Originally posted on October 15, 2009

Posted by Bruce Ramsey

The other night I watched “Obama’s War,” a Frontline piece on PBS. It has some real front-line footage in it, including a Marine who’s just been fatally shot, and footage of a verbally pushy Marine trying to talk to Afghan villagers in English. The message to the villagers was: We’re here now, come back to your fields, come back to your markets, let us protect you. The Afghans were skeptical. Wary. Suspicious. The Taliban had threatened that anyone who cooperated with the foreign devils would be killed. The Marine says, in effect, Don’t believe them. Believe us.  Read more... (283 words, 1 image, estimated 1:08 mins reading time)

War’s expensive,

That’s just fine;

Taking care,

That I get mine.

It may be that by now, Americans have a good handle on just how much money the Pentagon actually spends. Or not. In broad terms, U.S. military expenditures are just about equal to those of all other nations combined. Or, looked at another way, Pentagon expenditures are just about equal to those of all other federal agencies combined.

In any case, it’s a lot, maybe double what we really need. There are a number of unsettling explanations for this waste, so let’s glance at a few:  Read more... (591 words, 1 image, estimated 2:22 mins reading time)

By JULIEN MERCILLE:

The cigarette industry spends tens of billions of dollars a year on marketing.#

So Mr. Obama is getting ready to surge-again-in Afghanistan partly to fight opium trafficking. But an important report just released by the World Health Organization entitled The Global Tobacco Epidemic shows that Obama cannot possibly be waging a “war on drugs”-or else he would direct his attention towards tobacco executives and away from the Taliban Illegal drugs kill about 200,000 people every year, including deaths due to HIV/AIDS transmission through needles. Of this, opiates account for 100,000, a number recently used by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime to justify the targeting of Afghan drug traffickers and Taliban [2].  Read more... (756 words, 1 image, estimated 3:01 mins reading time)

In a war where insurgents can easily melt into the civilian population, coalition forces in Afghanistan are planning measures reminiscent of a Vietnam-era effort to secure villages, only with a high-tech spin.

“After studying counterinsurgency methods employed from the Boer war to the conflict in Iraq, British commanders are drawing up plans for ‘gated communities,’ from which the enemy can be excluded by identity checks,” the Sunday Times of London reported, based on an interview with Brigadier James Cowan, the head of British forces in Afghanistan. “The checks may involve fingerprints, retina scans or even DNA tests.”  Read more... (375 words, 1 image, estimated 1:30 mins reading time)

y Gale Fiege
Herald Writer
Often, the wounds are not as obvious as a lost limb or a scar.

Of the nearly 2 million men and women who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2002, an estimated half-million have been diagnosed with brain injuries, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder.

One of every five suicide victims in the United States has combat experience, though only 1 percent of the country’s population is active-duty military.

About 40 percent of people currently deployed overseas are parents, and most of those are citizen soldiers in the National Guard or reserve forces. Women make up 11 percent of those serving.  Read more... (1117 words, 1 image, estimated 4:28 mins reading time)