Doesn’t change the fact that someone is more concerned about writing positive letters to newspapers than what the soldiers themselves might want to say.
What if they want to send not so good news ? The way this administration seeks to punish dissent... its scary. Blab too much and we drag your family thru the newspaper mud. Every government no matter how popular or not has been criticized and has had dissent.There have already been many letters with bad news, mainly from soldiers in areas where there are a lot of attacks.
The good news letters are mainly coming from peaceful areas.
It would also be nice if Americans knew that most of Iraq was at peace.
Read the article again. Some of the soldiers’ superior officers gave them the letter, and then offered them a chance to sign it (and have it sent home) if they agreed with it. That means somebody higher up in the chain of command wrote the letter, made copies, and distributed it to the grunts below. This is nowhere near “Joe wrote a letter and the rest of the gang signed it in solidarity.”
And don’t forget that some letters were sent home in soldiers’ names even when they didn’t sign anything. Which means someone (again, higher up in the CoC) was harvesting names, slapping them on letters, and sending them out without the soldiers’ knowledge.
Still not convinced this is a coordinated propaganda campaign?
The soldiers in Iraq are probably too scared to say what’s really on their minds, anyway. After all, look at how the Pentagon punished those troopers who gave their honest criticisms of the war and Donald Rumsfeld back in July:
I can only imagine Donald’s as thin-skined as George is.
Most of Iraq is unpopulated or sparsely populated. The areas w/o people at all are completely peaceful. The minority of the country, the parts with people living in them, are the only parts that aren’t at peace.
An assessment of facts is not the same thing as cheering those facts.
While these are great, theoir signifigance is relevant to the amount of need. If Afghanistan needs $40bil and the total aid available is $2bil, then the $2bil is inadequate. If, when you post these numbers, you could include the relevant relations needed to evaluate their signifigance, it would make your case more signifgant. As it is, when you post empty numbers, w/o their relative impact, it makes your posts appear designed to be disingenuous.
Not the ones who’ve been sending this letter to the newspapers. No, everything is so fine and dandy over there that they all even use the same wording. No doubt it’s in so many places because of the need to get it into the RW blogs as proof that things are fine and dandy over there. Thanks to the always-reliable (and you can check) DU for the heads-up.
DU?
That is one of the most viciously partisan, totally biased, sandbagging, strawmanning group of hateful Democrats in real or cyberspace. No, I won’t read through their spew and pick out lies.
This heavy hitting on internal dissent does seem to confirm suspicions that the administration can endure no admittance of being wrong in their quest for “good”. They react heavily when americans criticize since apparently they are less bothered by international recriminations. So much for democratic values.
Heavy hitting on internal dissent? I AM internal dissent, if that was directed at me.
Beagle, the link is to the Olympia, Washington daily newspaper, The Olympian. Don’t worry, it’s safe to click - and as presumably factual as any other daily paper.
Okay, so the per capita GDP in Afghanistan might go all the way up to a staggering $187 next year, and you think this is good news?!? On what planet is this economic situation not massive incentive to plant poppies? Sheesh. Just because 10% growth would be a serious boom in the industrialized west doesn’t mean that 10% growth in a place with virtually no economic activity to begin with is anything to trumpet. Toss out all the investment statistics you like, the fact, as your own cite demonstrates, is that the average Afghan still has sweet bupkiss. I’m sure he’ll be happy about the existence of a luxury hotel in Kabul, though. That’ll go a long ways to making his life better.
Average wordl wide per capita GDP is $7,900.
$187 is 2.4% of $7,900.
@ 10% growth per year, how many years before Afghanistan reaches 50% of the world average? How many years until it reaches 75% world average? How long until 100%?
There is no doubt that Afghanistan is a very poor place. Even the 3rd world per capita annual income is about $800, so Afghanistan really sucks.
The point is that it is getting better, not worse. We can all wish that it was MUCH better, but this is a country that not long ago sparked the biggest refugee crisis in the world because conditions were so bad, and there was much talk of mass starvation the year of the war. Which didn’t happen.
Afghanistan is coming up from essentially zero. The people were starving. The Taliban was expropriating most of the food aid and other resources and leaving the people with nothing. There was no functioning economy to speak of.
Since then, the economy has increased by 28%, and is forecast to grow at 10% next year and the year after. Growth is going to be slow for a while no matter how much money you pump in - there’s not much infrastructure, the warlord problem makes it hard to build up national commerce, the population is uneducated, etc.
But I’m not sure what you expect. Rather than just pick at what I’m saying, how about someone offer some alternatives? Tell me where the Bush administration went wrong in Afghanistan. Tell me what you think their GDP SHOULD be at this point, and what steps you would have taken to achieve that. It’s really easy to simply knock down any accomplishment as not being sufficient - it’s another to offer substantive criticisms of policy and alternatives.
So let’s hear it - what’s you Afghanistan policy, and how is it better than what has happened to date?
Maybe that Afghanistan should be getting tens of billions of US help rather than Iraq ? After all Afghanistan was the terrorist hotbed.
I think his criticism of your 10% figure standing alone means very little... we can throw numbers and not show what is happening in Afghanistan. Spinning things doesnt change anything.In the case of Afghanistan, the problem is something I alluded to in another context: it’s a supply region. The rest of the world only cares that Afghanistan exists, from an economic point of view, because it supplies raw opium from which all of the drugs in the opiate family can be produced.
Given that, the entire economy revolves around this, and as is typical in such a place, a small elite lords it over a large, impoverished mass. To solve the problem you first have to break the back of the opium economy. The Taliban saw this, and banned the growing of opium poppies. We have to offer a carrot along with that stick, to diversify the economy and to break the power of the warlords.
Given that, the below is very bad news:
From http://www.duluthsuperior.com/mld/duluthsuperior/news/6532118.htm
But this is problem number one for Afghanistan. Diversify the economy away from opium, and you break the economic support for the warlords, and give the country a chance to develop a true economy. Without solving this problem, it’s all just band-aids.
As to my Pit question, why would you believe these guys and their press releases? As the above shows, they’re unwilling to do the hard things to solve the actual problems that they’re confronted with.
In case that wasn’t clear, the question was directed at Sam Stone.
Wow!! Fantastic!! In another 30 years, the Afghans will be almost as well off as they were before we started screwing with them… AND we get good cheap smack again!! Bonus!!
The predictions made about the future of Afghanistan in 2001 have been shot out of the water by the successful (for Afghanistan) US military intervention. The predictions involved millions starving and millions more being displaced or killed by the civil war. Sure, it still sucks to live in Afghanistan.