I'd like to thank John for letting me spread the word about this cause, and I'd like to thank everyone here at Crooks and Liars for helping pitch in. It's important that we work to end the war in Afghanistan, and it's important that we support progressive voices who work to do so.

Six months ago, President Obama had ordered in tens of thousands of new troops to Afghanistan while admitting that there was no strategy. Support for the war in Afghanistan was at 50%. Today, 58% oppose the war in Afghanistan. And President Obama right now is engaged in the process of "rethinking Afghanistan."

For the last few months, too, progressive blogger Derrick Crowe has been writing on the Afghanistan war. And his posts have made a difference.

Derrick has brought to bear facts, video testimony, statistics, political insight, and thoughtful arguments to drive home the point that escalating the war in Afghanistan is the wrong policy. Derrick has been writing and researching so prolifically because he's been on a three month fellowship, using funds provided out-of-pocket by the good folks over at Brave New Foundation and the editors at The Seminal.

Yesterday, Derrick's three month fellowship came to an end. Now I'm asking for your help to keep it going, and to support a strong voice against the war in Afghanistan.

Can you pitch in $10 or $20 to help extend Derrick Crowe's blogging fellowship against the war in Afghanistan? Your contribution will go directly to Derrick, and if we can raise $5,000, we can keep the fellowship going for an entire year.

Click here to donate.

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As Gen. McChrystal calls for an increase of troops to Afghanistan in order to see "victory" (although I'm still waiting to hear what constitutes a victory) the Sunday Express, a conservative paper in the UK, says the war has already been lost:

In case anyone hadn’t noticed, there is a war on. And when this nation is at war it has a tradition of pulling together in support of the troops. But as far as the campaign in Afghanistan is concerned there is precious little sign of that. The death toll of British troops there this week is horrendous.

And yet the Government has been put under almost no pressure to explain what our soldiers are doing and when it expects their mission to be completed.

Gordon Brown does not appear to know whether this war is worth prosecuting with the full might of the nation’s military resources or not. He has already turned down a request from Barack Obama to send significant reinforcements, while the shameful inadequacy of the equipment supplied to our soldiers has already been well documented. After the losses of the past few days, this half-hearted approach has become utterly unsustainable. Britain and indeed the whole of Nato must now decide whether this fiendishly difficult bid to tame a hitherto untamable land is worth all the blood that is being spilt.

This newspaper’s assessment is that the chance of outright victory in Afghanistan vanished the moment US and British forces went into Iraq. The focus on Afghanistan was lost and the coalition against terror broke up. There is now little prospect of the rest of Nato committing wholeheartedly to the fight against the Taliban. In a war of attrition, such as is presently being fought, victory will not be achieved, but heavy losses will certainly be sustained. Our brave soldiers deserve far better than that.

Wow...some honest assessment. Of course, it's not coming from our country, where we still hang on these nebulous phrases like "victory" and "security" without actually explaining what that means. Cernig at Newshoggers:

It was always the conservative establishment who were most against Britain's continued enmiring in Bush's Iraq occupation - and now it appears that conservatives will lead the way in calling for an exit from Afghanistan too. There's certainly a part of that which is just the cynical politics of opposition, but there's also a part that's just good sense. The British populace are, if anything, more generally accepting of foreign wars than their American cousins but there's a limit to what even the "fighting Blitz spirit" will countenance when a military entanglement has no plan, no metrics for success and no end in sight. The Tories are just getting out ahead of the curve.

Update: As Gordon Brown defends the UK's involvement and insists the Afghan war is being won (the credibility of that claim being dependent on how credible you think Brown is in general), renowned British military historian Correlli Barnett has an op-ed in the pages of the very conservative Daily Mail in which he argues that Britain must unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan.

Why won't an American journalist confront the Obama administration and simply ask them, "How will we know when we've won?" Unless they can answer that in tangible terms, all we're doing is condemning more troops to death.

Must... Resist... Hitting... Head... Against... Keyboard.

Pajama Media TV's idea of a war correspondent, Samuel Wurzelbacher, aka Joe the Plumber, goes to Israel and laments...war correspondents in a warzone. That's a curious way to kiss up to the boss: admit that your assignment is a bad idea.

Here's direct quote from Joe--who's currently reporting from just outside Gaza:

"I'll be honest with you. I don't think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what's happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it's asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you'd go to the theater and you'd see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for'em. Now everyone's got an opinion and wants to downer--and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you're gonna sit there and say, 'Well look at this atrocity,' well you don't know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it."

Thanks to Brandon at Vet Voice for transcribing something that even makes my cast iron stomach wretch.

Leave it to a bunch of rightwing boneheads to hire someone who doesn't even understand the function of a free press. Maybe the PJ bunch should consider renaming themselves Pravda. Of course, considering that Israel is preventing actual journalists (not the fake kind like Joe here) into Gaza to report what's actually happening, maybe it's unnecessary to be that overt.

The US has kicked the investigation of an alleged airstrike-gone-wrong into high gear, sending a general to Afghanistan to take over from local commanders after they had confirmed that the airstrike hit militant targets. The reason? The UN has video evidence contradicting those local commanders.

Afghan and Western officials say Afghanistan's intelligence agency and the U.N. both have video of the aftermath of the Aug. 22 U.S. airstrikes on the village of Azizabad showing dozens of dead women and children.

The Afghan government and the U.N. have said the raid killed 90 civilians, including 60 children.

The U.S. military said in a statement Sunday it will send a general officer to review the findings of the initial U.S. investigation that up to 35 militants and seven civilians died.

Locals had alleged that the airstrike was based upon faulty intelligence after political enemies of a local leader falsely 'fingered' the village in return for a bounty payment.

The BBC adds more about the nature of the new evidence.

Video footage from mobile phones showing dozens of dead bodies has given increasing credibility to claims by local residents that up to 90 civilians were killed in the attack.

The footage shows bodies - many of them women and children - lined up in a mosque in the village of Azizabad, which was the subject of a combined ground operation and airstrike by US forces.

Both the Afghan government and the United Nations have already carried out their own investigations into the attack.

They say the video evidence, and the presence of a large number of fresh graves in the village, confirm the accounts of local people.

Until now, the US military has insisted that far fewer civilians died in what it says was a successful operation against Taleban militants in the area.

On Sunday, however, the senior US commander in Afghanistan, David McKiernan, said that in light of new evidence, he had asked for the American investigation to be reopened.

You can watch some of the video as part of a BBC World news report on the incident here.  

Violence is still rising in Afghanistan, with a higher rate of US troop deaths now than Iraq even at its worse. More than more than 2,500 people, including 1,000 civilians, have been killed in the last six months and, overall, coalition forces have killed almost as many civilians as militants have. Airstrikes have been blamed for many of the deaths.

Just after the airstrike in Herat district, Afghan president Hamid Karzai visited grieving relatives and told them "I have been working day and night over the past five years to prevent such incidents, but I haven't been successful in my efforts. If I had succeeded, the people of Azizabad wouldn't be bathed in blood."

Watch it.

Fascinating.  Does the guy want us to attack Russia?

"Today, many are dead and Georgia is in crisis, yet the Obama campaign has offered nothing more than cheap and petty political attacks that are echoed only by the Kremlin," said McCain aide Tucker Bounds in the statement. "The reaction of the Obama campaign to this crisis, so at odds with our democratic allies and yet so bizarrely in sync with Moscow, doesn't merely raise questions about Sen. Obama's judgment -- it answers them." 

What is he trying to say? 

"Russian President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin must understand the severe, long-term negative consequences that their government's actions will have for Russia's relationship with the U.S. and Europe," McCain said.

And, describing the Russian assaults that have gone beyond the disputed territory and into sovereign Georgia as "Moscow's path of violent aggression," the GOP nominee suggested that Putin's aim may be to overthrow the pro-U.S. government in Georgia.

"This should be unacceptable to all the democratic countries of the world, and should draw us together in universal condemnation of Russian aggression," McCain said.

As I blogged yesterday, neocons loves them some military conflict, as long as they don't have to fight it. The biggest neocon chickenhawk of them all, William "The Bloody" Kristol is rah-rahing for it: (reg. req'd)

When the "civilized world" expostulated with Russia about Georgia in 1924, the Soviet regime was still weak. In Germany, Hitler was in jail. Only 16 years later, Britain stood virtually alone against a Nazi-Soviet axis. Is it not true today, as it was in the 1920s and '30s, that delay and irresolution on the part of the democracies simply invite future threats and graver dangers? 

Have you learned nothing from your warmongering ways?  If you're so hot to fight, suit up, Kristol.  Our resources are tapped out by your last cheerleading effort. Matt Yglesias agrees with me.

If Kristol really thinks we should go to war with Russia, he's being crazy and irresponsible. If he doesn't think that, then he has no business busting out these Munich analogies. Nowhere in his column does he propose a single concrete step with any meaningful chance of altering the situation - it's all dedicated to mocking doves, but utterly lacking in viable alternatives.

That's it in a nutshell.

UPDATE:  Where is John McCain getting his foreign policy positions vis à vis Georgia?  Wikipedia, of course!

  BBC:

A US air strike in eastern Afghanistan on Sunday killed 47 civilians, 39 of them women and children, an Afghan government investigating team says.

Reports at the time said that 20 people were killed in the airstrike in Nangarhar province. The US military said they were militants.

But local people said the dead were wedding party guests.

Correspondents say the issue of civilian casualties is hugely sensitive in Afghanistan.

President Hamid Karzai has said that no civilian casualty is acceptable.

Mr Karzai set up a nine-man commission to look into Sunday's incident.

Democracy Now! has more, including audio and video streaming. 

MSNBC: (h/t BillW)

U.S. and NATO troops aided Afghan forces with reconnaissance in a hunt Saturday for 870 inmates who escaped prison after a sophisticated Taliban assault that even NATO conceded was a success for the militants.

A roadside bomb, meanwhile, killed four U.S. Marines sent to southwestern Afghanistan to help train the country's fledgling police. The deadliest attack on American forces this year came one day after the U.S. defense secretary highlighted the fact that more American and allied troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq last month.

Afghanistan's deputy interior minister, Munid Mangal, said about 1,000 prisoners were housed in Kandahar's Sarposa Prison when dozens of militants on motorbikes attacked the facility late Friday. Seven police and several prisoners died in the assault, he said.

Al Jazeera's numbers are significantly higher, claiming 1,100 prisoners escaped. Of those, 15 have been killed.

The title really says it all: Hubris and Fearmongering. Two words that best describe whatever is left of the Bush legacy. David Shuster reports on Bush's latest belligerent press conference. His contempt for the press is really unprecedented.

Download | play Download | play

Bush: But this -- we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon...

Is anyone else shocked that it was FOX's Bret Baier that elicited the "World War III" soundbyte? Me neither.

Full transcript here if you can stomach it.

Warning: Graphic, violent images. May not be appropriate for work.

The LA Times has a harrowing op-ed from a former US official on her experiences with Blackwater:

As a U.S. official in Baghdad for nearly two years, I was frequently the "beneficiary" of Blackwater's over-the-top zeal. "Just pretend it's a roller coaster," I used to tell myself during trips through downtown Baghdad.

We would careen around corners, jump road dividers, reach speeds in excess of 100 mph and often cross over to the wrong side of the street, oncoming traffic be damned.

But much more appalling than the ride was the deleterious effect each movement through town had on the already beleaguered people of Iraq. I began to wonder whether my meetings, intended to further U.S. policy goals and improve the lives of Iraqis, were doing more harm than good. With our drivers honking at, cutting off, pelting with water bottles (a favorite tactic) and menacing with weapons anyone in their way, how many enemies were we creating?

Well, exactly. Hearts and minds, people....hearts and minds.