, and urge other nations to do the same. In a somewhat decent world, he would withdraw rather than send more troops to Afghanistan. And in the crappy world we call home, the least we can do is kill Afghans with flesh-and-blood soldiers rather than drone planes.

(Ted Rall is the author of "To Afghanistan and Back," the first book about the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Among its chapters is one titled "How We Lost the Afghan War.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

SYNDICATED COLUMN: Build Stuff. Then Leave.

In Afghanistan, Pull Out Soldiers and Send in Engineers

Eight years into the longest war in American history, we've learned what doesn't work in Afghanistan. What will?

More troops won't help. But neither will the prescription now being floated in Washington: maintaining bases of small commando units that could be called upon to wage covert counterinsurgency operations across the border in Pakistan.

Now it's time to fight the war for hearts and minds the way it ought to have been done from the start—instead of hostile troops, Afghanistan needs civil engineers. Stop blowing up wedding parties and start building bridges. Pack away the Predator drones and string up fiberoptic cable. It's time to give Afghanistan what it needs most, and what Afghans crave: the gift of infrastructure.

More than anything else, Afghans need paved roads. The second priority is electricity. Third is telephone service. An Afghanistan possessing these three building blocks of nationhood could modernize its own economy and political system at an astonishing speed. And it would have the people of the United States to thank.

According to the Pentagon, fewer than 15 percent of Afghanistan's roads are paved, but most of these include roads that no American driver would deem passable. NGOs say fewer than one percent are in decent shape. Either way, moving people or goods from one place to another is a daunting prospect in Afghanistan. Distances that can be covered in the U.S. by a 15-minute drive require hours of torturous travel over backbreaking, axle-shattering ruts and blast craters.

The U.S. recently spent $1 million to help Afghanistan open its first national park, in the relatively peaceful Bamiyan province. But no one visits the park—due to the state of the roads. "The drive to Band-e-Amir from the Afghan capital of Kabul, 150 miles away, takes as long as 12 hours over rocky roads," reports USA Today. "Trucks easily overturn, and the talc-like dust of the high desert regularly chokes the air filters of even the hardiest vehicles." In addition, hundreds of bridges have been blown up during 30 years of civil war, forcing motorists to ford rivers. Cars get washed away all the time.

A local eco-tourism guide says the park is a waste of money. "We need a road. We need electricity. We need an airport," says Jawad Wafa, 22. Afghans have been pleading with the U.S. to stop bombing and start building for years. The U.S. makes promise after promise, but the bulldozers never arrive. Americans blame corrupt Afghans. Afghans complain that the Taliban makes construction too dangerous. Billions of dollars have vanished; little has been accomplished.

With relatively few natural resources and little arable land, Afghanistan is economically most notable for the countries it separates. Its only hope for prosperity relies on trade. Pakistani truckers want to ply a new Silk Road by shipping cheap manufactured goods from India and China into Central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia and eastern Europe. The Afghans could collect tolls and customs duties on products passing through their territory. But this traffic will remain a mere trickle as long as the roads remain impassable and unsafe.

Farmers currently account for 85 percent of the population, and some of them could be persuaded to stop growing opium and return to traditional Afghan crops—pomegranates, apricots and almonds—if decent roads allowed them to get their produce to markets.

Electricity is another vital component of a modern state. But only seven percent of Afghanistan has any electricity whatsoever. Even Kabul suffers daily blackouts. Were the Afghan electrical grid to become widespread and reliable, people wouldn't have to rush home before dusk to avoid gangs of roving rapists and murderers. It would be harder for Taliban forces to plant roadside bombs and ambush vehicles on brightly lit highways. Factories and offices could remain open, run computers, and operate after dark. Water pumps would become more efficient and ubiquitous.

A broad communications network is the third prerequisite for economic viability. When I was in Afghanistan during the fall of 2001, I was struck by how easily misinformation could be used to fleece people. "The U.S. dollar is down versus the afghani," a moneychanger told me, "because many U.S. cities have been destroyed." By whom? I asked. "The Taliban!" Nice try. But others believed him.

On another occasion, I needed to know whether the Uzbek-Afghan border crossing at Termiz was open. There was no way to find out.

It's impossible to conduct business without the reliable exchange of information. But only eight percent of Afghans have access to any form of telephone service, including public call booths. Those with a dedicated phone number—where people can reach them any time—are even fewer. Without telephone service, it's impossible to know when a truckload of goods is due to arrive. Casual conversations that could lead to innovation ("What? You can't get them in Kandahar? They're cheap here in Herat.") never have a chance to take place.

Investment in infrastructure would allow Afghans to stand on their own feet economically. As happened in the U.S. a century ago, rural electrification and highway construction would bring outsiders to communities cut off by war and rugged terrain. Radios and televisions, currently useless, would introduce 21st century mores to 14th century cultures. As has occurred in many parts of the world—whether for better or for worse—popular culture would have a liberalizing influence on Afghans. How long would women tolerate the burqa after they learned that it's an anomaly within the Muslim world?

The United States should offer its expertise in building infrastructure with no strings attached, while renouncing all interest in Afghanistan's internal affairs. Regardless of who runs the show in Kabul—even the Taliban—we should continue to help. And it should be free. No loans.

First rebuild Afghanistan. Then leave. After all, we broke it.

(Ted Rall is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for September 21, 2009

It's true that the lawn around the Vietnam war memorial is in trouble. But at least soldiers who died in Afghanistan will have died for something useful.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: The Impotent Dictator

How Many More Must Die for Karzai?

"For five years Mr. Karzai was my president," Ashraf Ghani, an opposition candidate, bemoaned after widespread reports that incumbent Hamid Karzai had used fraud on a massive scale to steal the election. "Now how many Afghans will consider him their president?"

Not many. In a country where civil war is the national pastime and five-year-old boys learn how to fire an AK-47, this is not good. But Ghani is asking the wrong question. The real question is, how many Americans will continue to see Karzai as viable--and be willing to continue to pay the price of propping him up?

California Senator Diane Feinstein used to support Karzai. "Afghanistan is our beachhead on our war on terror. We cannot lose it, or we lose our war on terror," she said in 2002. What a difference seven years makes! "I do not believe we can build a democratic state in Afghanistan," she finally admitted last week.

Americans are finally waking up. Afghanistan, most people finally understand, is not "the good war" but the stupid one. We can't win. Even worse, there's nothing to win. The historical parallels aren't perfect--they never are--but it's hard not to think of the cost of propping up the corrupt Diem regime and its successors in South Vietnam when you see Hamid Karzai prancing around in Kabul, never an arm's length away from U.S. Special Forces commandos. You see, Karzai's own troops can't be trusted not to kill him.

A July headline in The Christian Science Monitor asked an intentionally hilarious question: "Afghan Election: Can Karzai's Rivals Close the Gap?" Not with the way Karzai stuffs ballot boxes!

There were at least 800 fake polling sites on Afghanistan's election day--places that "existed only on paper," reported The New York Times. "We think that about 15 percent of the polling sites never opened on Election Day," the paper quoted a "senior Western diplomat." "But they still managed to report thousands of ballots for Karzai."

Also, "Mr. Karzai’s supporters also took over approximately 800 [additional] legitimate polling centers and used them to fraudulently report tens of thousands of additional ballots for Mr. Karzai."

Actually, make that hundreds of thousands. In "Kandahar…preliminary results indicate that more than 350,000 ballots have been turned in to be counted. But Western officials estimated that only about 25,000 people actually voted there."

Overall "pro-Karzai ballots," reports the Times, "may exceed the people who actually voted by a factor of 10."

The truth is, there's nothing new here. Ashraf Ghani may have been the only Afghan to have ever considered Karzai legitimate. To most Afghans, Karzai has always been a curious "impotent dictator," propped up by U.S. military force but with insufficient funding to exert his power outside the capital Kabul. In the provinces, tribal warlords fight the Taliban for control.

Looking at Karzai's resume, it's hard to imagine what George W. Bush and his "pet Afghan" Zalmay Khalilzad were thinking when they appointed Karzai as the U.S. puppet "interim president" of occupied Afghanistan in late 2001. Granted, all three were oilmen--Karzai and Khalilzad had both worked as consultants for the energy corporation Unocal, which tried to build an oil-gas pipeline across Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.

But Karzai lacked both integrity--as a Taliban official in 1997, Karzai was caught embezzling government funds and forced to flee the country--and support. He was a Pashtun, and the new Northern Alliance government was predominantly Tajik. Always essential in a nation permanently at war, Karzai had no military bona fides, having rarely seen a shot fired in anger.

Karzai's drive to consolidate power since 2001 has been marked by trickery, intimidation, ballot stuffing and systemic corruption. One "election" has followed another. But none have been conducted legitimately.

Perhaps democracy was too much to hope for in a nation whose infrastructure had been degraded to the 14th century. There was no census, no house addresses, no mail service. How could a fair election be held?

Karzai didn't even try.

At a June 2002 loya jirga (grand assembly) to choose the new head of state, Karzai got his U.S. masters to lean on his main rival, former king, Mohammed Zahir Shah. Zahir Shah withdrew, as did 70 of his delegates. They did the same to ex-President Burhanuddin Rabbani, guaranteeing Karzai a phony mandate.

"Voting for the loya jirga has been plagued by violence and vote-buying," said UN envoy to Afghanistan Lakhdar Brahimi at the time. "There were attempts at manipulation, violence, unfortunately. Money was used, threats were used."

"This is not a democracy, it is a rubber stamp. Everything has already been decided by the powerful ones," added the Women's Affairs minister.

On October 9, 2004, Karzai "won" his first "democratic election." As before, Karzai's goons stacked the deck. Unsympathetic elections officials were kidnapped. The UN concluded that "that fraud had occurred, particularly ballot-box stuffing" in the 2004 election. The UN "noted that some estimates have said that 10 percent to 15 percent of the 11.5 million registered voters, in Afghanistan and among Afghan refugees abroad, may be registered more than once," reported The New York Times at the time. The three-member committee that counted the ballots were all appointed by Karzai.

Those who can't win, cheat. Without the U.S., Karzai would never have won power in Afghanistan. He certainly wouldn't have kept it.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported May 18, 2009 that Zalmay Khalilzad "could assume a powerful, unelected position inside the Afghan government under a plan he is discussing with Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, according to senior American and Afghan officials."

Bush's corrupt oilmen are still having fun looting Afghanistan. The question for us Americans is: why should anyone die to help them?

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for September 7, 2009

The way things are going in Afghanistan...

Cartoon for August 29, 2009

Obama, like LBJ, prepares to squander all his political capital on an unwinnable war.

SYNDICATED COLUMN: What If They Gave a War and Nobody Knew Why?

Obama Still Trying to Define Victory in Afghanistan

What if they gave a war and nobody knew why?

When the U.S. began bombing Afghanistan in October 2001, America's war aims were clear: capture or kill Osama bin Laden, overthrow the Taliban government, deny Al Qaeda training camps and a safe haven.

Of course, two out of three of these goals were based on lies; both bin Laden and most of Al Qaeda's camps and personnel were in Pakistan, not Afghanistan. There was also a fourth unmentioned war aim, a lie of omission: lay an oil and gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan. Still, the Bush Administration deserves credit for articulating clear goals—metrics, in bureaucratese—against which success or failure could be measured.

President Obama has rebranded Bush's Afghan War as his own. Afghanistan, Obama said during the campaign, was the war America should be fighting. And so we are. Obama has dispatched tens of thousands of additional troops to the "graveyard of empires," many redeployed from Iraq.

But, unlike Bush, he still hasn't told us why we're in Afghanistan.

When he took office, Obama's stated war aims were muddled: propping up U.S. puppet Hamid Karzai, training local Afghan police, and reducing opium cultivation. The first two led to no clearly-enunciated end; how long would they take? If we really cared about number three, we might as well have put the Taliban—who'd had some success in getting rid of opium—back in charge.

Obama reads the polls, which reflect increased skepticism about his Afghan war. So, in May, Obama attempted a reset. "We have a clear and focused goal," he assured a White House audience: "to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future."

In other words, back to Bush.

Here again, let's give Bush credit. He never floated war aims in a country—namely Pakistan—which we weren't actually fighting in.

Sure, the CIA is firing missiles from remote-control drone planes at every Pakistani wedding party in sight. But Al Qaeda will never be defeated with air power alone. As things stand, Pakistan remains a heavily-funded U.S. client state—not an enemy with which we are at war. There are no U.S. ground troops in Pakistan. Until that changes, Obama's aim in Afghanistan (and Pakistan) remains prima facie unachievable.

Leaders who clearly articulate the aims of a war—and secure domestic political support for those aims—may weather the inevitable ebbs and flows of warfare. FDR did this after Pearl Harbor, ensuring that Americans accepted the sacrifices required to defeat Germany and Japan during the difficult years of 1942 and 1943, when the outcome remained uncertain. A lack of clear, widely supported war aims, on the other hand, almost inevitably results in a collapse of interest—much less support—on the home front.

The stated aim of the Vietnam War—containing communism—was vague and contained no definable end. If you do define the goalposts, you're forced to concede defeat if you fall short: Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq began with a clearer goal, getting rid of Saddam's WMDs, but turned sour when Americans discovered Saddam didn't have any. Bush was smart enough to declare "Mission Accomplished." It might have worked, too, if only he'd yanked out U.S. troops and blamed the ensuing chaos on unruly and ungrateful Iraqis.

Ten and a half time zones away from Washington, American soldiers are fighting and dying in Afghanistan. Afghan resistance forces are fighting and dying too, protecting their homeland. And Afghan civilians are dying in the crossfire. But, eight years into this misbegotten war, "the Obama Administration is [still] struggling to come up with a long-promised plan to measure whether the war is being won," reports The New York Times.

Proposals for such measurements range from the insipid to the absurd. The "number of operations in which Afghan soldiers are in the lead," for example, will be tabulated and reported to a typically credulous media. Whether said sorties are effective won't matter. Also being considered is "an opinion poll to determine Afghan public perception of official corruption at national, provincial and district levels." Never mind that most Afghans live in areas controlled by violent local warlords, who may not be big fans of free speech among their subjects.

When you can't tell whether you're winning or losing, you're losing.

(Ted Rall, President of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists, is author of the books "To Afghanistan and Back" and "Silk Road to Ruin.")

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

New Animated Editorial Cartoon: "Afghanistan—The Good War"

Obama keeps firing more drone missiles; we keep blowing up more hearts and minds. It's more than just a crusade. It's a video game!

Here's the latest from yours truly and David Essman:

Cartoon for May 25, 2009

Barack Obama reneged on his promise to release 2000+ photos of prisoner abuse by US troops. Because, you know, the Afghans and Iraqis aren't already pissed.

Cartoon for May 11, 2009

It's true: U.S. puppet Afghan president Hamid Karzai has signed into law a bill that requires Afghan women to have sex with their husbands at least every four days, except when they're menstruating or sick. The Taliban were progressive by comparison--they stoned rapists to death.

Cartoon for April 4, 2009

Afghans like us. They really like "us."

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: What Obama and Hitler Have in Common

Broke and on a Losing Streak, Obama Doubles Down

Contrary to myth, the Nazis weren't crazy. But during the winter of 1944-45, with the Allied and Soviet armies closing in on Berlin, German leaders made an insane decision. Instead of doing whatever they could to hold out as long as possible, they sped up the Holocaust.

The Nazis' policy of accelerated genocide deprived the war effort of increasingly precious resources. Soldiers and paramilitaries were pulled back from the battlefront in order to arrest and guard ever-increasing numbers of Jews and other "enemies of the state." As battle after battle was lost, trains assigned to transport reinforcement troops were reassigned to ship the regime's victims to the death camps.

Killing Jews was the Nazis' top priority. It came ahead of everything else--even their own lives. Total madness.

But who are we to judge? Here we are 64 years later, doing the same thing. The U.S. is locked in a last-ditch struggle for survival, and the U.S. government is diverting vital resources to its own top priority: killing Muslims.

President Obama and the Democrats always asserted that Afghanistan was the "good war"--the one thing George W. Bush did right before he "took his eye off the ball" by invading Iraq. Not me. I realized that the invasion and subsequent occupation were doomed from the start. My Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment came while watching Afghan villagers sobbing outside a house being searched by U.S. troops. "The Russians never violated our homes," an old man told me. As in many societies descended from nomads, Afghan culture dictates that a man's home is truly his castle. "Even when they came to kill you, the Taliban knocked on the door and waited for you come out. They didn't touch your wife or daughter. They never came inside. Never."

I stared at the house's front door, smashed and splintered after having been kicked in, and thought: They'll never forgive us. Women were shrieking inside the house. The soldiers yelled at them: "Shut the f--- up!" At least they did it in English, so they couldn't understand. Hearts and minds.

I went to my rented room and filed a story with the headline: "How We Lost Afghanistan." It was December 11, 2001.

Bush spent the following seven years sending more and more troops to Afghanistan: 8,000 at first, then 18,000, then 30,000. Afghan resistance fighters killed more and more of them. It became more dangerous to serve a tour of duty in America's "forgotten war" than in Iraq. The more the size of the U.S. occupation force increased, street-level violence, warlordism and opium poppy cultivation spiraled out of control.

Chaos doesn't come cheap. It costs $390,000 to sustain one American soldier overseas for one year.

Now Obama is "doubling down" on a "new Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy," reported The Washington Post. "Along with the 17,000 additional combat troops authorized last month, Obama said he will send at least 4,000 more this fall…" There were 38,000 when Obama took office. Soon there will be 55,000. By early next year, at least 70,000. Thousands of more will be moved from Iraq to Afghanistan. There have been few protests. If insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results, we must be out of our collective minds.

I stand nearly alone in my long-running criticism of the Afghan war. But even if you disagree with my pessimistic assessment of the foreign policy repercussions of the "good war," surely we can find common ground on the economic front.

The U.S. is broke. One cause is the $3 trillion we've already wasted on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. (With compound interest, that debt comes to over $10 trillion--or a dozen $700 billion Wall Street bailouts.) In a move that echoes Hitler's misdirected obsessiveness, Obama is about to waste even more money we don't have. According to the Pentagon's notoriously rosy projections, Obama's "Afghan surge" will increase the cost of that misbegotten quagmire (remember when right-wing pundits ridiculed those of us who used the Q-word to describe Afghanistan?) by 60 percent, up from the current $2 billion a month.

Millions are losing their jobs and their homes. Is this best the possible use of our federal taxdollars?

Obama says his war aims in Afghanistan are to fight insurgents, "train Afghan Security Forces," improve the Afghan economy and reduce opium production. Of course, some of these goals are self-actualizing. If the U.S. withdrew, there wouldn't be any insurgents. And Afghanistan wouldn't need so many more security forces to keep order.

As for the Afghan economy and narcotics, Obama doesn't stand a chance. "We're pretty good about getting rid of old governments, but not really good at building new ones. I don't think any other country has that skill, either," said Gordon Adams, professor of foreign policy at American University and former Clintonista. "We can burn millions of dollars and lose thousands of American lives pretending we know how--but we don't know how."

And anyway: so what? As the real unemployment rate in the U.S. surpasses 20 percent and we sail off the cliff of fiscal oblivion, how can Obama justify spending hundreds of billions dollars more? To reduce unemployment in Afghan cities (while increasing it in the countryside, which depends on opium farming)? Even if Obama meets his metrics in Afghanistan, what's in it for us?

In this Depression there's still one gig with high job security: write a column for The New York Times that repeatedly gets everything wrong. Columnist David Brooks, one of the Dying Grey Lady's resident neocons, agrees with Obama that seven years of bombing wedding parties isn't enough. "This energetic and ambitious [Afghan troop surge] amid economic crisis and war weariness--says something profound about America's DNA," says he.

Maybe it does. Seventeen percent of Americans have German roots, more than any other ancestry group.

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Cartoon for March 6, 2009

As Obama revs up his Afghan surge, let us all take a moment to salute the true heroes who have been fighting the war since 2001.

Cartoon for February 23, 2009

Afghan wedding parties risk getting blasted to hell by trigger-happy NATO bombers. Surely there's another way.

Cartoon for February 7, 2009

Iraq may be winding down. But Afghanistan is just rebeginning!

Thank God we can afford more military misadventures.

Cartoon for January 29, 2009

Obama likes to read up on the Civil War. Compared to Bush, it's nice to see someone who likes to read. Based on his cluelessness about Afghanistan, however, he needs to expand his reading list.

THIS WEEK'S SYNDICATED COLUMN: MAD MONEY

A Broke America Can't Afford Wars, Tax Cuts

Credit has dried up. The stock market is disintegrating. Unless someone pours money into capital markets, everyone agrees, we could wind up like people in Baghdad, fondly remembering the day five years ago when they pushed the handle and their toilets still flushed. Only one "someone" has enough cash to fix the problem: the U.S. government.

The Bush Administration and Congressional Democrats want taxpayers to pay $700 billion to bail out failing banks. Progressives would prefer to bail out homeowners facing the imminent foreclosure of their homes, as well as those in danger of being foreclosed upon during 2009, at a cost of $1.3 trillion.

Never mind which approach is better. Where will the government find the money?

There are two elephants in the room: war and Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. We can't afford either. Yet, to abuse the animal metaphor, everyone acts like they're sacred cows.

When you think about it, it's sheer madness. The city marshal is at the door, brandishing a shotgun, ready to evict you and your family for nonpayment of rent. But while your kids are screaming in terror, you're at the computer, wasting thousands on online gambling. You could pay off your landlord instead. You could make the marshal go away. All you have to do is stop. But you keep on keeping on. Click, click. More money squandered.

What the hell is wrong with you? What the hell is wrong with us?

In 2007 the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the final cost of our biggest national compulsion, the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, could total $2.4 trillion, or $8,000 per man, woman and child in the country. That's twice as much as the Korean, Vietnam and Gulf Wars combined. It's also two-thirds the cost of World War II. Yet no one--not the Republicans, not the Democrats, not the media, not even the left--insists that we get out.

To paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen, I've studied World War II. World War II was a worthwhile war, one that freed millions from tyranny and set the stage for the U.S. to dominate he global economy and become the wealthiest nation in history. Iraq and Afghanistan? They're no World War II. As wars go, they're not as worthwhile as the invasion of Grenada.

"The CBO estimates assume that 75,000 troops will remain in both countries through 2017, including roughly 50,000 in Iraq," reported USA Today. If anything, that's a low-ball estimate. More than a half century after the fighting ceased, we still have 37,000 troops in one tiny country, South Korea. And both McCain and Obama promise to send more troops to Afghanistan. That means more taxpayer money.

Nearly two out of three Americans think invading Iraq--where the lion's share of war funding is being spent--was a mistake. The Afghan resistance is kicking our butts. Both wars have been a complete, total waste of money, effort and lives. As surely as the sun will rise in the east, we will lose both. At a total cost of at least $2.4 trillion. Ridiculous.

$2.4 trillion is nearly twice the $1.3 trillion it would take to save every home in danger of foreclosure. That would keep many banks afloat, and act as the biggest economic stimulus in history. Can anyone sane tell us why we shouldn't bring our troops back home? Can anyone justify wasting $2.4 trillion at a time when the U.S. economy is staring into the abyss of total collapse?

The other national obsession is the tax cuts Bush pushed through in 2001 and 2003. "The surplus is not the government's money," Bush said at the time, apparently unaware that the economy was already in a recession. "The surplus is the people's money." Remember surpluses? Such a Clintonian word. Anyway, Democrats in Congress--still in full-on wuss mode following 9/11--went along with Bush's tax cuts. But, bless their wimpy little heads, they did manage to extract a concession: In 2011, tax rates would revert to what they'd been in 2001.

Believe a Republican once, shame on you. Believe a Republican twice, what were you thinking? Now so-called conservatives are complaining that "the largest tax increase in history" will occur in 2011 if Bush's tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Making the Bush tax cuts permanent would codify the most regressive tax change in history. "After-tax income would increase by more than six percent for households in the top one percent of the nation's income distribution, two percent for households in the middle 60 percent, and only 0.3 percent for households in the bottom 20 percent," found a Brookings Institution study.

Making the rich richer will cost the Treasury an arm, a leg, and the better part of a torso.

"Combined with a minimal but necessary fix to the government's Alternative Minimum Tax, making the tax cuts permanent would reduce federal revenues by almost $1.8 trillion over 10 years--and that's in addition to the $1.7 trillion of revenue losses already locked into law."

$1.8 trillion. Again, allow me to remind you: $1.3 trillion is the amount we need to stave off imminent financial catastrophe.

That sound you hear is the door breaking down. The marshal is coming down the hall. Get off the computer. Fix the problem. Get out of Iraq and Afghanistan. Let the tax cuts expire.

COPYRIGHT 2008 TED RALL

Ted Rall Cover Story on Afghanistan

For seven years, I've been telling you that the war against Afghanistan is every bit as illegal and immoral--and probably less winnable--than the war against Iraq. Now, slowly, people are starting to notice.

Given that I've been almost alone as an American opposing the Afghan war, the CityBeat chain of Southern California alternative newsweeklies asked me to take a look at the situation as it stands now. The result is a lengthy cover story in this week's CityBeat newspapers.

You can find it in Los Angeles CityBeat as well as San Diego CityBeat.

We're so sorry... that you don't understand why we had to kill your kids!
Posted by Mikhaela Reid

A few weeks ago, I did a cartoon about the U.S. trying to spin civilian casualties in Afghanistan.

Once again, the U.S. is upset about civilian casualties in Afghanistan. And once again, they're not upset that the U.S. military killed seven children in a "targeted" airstrike, but that those unreasonable Afghan civilians just don't understand it's not REALLY the U.S.'s fault--there was nothing they could do! From the NY Times this morning ("7 Children Killed in Airstrike in Afghanistan"):

Seven children were killed during an airstrike by the United States-led coalition against a religious compound thought to be a Qaeda sanctuary in remote eastern Afghanistan, the coalition said Monday.

The death of the children on Sunday may well add to the crescendoing anger many Afghans feel about civilian casualties from American and NATO military operations. More than 130 civilians have been killed in airstrikes and shootings in the past six months, according to Afghan authorities.

The article goes on to say that the toll may rise to about 180 once the death toll from another airstrike are confirmed. But as for these murdered children, the U.S. had stock apologies and little sympathy:

The air raid against the religious compound was a targeted strike rather than a pitched battle. “We are truly sorry for the innocent lives lost in this attack,” said Maj. Chris Belcher of the United States Army about Sunday’s raid against several structures, including a school and mosque, in Paktika Province, near the border with Pakistan.

And

The American ambassador, William B. Wood, said the coalition went to extraordinary lengths to avoid civilian casualties. “Unfortunately, when the Taliban are using civilians in this tactical way, instances of civilian casualties, just like instances of casualties from friendly fire, cannot be completely avoided,” he said.

Consider those hearts and minds WON.