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Tuesday, December 8, 2009 : When President Obama delivered his speech outlining a major escalation of the Afghanistan war one week ago at West Point, he presented it as the prelude to a withdrawal that would begin in July of 2011. It has taken less than a week for this suggestion of a short-term “surge” and early withdrawal to be turned into its opposite....

Saturday, December 5, 2009 : More U.S. troops are being prepared for Afghanistan. The President charged them with defeating or degrading the Taliban; building the Afghan National Army. We have thrown in our lot with Hamid Karzai's government. Its association with warlords is uncontestable (his own brother is an opium kingpin). Our enemy is the Taliban, which recruits a family each time we accidentally kill one civilian....

Monday, December 7, 2009 : In the media coverage of Barack Obama’s decision to escalate the war in Afghanistan, one question goes unasked and unanswered: how many thousands, tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of Afghan civilians will die as a result of US military aggression?...

(New York) - Eight years after the fall of the Taliban, women and girls suffer high levels of violence and discrimination and have poor access to justice and education, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.  The Afghan government has also failed to bring killers of prominent women in public life to justice, creating an environment of impunity for those who target women....

From a Saturday, December 5, 2009 entry on Informed Comment a blog run by Juan Cole...

President Obama announced he would send 30,000 additional American soldiers to Afghanistan in the next year, bringing our troop commitment to 100,000. A recent report places a cost of $1million per U.S. soldier per year in a battlefield. With 100,000 soldiers expected to be in Afghanistan my mid 2010, it will cost a staggering 100 billion dollars each year! Great empires have dissipated themselves into decay by military over-spending. Is this the destiny of our nation?...

From a Friday, December 4, 2009 entry on Informed Comment a blog run by Juan Cole...

Thursday, December 3, 2009 :As President Obama prepares to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan, aid agencies have issued a warning about what they describe as the increasing militarization of humanitarian aid to Afghanistan. Oxfam, CARE International and other groups say humanitarian aid is often being used by the United States and other nations as part of a counterinsurgency strategy and that military plans are dictating how aid is distributed. We speak to Lex Kassenberg, who has overseen...

A recent letter initiated by a bipartisan coalition of eight anti-war Congress members urges President Obama to reconsider his choice of further military escalation in Afghanistan. The escalation of 30,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan will only further destabilize the region by encouraging local Afghans to join the Taliban fighters as they offer the only real resistance to the occupation forcces and the overtly corrupt Karzai government. It follows that additional presence of U.S. tr...

Wednesday, December 2, 2009 :Andrew Bacevich, a retired colonel and a Vietnam war veteran who spent twenty-three years in the US Army, responds to Presidnt Obama's plan to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University and the author of "The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism."...