Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
Showing posts with label President Barack Obama. Show all posts
President says 12-year war was fought for the West and for US security as he expresses ‘extreme anger’ with Washington.
Expressing “extreme anger” towards the United States government, Afghan President Hamid Karzai has said in an interview that the war in Afghanistan was not fought with his country’s interests in mind.
“Afghans died in a war that’s not ours,” Karzai said in an interview with the Washington Post newspaper published late on Sunday, just a month before the election to pick his successor.
He was quoted as saying he was certain the 12-year-old war, the United States’ longest and launched after the attacks of September 11, 2001, was “for the US security and for the Western interest.”
Karzai’s refusal to sign a security deal with Washington that would permit foreign troops to stay in Afghanistan beyond this year has frustrated the White House, and President Barack Obama has told the Pentagon to prepare for the possibility that no US troops will be left in Afghanistan after 2014.
Obama told Karzai in a phone call on Tuesday he had given the order to the Pentagon. The phone call was the first substantive discussion between the two leaders since June.
But staking out a new position, the White House said in a statement it would leave open the possibility of concluding the bilateral security agreement later this year.
“It’s good for them to sign it with my successor,” Karzai told the Post.
He has insisted the US must jump-start peace talks with Taliban fighters, and end raids and strikes on Afghan homes before he signs the deal.
Feeling betrayed
In the interview, the Afghan leader said he was deeply troubled by the war’s casualties, including those in US military operations, and felt betrayed by what he described as an insufficient US focus on targeting Taliban sanctuaries in Pakistan rather than in Afghan villages.
Civilian casualties in Afghanistan dissipated his country’s “common cause” with the US, Karzai told the newspaper.
Criticising his US allies was the only way to secure a response by Washington to his concerns, he added.
The Post said Karzai told his interviewers as he escorted them out of his office on Saturday night, “To the American people, give them my best wishes and my gratitude. To the US government, give them my anger, my extreme anger.”
Armies are like newspapers. They have become 21st-century anachronisms. To survive, they must adapt. For the press, that means accommodating the demands of the Internet. For the United States Army, it means adjusting to a changing security environment. Nostalgia about a hallowed past is a luxury that neither armies nor newspapers can afford to indulge.
So the hand-wringing triggered by Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s plan to reduce the Army’s size, while predictable, is beside the point. Yes, those cuts would leave the United States with its fewest active-duty soldiers since the eve of World War II.
So what?
This isn’t 1940. Moreover, as an instrument of coercion, that smaller army would be more lethal than the much larger one that helped defeat Nazi Germany and imperial Japan. Given a choice between a few hundred of today’s Abrams tanks and a few thousand vintage Shermans, Gen. George Patton would not hesitate to choose the former.
More relevant questions are: Do we need even a few hundred tanks? And for what? In its 2012 report to Congress , the Army’s senior leadership described the service as “The Nation’s Force of Decisive Action.” In the 2013 version, they “guarantee the agility, versatility and depth to Prevent, Shape and Win.“
Yet to judge by outcomes, the Army is not a force for decisive action. It cannot be counted on to achieve definitive results in a timely manner. In Afghanistan and Iraq, actions that momentarily appeared to be decisive served as preludes to protracted and inconclusive wars. As for preventing, shaping and winning, this surely qualifies as bluster — the equivalent of a newspaper promising advertisers that it will quadruple its print circulation.
Washington’s preoccupation with budgets provides Army leaders — and the entire national security establishment — an excuse to dodge core questions. The most pressing: What should the nation expect of its armed forces?
After the Cold War and especially after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, expectations of what the U.S. military should be able to accomplish expanded considerably. Defense per se figured as an afterthought, eclipsed by the conviction that projecting power held the key to transforming the world from what it is into what Washington would like it to be: orderly, predictable, respectful of American values and deferential to U.S. prerogatives.
The “Global War on Terror” put that proposition to the test, with disappointing results. Putting boots on the ground produced casualties and complications, but little by way of peace and harmony. It did nothing to enhance the standing and reputation of the United States. And as a means to engineer positive political change, America’s Army proved sadly wanting. That’s not a knock against our soldiers. They performed admirably, even if the same cannot be said for those who conceived and mismanaged the wars our soldiers were sent to fight.
Americans today are not inclined to indulge this experiment further. With his widely noted preference for drones and Special Operations forces, President Barack Obama has tacitly endorsed the public’s view — even if his improvised way of war is devoid of any serious strategic rationale.
The principal military lesson of the Global War on Terror affirms what ought to have been the principal military lesson of the Cold War: Force held in readiness has far greater political utility than force expended. Armies are well suited to defending and containing. But invading and occupying countries are fraught with risk.
It’s the Bush Doctrine, just inverted: Rather than engaging in preventive war, commit troops only after exhausting every other alternative. As long as that approach pertains — may it do so for many decades — the projection of U.S. military might will come in the form of bombs and missiles, falling under the purview of naval and air forces.
What role, then, remains for the United States Army? The honorable and necessary one of defending this country. For that task, absent the emergence of a major Mexican or Canadian threat, a smaller Army should serve just fine.
Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.“
The United States is considering a proposal to withdraw all its troops from Afghanistan by 2017, say two Republicans as official sources confirm that “the zero-option” was also discussed at a White House meeting on Tuesday.
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden met Defence Secretary Chuck Hagel and senior US generals at the White House to review their options in Afghanistan. Gen Joseph F. Dunford Jr, commander of US and allied forces in Afghanistan, came from Kabul to attend the meeting.
Gen Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the vice chairman, Adm James A. Winnefeld Jr; Gen Lloyd J. Austin III, the head of the United States Central Command; and Adm William H. McRaven, head of the United States Special Operations Command, also participated in the discussion.
Separately, the White House reconfirmed its plan to withdraw all but a small residual force from Afghanistan by the end of 2014.
“Together with our allies, we will complete our mission there by the end of this year. And America’s longest war will finally be over,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told a briefing.
The United States, however, wants to keep a residual force of about 10,000 after 2014 as well, provided the Afghan government signs a bilateral security agreement.
But on Tuesday evening, two senior Republican Senators, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, told reporters that
And this caused Afghan President Hamid Karzai to move away from the United States and hold secret talks with the Taliban, they argued.
The White House Press Secretary did not directly confirm that the administration was considering such a plan but when asked to comment on the statement by the two senators, he said: “Some senators envision a world in which US troops remain in Afghanistan for decades. Some senators envisioned a world in which US troops remained in Iraq for decades. That’s not the president’s vision.”
Although the US media reported that the Obama administration was upset with Mr Karzai for holding secret talks with the Taliban, the State Department welcomed the talks.
“It’s important to note here that we’ve long strongly supported an Afghan-led reconciliation, which would, of course, be Afghans talking to Afghans,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said. “So the notion that we wouldn’t support that dialogue is inaccurate.”
The US, however, was not talking to the Taliban, she added.
In a report on President Obama’s meeting with his generals, The New York Times said that the Pentagon too was not against the “zero option”.
“The feeling among the generals is that, ‘Hey, if Karzai doesn’t sign this thing, we are fine with pulling back to zero’,” a senior Pentagon official told NYT.
“Moving to zero troops no longer seems unthinkable, especially with alternatives like drones available,” the official added.
The report said that Vice President Biden had been pressing officials with sceptical questions of what a residual force would accomplish, and aides to Mr Obama have suggested alternatives that would result in a lower troop presence than the military would prefer.
US generals want at least 10,000 American and 5,000 Nato troops in Afghanistan after 2014, saying that if the Afghan government does not accept this deployment, the United States should withdraw all its forces.
The US National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone records provides only minimal benefits to countering terrorism, is illegal and should end, a federal privacy watchdog has concluded.
The watchdog’s report released on Thursday called on the government to end the NSA programme and to purge the data it had collected.
Members of the watchdog questioned the relevance of collecting metadata – records of US phone calls, their length and time – in bulk and its routine reauthorisation by a secretive surveillance court.
The report came on the same day that NSA spying whistle-blower Edward Snowden said he cannot come back from Russia because does not expect to get a fair trial in the US.
The latest report could further complicate efforts by both President Barack Obama and Congress to come up with reforms to the programmes, which have been under harsh scrutiny for their scope in the wake of Snowden’s revelations.
The report was a result of a review of the phone data collection programme, based on public and classified briefings and documents, conducted by the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board at the request of Obama and legislators.
The three-member majority of the board argued that the NSA improperly relies on a statute meant to give the FBI access to phone records.
Existing laws
The board said other existing laws could be used to access phone records if needed.
“It’s time to push the reset button” on the programme, said board member James Dempsey, public policy vice president at privacy advocacy group Centre for Democracy and Technology.
Based in part on classified briefings and documents, the board found no terrorist attacks thwarted or previously unknown terrorist plots discovered through the program in the previous seven years.
By concluding that NSA’s bulk collection of Americans telephone metadata lacks legal grounding, the board goes further than both President Barack Obama and an ad hoc panel he created to review NSA eavesdropping activities.
Obama, in his own speech on NSA reforms on Friday, did not call for an outright halt to the collection of phone metadata by the NSA, although agreed that the storage of telephone metadata should be moved out of government and should not be searched without judicial approval.
Meanwhile in Russia, Snowden faced an online question-and-answer session on the controversy.
During the session, Snowden said he cannot come back from Russia because “there’s no chance to have a fair trial” and urged the US to strengthen its protections for whistle-blowers.
No clemency
Snowden, living in temporary asylum in Russia after disclosing US government secrets on surveillance programmes and other activities, faces criminal charges in the US States after fleeing last year first to Hong Kong and then Russia, where he was granted at least a year’s asylum.
His comments, made on a “Free Snowden” website, came as Eric Holder, US attorney general, said in Virginia that the US government would not consider clemency for him.
“If Mr Snowden wanted to come back to the United States, enter a plea, we would engage with his lawyers. We’d do that with any defendant who wanted to enter a plea of guilty,” Holder said.
But Snowden argued that the law under which he was charged “was never intended to be used against people working in the public interest and forbids a public interest defence.”
Snowden also said that while he was concerned about this “direct threat to my life”, he was “not going to be intimidated”.
He also denied that he stole the passwords of NSA co-workers, condemned threats to his life made by unnamed US intelligence officials in the news media, and decried “indiscriminate mass surveillance” by governments.
Proposals by US lawmakers to impose new sanctions against Iran would be a mistake that would sabotage a possible diplomatic deal with Tehran, former Pentagon chief Robert Gates warned Thursday.
“I think that the president’s opposition to a bill that would impose additional sanctions now is absolutely right,” Gates said at an event highlighting his newly released memoir.
“To vote additional sanctions today would be I think a deal-killer,” said Gates, who served as defense secretary under President Barack Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush.
The Obama administration has lobbied against a push by some members of Congress to introduce additional economic sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, saying it would undermine recent diplomatic progress after Tehran agreed to a six-month interim accord.
“As hard as it may be for people to realize, what we may be seeing is the success of the sanctions effort done by president (Bill) Clinton, intensified by president Bush and even more so by president Obama, to force the Iranians to come to the table because of economic hardships,” Gates said.
“I think we have succeeded to the extent that we now have the Iranians at the table.”
He pointed to the clear effect of economic pressure on the Islamic republic.
The former CIA director did say he favored a mechanism — either through legislation or a “formal commitment” — that if talks fail, Iran would face even more drastic economic penalties than those in place before the interim deal.
“It could be a negotiating asset for the administration in terms of telling the Iranians if you roll us for six months, or slow-roll us for some period beyond that and we don’t end up with an agreement that meets our needs, you’ll not just go back to the status quo ante but you will face a situation that is even more dire,” he said.
Gates, a Republican with a reputation as a hard-nosed pragmatist when it comes to foreign policy, reiterated his view that bombing Iran’s nuclear facilities would not eliminate the program and merely set it back by a few years.
But he said it was not at all assured that the current interim deal would lead to a full-fledged agreement with Iran, given the need to persuade Tehran to abandon a possible nuclear weapons capability.
“I think it’s a steep hill because the only acceptable agreement for the longer term is one that rolls back the Iranian program from allowing Iran to be a nuclear weapons threshold state,” he said.
And an agreement would have to provide “intrusive enough inspections that ensures that if they decide to violate the agreement, we have ample time to react militarily or in other ways.”
The current interim deal, between major powers and Iran, allows for a modest easing of sanctions in return for a freeze on some parts of Tehran’s nuclear program.
It also calls for a timetable of inspections of nuclear sites by the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations nuclear watchdog.
U.S. officials reacted angrily Tuesday to comments attributed to Israel’s defense minister criticizing Secretary of State John Kerry’s efforts to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Palestinians.
The derisive remarks appeared in a popular daily Israeli newspaper, Yedioth Ahronot, and reflect Moshe Yaalon’s skepticism of the Kerry-led U.S. efforts “both in private conversations in Israel and in the U.S.”
“American Secretary of State John Kerry, who turned up here determined and acting out of misplaced obsession and messianic fervor, cannot teach me anything about the conflict with the Palestinians,” Yaalon said, according to the paper.
Yaalon later issued an apology in a written statement sent to media from the Defense Ministry.
“Israel and the United States share a common goal to advance the peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians led by Secretary Kerry. We appreciate Secretary Kerry’s many efforts towards that end,” the release said. “The defense minister had no intention to cause any offense to the secretary, and he apologizes if the secretary was offended by words attributed to the minister.”
Earlier, the U.S. State Department issued a harsh rebuke. Spokeswoman Marie Harf said it was shocking that a close ally would question Kerry’s motives.
“If these comments are accurate, we find the remarks of the defense minister to be offensive and inappropriate, especially given all that the United States has done to support Israel’s security needs and will continue to do,” she said at a regular media briefing.
“Secretary Kerry and his team, including Gen. (John) Allen, have been working day and night to try to promote a secure peace for Israel because of the secretary’s deep concern for Israel’s future.”
President Barack Obama’s press secretary Jay Carney said much the same thing to reporters at the daily news conference at the White House. He added that Kerry met Sunday in Paris with Arab leaders to discuss peace initiatives, efforts that will continue.
“We’re pressing forward with both the Israelis and the Palestinians on this process and hope that it bears fruit,” he said.
Kerry recently visited Jerusalem where he met multiple times with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
He declined to share details of the conversations with reporters but told them that progress was being made during the trip, his ninth to the region since becoming secretary about a year ago.
“We’re at the table today because of the determination to try to resolve this issue, and both of them have made the tough choices to stay at that table,” he said January 5. “We are now at a point where the choices narrow down and the choices are obviously real and difficult. And so we — the United States, President Obama, myself — will do everything in our power to help the parties be able to see the road ahead in ways that will meet the interests of both of their peoples.”
Kerry has floated a proposal based on five months of intensive consultations with Israelis and Palestinians since the resumption of the peace process last summer.
Yaalon was quoted Tuesday as saying: “The American security plan presented to us is not worth the paper it’s written on. It contains no peace and no security.”
Sa’eb Erekat, chief Palestinian negotiator and a member of the executive committee of the PLO, told CNN the comments were another indication that the Israeli government was trying to sabotage Kerry’s efforts. Israel wants to dictate terms, not negotiate.
“This is absolutely inappropriate and extremely despicable statements, because Mr. Kerry is exerting every possible human effort for the sake of peace for the Palestinians and Israelis, and he should not be rewarded with such statements from Yaalon or somebody else,” he said.
Intelligence leaker Edward Snowden’s revelations about the scale of American eavesdropping have succeeded in triggering a fierce debate which could ultimately lead to limits on National Security Agency spying, experts say.
Snowden has been labeled a “traitor” by government officials but events this week signalled a possible vindication for the former computer contractor, who has always insisted he is a whistleblower trying to shed light on the NSA’s secret surveillance.
Six months since a stream of bombshell revelations began pouring out from Snowden, members of Congress are proposing new laws to rein in the NSA, a federal judge ruled one of its programs is likely unconstitutional and a panel handpicked by the White House has called for sweeping changes to electronic surveillance.
It is “undeniable that we’re having a series of debates about the appropriate limits of government surveillance that, without Edward Snowden, we would not be having,” said Stephen Vladeck, professor of law at American University. “If Snowden’s goal was to spark a public debate I think he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.”
Snowden, who has been granted asylum in Russia and faces espionage charges in the US, has expressed satisfaction that federal judge Richard Leon found the NSA’s collection of Americans’ telephone records probably violated privacy rights and that the snooping was “almost Orwellian” in scale.
“Today, a secret program authorized by a secret court was, when exposed to the light of day, found to violate Americans’ rights,” Snowden said after Monday’s ruling.
The most serious rebuke to the NSA came Wednesday from a panel of establishment figures named by the White House to review the surveillance operations that mushroomed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The panel, which included a career spy who served as acting director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Michael Morrell, called for imposing limits on the NSA’s powers, scaling back its secrecy and reforming the agency.
“We conclude that some of the authorities that were expanded or created in the aftermath of Sept. 11 unduly sacrifice fundamental interests in individual liberty, personal privacy, and democratic governance,” the panel wrote in its report issued Wednesday.
The panel also called into question claims from US spy chiefs that the dragnet of phone and Internet traffic has kept America safe, saying the spying “was not essential to preventing attacks.”
Privacy versus security
The panel warned that privacy rights outlined in the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution should not be sacrificed in the name of preserving security, but also said the government had a duty to protect its citizens. The tension between those two principles is at the heart of the debate triggered by Snowden.
“I think the question is: what is the spirit of the Fourth Amendment as applied to the new technologies?” Vladeck said.
“That is the incredibly important and so far unanswered question looming behind the Snowden disclosures.”Even the Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, reluctantly acknowledged in September that Snowden’s leaks have generated a much-needed discussion about the parameters of eavesdropping.
More than a decade since the 9/11 attacks, the sweeping powers granted to the NSA by two successive presidents and lawmakers are now being re-examined, according to James Lewis, a former senior US official who worked on intelligence and cyber security.
“It’s painful to say but yes, Snowden triggered long overdue thinking about how we engage in intelligence collection,” said Lewis, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Snowden’s leaks, however, also have damaged the US government’s ability to gather intelligence and that will carry unknown risks, he said.
Snowden evokes mixed feelings among Americans.
According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll last month, only 35 per cent of Americans between the ages 18 to 30 say Snowden should be charged with a crime, compared with 57 per cent of those 30 and older.
Rights activists believe the leaks have opened up a rare opportunity to enact major reforms but it remains unclear where President Barack Obama will come down on the panel’s recommendations.
For Snowden, the secrecy surrounding NSA spying represented a bigger threat than the surveillance itself.
“What we recoil most strongly against is not that such surveillance can theoretically occur, “ he wrote to Time magazine in an email interview, “but that it was done without a majority of society even being aware it was possible.”
The United States announced Wednesday it had transferred two Sudanese detainees from Guantanamo to their home country, its second release this week as President Barack Obama works to close the prison.
Noor Uthman Muhammed, 51, and Ibrahim Othman Ibrahim Idris, 52, were the last Sudanese prisoners at the US naval base in southern Cuba, a US defense official told.
They were both considered by the US military to be members of Al-Qaeda and were sent to Guantanamo in 2002.Idris, seen by the Pentagon as a “veteran” member of the terror network who swore loyalty to its late leader Osama bin Laden in the 1990s, was among the first detainees to arrive at Guantanamo Bay on January 11, 2002. Muhammed arrived in May of that year.
In exchange for a guilty plea to terror offenses in February 2011, part of Muhammed´s 14-year sentence was suspended and he completed his term on December 3.Idris, who had been cleared for transfer since 2009 by an interagency task force, was released following an October court order from the US District Court in Washington.
“As directed by the president´s January 22, 2009, executive order, the task force conducted a comprehensive review of Idris´s case, which examined a number of factors, including security issues, in making that designation,” Pentagon spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Todd Breasseale said.
It said the Obama administration informed Congress of its intent to transfer both men, as required by law.
The transfers came as Obama accelerates repatriations to meet his campaign promise of closing the prison opened by his predecessor George W. Bush in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States to house suspects captured around the world.
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