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US career politician, Robert Gates, dutifully lectured NATO defence chiefs recently on the need to maintain occupying forces in invaded territories and NOT to withdraw THEIR troops when the US begins to reduce its forces in Afghanistan. Gates cited the threat of ‘instability’ (which invasion and foreign occupation creates) and the likely loss of the precarious ‘gains’ made by occupying forces as causes for concern.
US Defence Secretary, Robert Gates
Gates’ thinly veiled message, as most analysts are aware, is that occupying forces are there to stay – the strategy is to invade, destabilise and then cite the need to maintain ‘stability’ as the excuse for permanent occupation with puppet governments. Give the world a break, Gates, you pathetic little errand boy for the globalists!
The US and NATO have committed – and continue to commit -- heinous war crimes (Iraq) and other crimes against humanity (Torture and Drone strikes) for which they have never been held accountable, a situation that CLEARLY INDICATES the organised corrupting influence of certain Banking/Financial elites and Transnational Corporatists.
These criminal forces have proven they are committed and will stop at nothing to realise their nefarious plan of elite rule and mass slavery for everyone else. It should now be extremely clear to all that these minority criminal forces MUST be stopped by the world’s overwhelming majority, as every legal and regulatory global institution has been thoroughly corrupted over the past few decades.
US/NATO forces now deliberately AND OPENLY flout UN resolutions, mandates, international law and convention by engaging in OVERT assassination attempts (Gaddafi) and the murder of innocent civilians and children.
It is clear a globalist agenda exists and that more nations will be ILLEGALLY invaded. The sociopaths behind ALL the wars that rage today will stop at nothing to realise their megalomaniacal dreams. Nevertheless, they can be stopped -- an AWARE, UNITED and focused public is the most potent social force that exists and no elite minority has ever historically prevailed against such a force – be heartened by that historical fact!
Elite Banking/Financial/Corporatist forces MUST BE STOPPED if peaceful relations among SOVEREIGN nations are to be re-established or even have a chance in the future. Nefarious forces that work their evil machinations have already spelt out their future world; destabilisation, war, locked down global societies, mass SLAVERY and an unassailable ruling elite in control.
WE MUST rout these evil, mass murdering, criminal forces while we have the chance, as the longer we leave it the more difficult the task becomes.
If permanent slavery and expendability is what you desire for your children and loved ones then do nothing, turn on your television sets and lap up all the outrageous LIES and propaganda that issues from the CORPORATE mass media.
However, if you wish to restore REAL DEMOCRACY and a civilised social order with LAWS that are applied to ALL, without fear or favour, then you will have to WORK tirelessly to educate yourself and others. Never VOTE for MAJOR (bought) Parties but elect REAL INDEPENDENTS to OFFICE. If fair elections are denied you then resort to any means to remove corrupt criminal officials from power. If it all ends in a global fight against tiny ruling elites then it will be a very short lived war and a welcome outcome!
It is utterly absurd that the masses tolerate their paltry wages and low living conditions while Corporate Executives reap millions for doing nothing more than secret insider deals.
If you have doubts about a secret global push then keep an eye on Syria and Lebanon!
WASHINGTON, 8 Jun (IPS) - With only three weeks left before U.S. military forces are scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan, the debate over the size and pace of that withdrawal has become increasingly intense.
On one hand, the Pentagon, backed by prominent neo-conservatives and other hawks, insists that the 18-month-old "surge" of 30,000 U.S. troops has turned the strategic tide against the Taliban.
Anything more than a "modest" drawdown of a few thousand of the nearly 100,000 soldiers and marines there through the end of the year, they argue, risks losing all that has been gained.
"I would hope that (the withdrawal) is very small," the 2008 Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, told the Financial Times this week. "I would hope that it is 3,000. We need another fighting season (against the Taliban)."
On the other hand, President Barack Obama's political advisers, backed by a strong majority of Democrats and a small but growing minority of Republicans in Congress, are arguing for a much more substantial withdrawal.
In the clearest marker so far, the influential chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Carl Levin, said this week that at least 15,000 troops should be withdrawn between July and the end of the year.
His appeal came just days after the ranking Democrat on the House subcommittee that oversees the Pentagon's budget, Rep. Norm Dicks, shocked Washington by calling for an end to the U.S. military presence in Afghanistan before 2014. Current plans call for the U.S. and its NATO allies, which have sent more than 40,000 troops, to withdraw all their combat forces by the end of that year.
"We need to start seeing if we can do this (withdrawal) a little faster," Dicks, a veteran Democratic hawk, told Politico.
"I think the American people would overwhelmingly like to see this brought to a conclusion sooner than 2014," he said, citing growing "war fatigue" in Congress.
Obama, who has promised that the initial withdrawal will be "significant", has otherwise kept his cards close to his chest. The White House said he was still waiting to receive formal recommendations from the outgoing defence secretary, Robert Gates, who met with military commanders during a three-day farewell visit of Afghanistan that began on the weekend.
The withdrawal debate has intensified steadily since the May 2 killing by U.S. Special Forces of Al-Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden at a compound in the Pakistani resort town of Abbottabad where he had apparently been living for six years. Until then, it appeared that the Pentagon and its civilian allies would prevail upon Obama to withdraw only a "modest" – if not token – number of troops in July and through the end of the year.
But bin Laden's demise gave new momentum to the war's critics who have long argued that Al-Qaeda had, for all practical purposes, left Afghanistan in 2001 and that Washington's military-led counterinsurgency (COIN) strategy there was overly ambitious and largely ineffective, if not counter-productive.
"We've gone from being waist- to chest-deep in quicksand," noted Matthew Hoh, who directs the Afghanistan Study Group and served in Afghanistan as both a Marine captain and a State Department adviser.
At the same time, the growing focus in Congress about the yawning government deficit has cast a harsher light on the war's enormous cost – some 10 billion dollars a month, not including another 300 million dollars a month for civilian-led aid projects.
It was these considerations, as well as unhappiness with U.S. military operations in Libya, that led late last month to near- passage by the House of Representatives of an amendment to the 690- billion-dollar 2011 defence authorisation bill that required Obama to submit a plan for withdrawing U.S. troops and "an accelerated transition" of U.S. operations there to the Afghan government.
The amendment, which was defeated 204-215, gained the votes of all but eight Democrats and 26 Republicans – a total of nearly 42 more votes than a similar measure last year.
The vote, which was taken as a strong indication of war weariness, appears to have tilted the balance in the debate, as the Pentagon and its backers stepped up their public campaign for a "modest" withdrawal of just a few thousand troops beginning in July.
Thus, a Washington Post/ABC poll released earlier this week that showed a sharp increase - from 31 percent last March to 43 percent after bin Laden's death - in the percentage of people who believe that the war in Afghanistan has been worth the costs was seized on by one former Bush administration adviser as evidence that Obama "probably has the political breathing room" to choose a "measured withdrawal" as opposed to a "rapid retreat".
The same survey, however, showed found that three out of four respondents favoured withdrawing "a substantial number of U.S. combat forces from Afghanistan this summer".
At the same time, Kimberly and Frederick Kagan, neo-conservative military analysts close to the outgoing U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David Petraeus, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal arguing that "nothing about conditions on the ground justifies the withdrawal of any U.S. or coalition forces".
Moreover, they warned, if Obama withdraws all 30,000 "surge" forces by the end of 2012, "the war will likely be lost."
Gates, who has called for a "modest" drawdown, has not offered a specific number, but, since the House vote, in particular, he has made clear that he wants as few combat troops as possible to leave.
"I think we shouldn't let up on the gas too much, at least for the next few months," he said over the weekend. He has also hinted that he will speak out publicly in support of the current strategy after he steps down at the end of the month.
Whether this will be enough to sway Obama, who has been criticised by his fellow-Democrats for deferring too much to the military, remains to be seen.
But it is clear that disillusionment with the war is spreading in both parties.
Releasing a highly critical staff report on the effectiveness and sustainability of U.S. aid programmes in Afghanistan Wednesday, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry expressed strong doubts about the current strategy.
"While the United States has genuine national security interests in Afghanistan," said Kerry, a key foreign policy ally of the White House, "our current commitment, in troops and dollars, is neither proportional to our interests nor sustainable."
His remarks were seconded by the Committee's ranking Republican, Sen. Richard Lugar. "Despite 10 years of investment and attempts to better understand the culture and the region's actors, we remain in a cycle that produces relative progress but fails to deliver a secure political or military resolution," he said.
"Undoubtedly, we will make some progress when we are spending more than 100 billion dollars per year in that country. The more important question is whether we have an efficient strategy for protecting our vital interests that does not involve massive open-ended expenditures and does not require us to have more faith than is justified in Afghan institutions," he said.
There you have it, straight from the (indisputable) horse's arse itself!
Mike Mullen heads all western criminal occupation forces in invaded Afghanistan and he is acutely aware of who butters his bread!
Corporations do not willingly give up what they have appropriated; the answer for Mike and all the other dreamboats is of course YOU and your Corporate overlords WILL BE forcibly EXPELLED, as the Russians were expelled! Either that or face ruin [you can't keep printing money forever] fighting a back-breaking war of attrition!
WASHINGTON — The top US military officer is vowing long-term commitment to Afghanistan, touting progress in the war against the Taliban and its Al-Qaeda allies ahead of an American drawdown.
Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on the "Charlie Rose" television interview show Tuesday that although some troops would be withdrawn, a continued US presence was assured.
"Since I've been out there in the last three and a half, four years, it's still the leading question is, 'You left us before, are you going to leave us again?'" he said.
"A couple years ago I got to the point where they're only going to believe we're going to be there if we're there... and certainly there will be some troops that come out this summer... and yet that isn't a message that we're leaving."
President Barack Obama is expected to decide in the coming weeks whether or how many of the 100,000 US troops to withdraw from Afghanistan starting next month, the first stage of a drawdown he initially promised in mid-2009 but later de-emphasized.
Authority is due to be turned to the Afghans in full in 2014.
In 1989, the United States essentially turned its back on Afghanistan after CIA-backed insurgents beat out Soviet forces toward the end of the Cold War. A civil war ensued and the Taliban eventually gained control.
But Mullen insisted America would not repeat its past mistakes.
While hailing the fragile progress made in the 18 months since Obama announced a troop surge to push back the Taliban and buy time for Afghan political and security development, Mullen declined to indicate just how many troops may return home initially.
"We're not picking any numbers yet," Mullen said.
"Whatever that number is from a standpoint of the overall campaign, I'm comfortable we've made enough progress where we can take out a number and continue to make progress in the campaign, and move to 2014 in transition."
He pointed to a "very aggressive agenda to turn the security over by the end of 2014 and to have the governance process and the development process enough in support so that the country can be secure."
The Pentagon, led by outgoing Defense Secretary Robert Gates, seeks only a cautious drawdown from a war that has killed around 1,500 US troops [and thousands of Afghan civilians].
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