I’ve been watching Börgen on LinkTV. In Season 2, Episode 1, Prime Minister Nyborg changes the position of her party, The Moderates, on Afghanistan from expedited withdrawal of Danish troops to escalation with a 5-6 year timetable.

PM Nyborg adopts humanitarian intervention as a policy, calling her party’s anti-war positions obsolete. Four encounters change PM Nyborg’s opinion. An Afghani female physician praises the international occupation for restoring to her her right to drive and her right to a drive and to the increase in girls’ participation in education. The second is a letter from a dead Danish soldier in which he writes that, upon learning that an additional 89,000 Afghan children survive annually since the collapse of the Taliban government, he now sees a purpose to his involvement in the war. The third is the recommendation from a Danish commander in theater for escalation. The fourth is her political opponent, the head of the Liberal Party, Hesselboe, tells her than an escalation is needed and that his party won’t support maintenance of the status quo.

I have always been opposed to the idea of humanitarian intervention. I think it rather obvious now that the Afghanistan surge has failed to meet its original objectives. But I do think it is important to think about this claim that 89,000 more children annually are surviving.

The AP report cited Afghan Prime Minister Hamid Karzai, who in turn bases his claim on a “survey by the US John Hopkins University showing the annual under-five mortality rate had dropped from 257 per 1,000 live births in 2001 to about 191 in 2006.”

My PubMed search on the terms “Afghanistan child mortality” yielded 101 results as of the time of my writing. I could not find the study which would support Hamid Karzai’s 2007 claim.

In 2012, the Afghanistan Mortality Survey reported great improvements in public health, although Johns Hopkins University researcher David Peters questions the results. PubMed lists many articles he has authored in which the term “Afghanistan” appears.

Are the gains in public health real? If so, are they attributable to NATO’s military occupation and the Afghan government? Or are they attributable to economic gains from poppy cultivation? Or are they attributable to focused NGO intervention? Are those gains sustainable? Could a negotiated settlement with the Taliban result in a government which would sustain these gains, whatever their reasons?

Finally, why is the Green Party in Börgen so ineffectual?

Col. (Ret.) Ann Wright spoke in Aiken, SC on November 19, 2012. This is a recording of most of her talk, until my cell phone battery ran out.

The focus of her talk was her experience as a government employee in the United States military and Department of State and the important role government employees play in blowing the whistle on malfeasance.

You can read more about this topic in her book entitled Dissent: Voices of Conscience.

If you don’t have Adobe Flash, download the MP3 audio file here.

Next time you hear that the U.S. has killed “militants” in a drone attack, remember this transcript of U.S. military personnel observing for four hours a convoy of 3 vehicles carrying Afghan civilians. The personnel concluded that they had positively identified weapons and no women or children were present. They launched two missiles, destroying two vehicles and killing 23 people, according to village elders interviewed later. Military personnel confirmed no weapons were present.

United States Public Broadcasting System’s The News Hour highlights Libya’s use of cluster bombs and fails to mention the United States’s and Israel’s use of cluster bombs.

PBS’s The News Hour’s piece Fighting Continues in Misrata as 3 Countries Send Advisers to Assist Rebels, broadcast April 20, 2011, mentions the Human Rights Watch report on Libya’s use of cluster bombs in Misrata April 14, 2011.

Yet The News Hour fails to mention Human Rights Watch’s reports on the United States’s use of cluster bombs in Afghanistan in 2002 and Iraq in 2003 and its reports on Israel’s use of cluster bombs in Lebanon in 2006.

According to the Cluster Munition Coalition, the United States has not signed nor ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions has not participated in the Oslo Process meetings.

I condemn the Libyan government’s use of these inhumane weapons, and I’m happy that The News Hour used Human Rights Watch as a source of information. But The News Hour should bring to the attention of its viewers that their own government and its allies use these weapons in addition to today’s villain du jour.

#Cartoon General Flustercluck Receives Orders from #POTUS, who has to fight off #progressive fantasy old rhetoric

Unmanned drones speak louder than words #Cairo #Obama #Pakistan #Afghanistan #Yemen #Somalia #GWOT #Iraq #Occupation #War

How can insanity erupt in the world’s most rational society? #USA #War #Immigration #Guns #Tuscon #Arizona #Loughner

Yesterday on CNN, Joe Klein said it was “stupid” of Ed Schultz to hold up a sign that said “GET OUT” regarding Afghanistan.

But when Klein calls Schultz “stupid,” he’s insulting most Americans as well: more than 60 percent of Americans oppose the war in Afghanistan, and they rank it the #2 most important issue for President Obama to address, second only to fixing the economy.

Thousands of people were wounded or killed in Afghanistan in 2010, and more will die in 2011 in a war that’s not making us safer and that’s not worth the cost. THAT’s stupid.

Join us as we fight back against the war at http://facebook.com/RethinkAfghanistan.

US Military’s Real DADT Policy: Don’t ask if they’re civilians, don’t ask if you’ve killed them in cold blood

As long as a few of us rebel it will always remain possible to defeat a system of centralized, corporate power that is as criminal and heartless as those I watched tumble into the ash bin of history in Eastern Europe.