GWOT Over
It ends not with a whimper but with more of a dismissive tone, as Hillary Clinton offhandedly dispenses with the term. Prior to offhandedly dismissing eight years of international aid efforts that in a number of cases have cost western aid workers and Afghans their lives.
None of the reporters on the plane apparently bothered to ask what the Obama administration is are now calling this thing that stretches from the United States to Europe, through the Middle East to Indonesia and the Philippines, currently involving large parts of the United States military, the CIA, the NSA, the FBI, MI5 and MI6, the British Army, the Australian Army, the Canadian Army, the Afghan Army, the Iraqi Army, the Philippine Army, local police departments in all of those places, who are engaged with irregulars who are also terrorists, none of whom demonstrably give a damn who they kill. That’s too bad, because I’ve been wondering what they call it. “Man-caused disasters” is about as far as we’ve got. Here’s Hillary:
“The administration has stopped using the phrase and I think that speaks for itself … I haven’t heard it used. I haven’t gotten any directive about using it or not using it, it’s just not being used.”
They also have avoided using the word “surge” for what they are doing with 22,000 troops now headed for Afghanistan. Sounds too Bushy, I guess. The reporters apparently are good with the liguistic shift, to judge by their failure to note that the civilized world has been in an active state of war with terrorists throughout this period:
Here’s AP:
The phrase “war on terror” is widely disliked in Europe and elsewhere overseas, where even close U.S. allies suggested it was overly militaristic and perhaps counterproductive.
It is also now associated with a range of Bush-era policies such as harsh interrogation practices that Obama has pledged to abandon.
Not entirely. The CIA reportedly is not being held to the military’s high standard. Reporting on this subject also generally fails to mention that Pelosi and others reportedly were pretty enthusiastic about harsh interrogations back in the day.
Here’s Reuters:
The phrase was strongly criticized by human rights groups who said it was used to justify many actions, such as the opening of the Guantanamo Bay prison for detainees held without trial at the U.S. Naval base in Cuba.
Internationally, the phrase was seen by critics as a “with-us-or-against-us” philosophy, overly dependent on military force and what many Muslims decried as an attack on Islam.
Actually, Bush went out of his way repeatedly and explicitly to say we were not at war with Islam. Just with terrorists and evildoers. The Gitmo part is about right, though. The people there were illegal enemy combatants who could be held pending the cessation of hostilities, whenever that might be. But I haven’t noticed that the hated Crusader Gulag at Guantanamo is exactly closed yet, good intentions notwithstanding. Apparently there are issues.
Speaking of issues, Hillary has some with the way aid money has been spent in Afghanistan, and wants to throw it all out, baby and bathwater, and start again from scratch. It’s pretty harsh. You’d think there was something useful that was done somewhere by someone, but Hill says no. Washington Post:
The billions of dollars spent in U.S. aid to Afghanistan over the past seven years have been largely wasted, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Monday.
“For those of you who have been on the ground in Afghanistan, you have seen with your own eyes that a lot of these aid programs don’t work,” she said. “There are so many problems with them. There are problems of design, there are problems of staffing, there are problems of implementation, there are problems of accountability. You just go down the line.”
Clinton called the amount of money spent without results “heartbreaking.”
Speaking to reporters as she flew here to attend a conference to promote the Obama administration’s new policy for Afghanistan, Clinton said the ability of the United States to effectively administer aid programs has “very little credibility” among Afghans. Under the new American plan, she said, the United States will limit its aid efforts to areas of expertise while recruiting other countries to take on elements of a coordinated aid effort.
…
Since 2006, the U.S. Agency for International Development has spent more than $5 billion in Afghanistan, according to figures on the agency’s Web site. Clinton oversees USAID, which has boasted a number of success stories, including building hundreds of schools, distributing 60 million textbooks and vaccinating 90 percent of children against polio. But a report by Oxfam last week charged that much of the U.S. aid in Afghanistan is wasted on consulting costs, subcontractor fees and duplication.
Clinton’s blunt comments on past aid programs — which appeared to also indict the broader international effort — will probably raise the bar for the administration’s aid programs. “We are scrubbing every single civilian program,” she said. “This is part of my mission as secretary of state. We are looking at every single dollar as to how it’s spent and where it’s going and trying to track the outcomes. We want to see real results.”
Good luck, Hill. Sounds like there’s some pretty strong gaffe potential in there, though. Between dissing the entirety of international aid efforts* and her own prospects for turning all that waste around. Hillary has set a high bar. It will be interesting to see how it’s done.
* Even all those schools foreigners helped build and supply, that Afghan women have bravely taught in and that little girls brave acid-throwing terrorists to attend? That’s cold. How about this British woman, working for an agency that helped the diasabled? Shot dead. How about these three women working for the International Rescue Committee. Shot dead. This Reuters article cites 31 dead, 78 abducted and 27 injured in 2008. A shame to think it was all a waste. That article also says some people at an institute want the Obama admin to find a way to separate humanitarian efforts from military efforts, render them neutral. The actual aid workers seem to get that the terrorists who are killing them don’t give a damn about that. Maybe Hillary can help sort that out, seeing as the war on terror is over now.
To be more charitable than the Washington Post, though, it’s a fair guess that Hillary is only slamming the Bush-Cheney regime’s misbegotten efforts at largesse, and suggesting that a Democratic administration will be more efficient and effective when it comes to spending vast sums of money in social do-goodism.
Topics: Afghanistan, Clintons, GWOT, Obama
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:10 pm on Monday, March 30, 2009
5 Responses to “GWOT Over”
Leave a Reply
Trackback URLYou must be logged in to post a comment.
March 30th, 2009 at 11:41 pm
Given the bumbling of BO and Hillary, the war on terror will return, and many Americans will die from it in the US.
March 31st, 2009 at 1:21 am
What what does the messiah call the military effort in Afghanistan? A skirmish? A scrum?
March 31st, 2009 at 7:49 am
I wonder if she finds all the money wasted on public schools here with no results “heartbreaking”?
March 31st, 2009 at 8:11 am
We have never been at war in Eastasia.
March 31st, 2009 at 9:55 pm
[...] says: Gee. It’s a good thing we’re not at war anymore or this news might be [...]