Olbermann Special Comment: Get out of Afghanistan now

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In a Special Comment, Countdown’s Keith Olbermann argues that in the face political and financial opportunism, not to mention outright lies about the war in Afghanistan, and the stark historical warning represented by Vietnam, President Obama should make the change he promised during his campaign and pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan.

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Here’s the segment on The Rachel Maddow Show (MSNBC) discussing the impact of this ‘escalation’ in Afghanistan on our military readiness:

11 thoughts on “Olbermann Special Comment: Get out of Afghanistan now”

  1. How does Obama think we will be leaving Afghanistan in three years if this latest surge won’t even be completed until 2011? (The U.S. officials are saying 2010, but I heard 2011 from Rachel Maddow – she explained how she came up with 2011 in the video clip). What if the generals request even more troops in the meantime? This entire thing is disgusting. The thing nobody is discussing at all is the fact that we are there because of the pipeline.
    A “Necessary War” — for a Gas Pipeline – It’s Obama’s War Now
    That’s where our bases are positioned in order to protect it. That’s why Karzai is in place. That is why we won’t leave. In fact, we threatened to bomb Afghanistan BEFORE 9/11 because of that pipeline. 9/11 just gave us the green light and the backing of all the US.
    We are protecting our own interests and those of multinational corporations. Period. All the other stuff (rebuilding a nation, getting rid of al Qaeda and the Taliban, protecting the people, etc..) is just a bunch of emotional triggers meant to elicit an emotional response and garner support.
    Is that worth the blood and toil of our young men and women, and putting our nation in even greater debt and risk of collapse? I don’t think so. Just my 2 cents..
    And nobody is talking about the pipeline..

    And then there is the opium market angle..

    One of the most remarkable aspects of the Obama Presidential agenda is how little anyone has questioned in the media or elsewhere why at all the United States Pentagon is committed to a military occupation of Afghanistan. There are two basic reasons, neither one of which can be admitted openly to the public at large.

    Behind all the deceptive official debate over how many troops are needed to “win” the war in Afghanistan, whether another 30,000 is sufficient, or whether at least 200000 are needed, the real purpose of US military presence in that pivotal Central Asian country is obscured.

    Even during the 2008 Presidential campaign candidate Obama argued that Afghanistan not Iraq was where the US must wage war. His reason? Because he claimed, that was where the Al Qaeda organization was holed up and that was the “real” threat to US national security. The reasons behind US involvement in Afghanistan is quite another one.

    The US military is in Afghanistan for two reasons. First to restore and control the world’s largest supply of opium for the world heroin markets and to use the drugs as a geopolitical weapon against opponents, especially Russia. That control of the Afghan drug market is essential for the liquidity of the bankrupt and corrupt Wall Street financial mafia.

    ……

    It has been documented that Washington hand-picked the controversial Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun warlord from the Popalzai tribe, long in the CIA’s service, brought him back from exile in the USA, created a Hollywood mythology around his “courageous leadership of his people.” According to Afghan sources, Karzai is the Opium “Godfather” of Afghanistan today. There is apparently no accident that he was and is today still Washington’s preferred man in Kabul.

    …….

    Afghanistan is in an extremely vital location, straddling South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Afghanistan also lies along a proposed oil pipeline route from the Caspian Sea oil fields to the Indian Ocean, where the US oil company, Unocal, along with Enron and Cheney’s Halliburton, had been in negotiations for exclusive pipeline rights to bring natural gas from Turkmenistan across Afghanistan and Pakistan to Enron’s huge natural gas power plant at Dabhol near Mumbai. Karzai, before becoming puppet US president, had been a Unocal lobbyist.

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  2. Mr. President, I had thought you were a man of honor, a man of strong moral belief. I cried when I read the piece about your visit to Arlington on Veterans Day.

    I think you need a Jiminy Cricket to become a real President though. You need to listen to your conscience, not to generals. You know we are out of money. We can’t afford to play games any more. There is no win in Afghanistan or Iraq. There is only more death, more lies, more distrust. If you can’t make our country work right, sir, where do you get the temerity, the balls to try and tell any other country how to do things.

    You cannot be a hero at home while you are a villain abroad. You cannot fix things anywhere else until you can fix things here. You cannot pay for an escalation of war and save your own citizens.

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  3. muse, it fits their plan. We are expending resources we don’t have in pursuit of a goal we can’t attain. It takes away from societal benefit in the US, which would strengthen our country and leads to our bankruptcy as a nation.

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  4. Any of you seen the film “War Made Easy“? (Video here). Quite eye-opening. I won’t even listen to Obama’s speech tonight. I already know what words and justifications he’ll used. They aren’t new. They’ve been used many times before and by many other men from different generations. This film made me sit up bolt-right. Watching old clips of past presidents – speaking in front of the nation, trying to justify why we must go to war – all using the exact same language and logic for the necessity.
    It’s so weird to hear them all saying the same exact words and phrases. And it’s happening again.

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  5. Obama is Bush all over again. He listens to Bush people, throws around 9-11 and his plan is “escalate to exit” which was BS for Iraq and is BS for Afghanistan.

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    • The President gave a good speech, but I completely disagree with him on this.

      McCain supports the decision, except for the withdrawal date. That’s not good.

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  6. I finally found an article online that makes mention of the pipeline. It’s written by a student at the University of Texas at Austin:

    ..”The views of Obama advisers such as Zbigniew Brzezinski expose the veiled truth. In an interview with PBS, Brzezinski, the former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter said that he is “not an energy expert, but just using common sense and the knowledge available to all of us, it seems to [him] evident we’re going to be dependent on natural gas and oil for some decades to come, even if we do things that we need
    to do.”
    It makes logical, imperial sense for the United States to expand its empire in these areas, in what Brzezinski labels as “the Global Balkans.” As suggested by Brzezinski, “for us to have a strong position in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf is not only an economic necessity; it’s potentially a source of enormous strategic leverage on others.”
    Although Afghanistan is not a fossil-fuel giant like Iraq, its geographical position is consequential for the world’s energy order. There exist valuable deposits of oil and natural gas in Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan, all of which either border or are in close proximity to Afghanistan.
    As of April 2008, the U.S. brokered a deal between India and Turkmenistan over Caspian resources. The Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline, if successfully negotiated and constructed, will allow Turkmenistan’s natural gas to flow via pipeline through Afghanistan and Pakistan and into India by 2015. Such a possibility explains the intensity of geopolitics in the region. The deal isolates Iran and its ability to market its gas abroad.”..

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