Did Democratic delegates just vote down Obama bid to pander to AIPAC on Jerusalem?
This article by Ali Abunimah is re-posted from Electronic Intifada.
An extraordinary thing happened at the Democratic National Convention today. The official party platform for 2012 left out a reference that “Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel” that was in the 2008 version.
Under pressure from the Israel lobby and the Republicans the Democratic leadership hastily moved to shove it back in on a voice vote that required a two-thirds majority. But to the stunned surprise of Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa who was chairing the convention, the “No” votes seemed to be louder, as the video above shows.
Shocked, Villaraigosa held the vote a second time, and then a third time. Each time it seemed the noes had it. Nonetheless, Villaraigosa declared that it had passed anyway. Loud booing could be heard. It’s an astonishing spectacle (see a longer version of the video from C-Span).
Obama intervened directly
Apparently, Obama himself intervened as JTA reports:
late Tuesday afternoon – after Republicans launched a full-force offensive criticizing the omission – the Democrats reversed course. Robert Wexler, a member of the platform draft committee, and a chief Jewish surrogate for the Obama campaign, credited President Obama for the change.
“They are returning the language to the 2008 situation,” Wexler told JTA late Tuesday. “The president directly intervened to make sure this amendment happened.”
But it seems ploy by Obama to pander to the Israel lobby has badly backfired. Gleeful Republicans are already circulating the video and spinning it as Democrats booing Israel.
Shower Israel with love and affection
Just this morning, in a New York Times oped, Israeli-American tycoon Haim Saban ostensibly defended Obama against Republican claims that Obama has “thrown allies like Israel under the bus.” Saban admiringly listed Obama’s unconditional financial, military and diplomatic largesse to Israel. But even after all that Saban – an Obama supporter – suggested that Obama “should have showered Israelis with more love and affection.”
That was in the morning. In the afternoon the Jerusalem debacle occured at the convention. I personally am uninterested in the GOP vs. Democratic aspect. I consider both parties indistinguishable on Israel and so many other issues. They are part of the same ruling establishment.
But ramming through AIPAC’s desires – despite an apparent no vote – was a neat summary of how US elites make decisions when it comes to Israel. Both parties are in a bidding war to appease Israel’s most extreme supporters at home and abroad. If this means riding roughshod over their own members, the American public, world opinion, international law and the basic rights of the Palestinian people, then so be it.
We can expect that in an effort to repair the damage from today, Obama’s big convention speech tomorrow night will shower Israel even more “love” than ever.
Obama’s history of pandering
For Obama, it is also nothing new. Despite elevated and unrealistic expectations that he would be different, I had warned as early as 2007 that Obama had surrendered any autonomy on Palestine to AIPAC.
JTA is revealing on how the platform is actually written in the first place – effectively under direct AIPAC supervision:
A Jewish official speaking on background said that at least three American Israel Public Affairs Committee officials were present during the entire period when the platform was drafted last month in Minneapolis. Other Democratic and Jewish officials confirmed AIPAC’s participation in the process.
There is another way
For those committed to justice in Palestine today’s events are a reminder that the road to justice does not go through the GOP the RNC or the DNC, but for us in the United States it goes through BDS – boycott, divestment and sanctions against an Israeli apartheid regime that has the full backing of US political elites.
Jerusalem, after all, and all of Palestine are not Barack Obama’s or Mitt Romney’s to auction off to the highest bidder.
Michigan Department of Civil Rights to host an LGBT anti-discrimination forum in Grand Rapids on Sept. 19
The Michigan Department of Civil Rights (MDCR) is partnering with the Community Relations Commission of Grand Rapids to host a public hearing on the issue of how anti-discrimination ordinances and the LGBTQ community.
The MDCR has already hosted forums in Jackson and in Holland, where hundreds of people came out to express their concerns and tell their stories about how they or someone they know who identifies as LGBTQ are still being discriminated against in Michigan.
The City of Grand Rapids passed an anti-discrimination ordinance to include some protections for the LGBTQ community in 1994, making it just the 10th city in the country to do so.
However, despite Grand Rapids having such an ordinance, people who identify as Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender or Queer continue to be harassed, intimidated and discriminated against in a variety of ways. The public hearing on September 19 will provide an opportunity for those who are being discriminated against and those who are allies of the LGBTQ community to tell their stories.
According to a Media Release from the Grand Rapids CRC:
The event, co-sponsored by the Grand Rapids Community Relations Commission,
will take place at Grand Rapids Community College, DeVos Campus, Sneden Hall, Room 108, 415 Fulton SE, Grand Rapids, 49503 from 4 to 6 pm.
Both written and verbal testimony will be accepted. Follow this link to learn more about telling your story http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/ELCRAPrompt2012_385444_7.pdf.
To provide written testimony, please email it to calcagnor@michigan.gov before September 17, 2012. Please indicate if you would like to testify during the hearing.
If you want to attend the hearing and need an accommodation to do so, please notify MDCR at calcagnor@michigan.gov.
For more information on the Michigan Department of Civil Rights, visit www.michigan.gov/mdcr.
Opposition to fracking continues in New York with direct action
This article by Yvonne Taylor is re-posted from EcoWatch.
I am chained to a fence outside an Inergy facility near Watkins Glen, New York, and I am not alone.
We are protesting the gasification of New York. We don’t want fracking in this state (or any state), and we don’t like Inergy’s plans to build a gas storage hub in Seneca Lake salt caverns. 
We believe that:
1. Inergy’s plans are reckless and dangerous. Salt Cavern storage facilities are more accident prone than any other type of gas storage facility.
2. Even if nothing goes wrong, there will be plenty wrong. The Inergy project will change the character of our rural area by increasing the levels of traffic, noise and pollution. Just the pollution alone will kill people, and gas development will surely harm our existing winery, agricultural and tourism industries.
3. Inergy can’t be trusted. Inergy has been caught in so many lies and is keeping so many secrets that it has no credibility whatsoever. It cannot be relied on as a guardian of public safety.
4. The Inergy project is clearly meant to facilitate the fracking of New York, Ohio and Pennsylvania. We adamantly oppose fracking and consider it catastrophic folly. We want the Inergy project stopped because of its own lack of merit, and also as part of the larger effort to stop fracking.
5. We resent the fact that, even though we live here, we have been given no say in what happens to our area. We know, for example, that the DEC is keeping secrets for Inergy. And we know that the DEC sent proposed fracking regulations to the gas companies for review, before finalizing them and releasing them for public comment. No such opportunity was afforded to the industry’s opponents. We cannot remain silent while a demonstrably biased agency makes decisions behind closed doors that could forever change our way of life.
Stop the Sale of Mineral Rights for Fracking in Michigan
On Thursday, September 13th there will be a meeting of the Natural Resources Commission where the parcels of land being leased at the October 24th land auction will be discussed.
At this meeting, DNR Director Keith Creagh will be announcing his final decision on what state-owned mineral rights will be auctioned off in October. There will be an opportunity for public comment for people who oppose the public auctioning off of Michigan land for fracking or other fossil fuel extraction.
The meeting will be held at Lansing’s Diagnostic Center, located at 4125 Beaumont Road in Lansing, and anyone is allowed to give public comment starting around 3pm.
The group, Citizens Against Drilling on Public Land Michigan, is hoping to gather a sizeable group of people to speak their concerns about the consequences of the upcoming auction. The national organization Food & Water Watch has created an online mechanism for people to sign up to come to this meeting to give public comment.
At the September 13 meeting Citizens Against Drilling on Public Land Michigan also plans to present all the petitions and endorsements they have received over the past few months. For more information contact Citizens Against Drilling on Public Land Michigan cadplmich@gmail.com.
For those interested in being part of any organizing against the October 24 DNR land auction you can contact the Grand Rapids group Mutual Aid GR at http://www.facebook.com/MutualAidGR.
New Media We Recommend
Below is a list of new materials that we have read/watched in recent weeks. The comments are not a “review” of the material, instead sort of an endorsement of ideas and investigations that can provide solid analysis and even inspiration in the struggle for change. All these items are available at The Bloom Collective, so check them out and stimulate your mind.
The Nazis, Capitalism, and the Working Class, by Donny Gluckstein – This new book by Donny Gluckstein will challenge your perceptions about what were the primary ideological factors that drove the Nazi Party in Germany. Gluckstein’s thesis is that in addition to their hatred for Jews, the Nazi Party was motivated by their hatred of socialism, Marxism and organized labor. Hitler and the Nazi Party saw the German defeat in WWI, the Russian Revolution and the weakening of the country the fault of working class revolutionaries. The author tracks this ideological dynamic from WWI through the end of WWII, using numerous source materials, historical records, the German Press, Nazi Propaganda and other investigations to make a convincing argument that the Nazi belief in Capitalism was equal to their belief in anti-Semitism. An important contribution for the ongoing deconstruction of Nazi ideology and the growing collection of new anti-capitalist literature.
The Meaning of Freedom: And Other Difficult Dialogues, by Angela Davis – Few activist/scholars have the ability to bring an intersectional analysis to current freedom struggles the way Angela Davis can. This new collection of speeches from 1994 – 2009 offers a powerful display of intersectional analysis and a passionate plea for people to engage in the most pressing freedom struggles of our day. Davis addresses war, imperialism, neoliberal capitalism, the prison industrial complex, institutional racism, sexism, homophobia and heterosexism through this collection of essays. Whether she is talking about the US prison population, sexual assault, racial discrimination or poverty, Davis never hesitates to challenge our tendencies to look at issues through a single lens. Each speech is a weapon against privilege and together this collection of truth telling can help us dismantle power however it has manifest.
Partisanas: Women in the Armed Resistance to Fascism and German Occupation (1936 – 1945), by Ingrid Strobl – Common stereotypes of women during wartime relegate them to the sidelines of history—to supporting roles like dutiful munitions factory workers or devoted wives waiting for their men to return home. The truth is that much of the armed resistance to fascism, before and during World War II, can be chalked up to women about whom official accounts have little or nothing to say. Through years of intrepid research and numerous interviews with the participants themselves, Ingrid Strobl excavates the history of the women who shouldered guns, planned assassinations, planted bombs, and were among the era’s most active antifascist fighters. Strobl’s commitment to and respect for her subjects has resulted in a work of both scholarly rigor and emotional depth. Weaving moving personal narratives into the broader history of the European resistance, Partisanas is both a detailed historical account and an investigation into what compelled women to reject their traditional roles to take up arms in a fight for a better world.
A Burning Question: Propaganda & the Denial of Climate Change (DVD) – This fascinating and clarifying look at the debate surrounding global warming explores the striking disconnect between the relatively clear-cut concerns of the world’s most prominent scientists and the maze of speculation, rhetorical posturing, and outright misinformation that attaches to this issue whenever it’s taken up by politicians, PR specialists, and political pundits. Mixing a localized focus on Ireland with insights from scientists and leaders from around the world, the film serves as both a primer on climate science and a penetrating analysis of media framing and the science of perception management.
MLive invites you to discuss Obama’s speech with their experts – corporate investors and lobbyists
This morning, MLive posted an announcement about how the public can be part of a discussion after the President’s speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention.
The article states, “we want to hear what you and political experts on both sides of the aisle have to say.”
The panel of experts will include a few MLive reporters, but the three political strategists they have invited are Tom Shields of Marketing Resource Group; Joe Disano of Main Street Strategies; T.J. Bucholz of Lambert Edwards & Associates, and Greg McNeilly of The Windquest Group.
Looking at this line up it is clear what MLive considers as political strategists……..people who represent corporate interests as lobbyists, investors and people who work in the narrow world of money & politics.
The Marketing Resource Group claims to offer PR services, political consulting, marketing, advertising and crisis management. MRG’s history of political consultation was helping to elect John Engler, Candice Miller and according to their site. “Republican majorities in both the Michigan House and Senate.”
The client list for MRG is also instructive, with lots of casino and entertainment companies, along with the bottled water giant Nestle North America, environmental criminal Kennecott Minerals and the anti-gay legal group, the Thomas More Law Center.
Then there is Main Street Strategies, a political lobbying group based in Lansing. Their client list is pretty much just politicians, government entities and labor groups. I guess this would make them the other side of the aisle, since they disproportionately represent Democrats.
Main Street Strategies has a listing of some of their political lobbying campaigns, which includes the kind of ads the public loathes, attack ads. Knowing what they do makes their company tag line all the more ironic, since they claim to be “cutting through the clutter.”The Third expert is with Lambert Edwards & Associates, which promotes itself as a public relations, investor relations company. Their clients are mostly from the corporate world, such as Wolverine Worldwide, Biggby Coffee, Rubbermaid and Zondervan. However, Lambert Edwards & Associates has also represented the Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Michigan Department of Education.
The last expert or political strategist making up the MLive panel for tonight is Greg McNeilly of The Windquest Group. The Windquest Group is the public face that represents many of the DeVos family interests. McNeilly was part of the DeVos led attempt to alter local government through the group known as the One Kent Coalition.
It seems that the line up MLive has put together is made up of power brokers for corporate and government interests and not one of them represents the interests of working class people or issues like environmental protection, economic justice or racial, gender and LGBT equality.
This is what political pundits mean by both sides of the aisle, people who represent the two parties of the capitalist system. It’s as if another side or point of view doesn’t exist.
Profiting from the Global Food Crisis
This article is re-posted from ZNet. Editor’s Note: While this is article is about one company, it is indicative of neoliberal capitalism as a whole, which is based on profit making and not on human needs. See Raj Patel’s book “Stuffed and Starved.”
Barclays has made as much as half a billion pounds in two years from speculating on food staples such as wheat and soya, prompting allegations that banks are profiting handsomely from the global food crisis.
Barclays is the UK bank with the greatest involvement in food commodity trading and is one of the three biggest global players, along with the US banking giants Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, research from the World Development Movement points out.
Last week the trading giant Glencore was attacked for describing the global food crisis and price rises as a “good” business opportunity.
The extent of Barclays’ involvement in food speculation comes to light as new figures from the World Bank show that global food prices hit an all-time high in July, with poor harvests in the US and Russia pushing up the average worldwide cost of staples by an unprecedented 10 per cent in a month.
The extent of just one bank’s involvement in agricultural markets will add to concerns that food speculation could help push basic prices so high that they trigger a wave of riots in the world’s poorest countries, as staples drift out of their populations’ reach.
Nor has the UK escaped rising food costs. Shop food prices have risen, on average, by 37.9 per cent in the past seven years, according to the Office for National Statistics, as the demands of an increasingly affluent and growing world population strain supply. Oils and fats have soared by 63 per cent in the UK during that period, fish prices by 50.9 per cent, bread and cereals by 36.7 per cent, meat 34.5 per cent and vegetables 41.3 per cent. In April, average UK food prices were 4.2 per cent higher than a year earlier.
Oxfam’s private sector adviser, Rob Nash, said: “The food market is becoming a playground for investors rather than a market place for farmers. The trend of big investors betting on food prices is transforming food into a financial asset while exacerbating the risk of price spikes that hit the poor hardest.”
The World Development Movement report estimates that Barclays made as much as £529m from its “food speculative activities” in 2010 and 2011. Barclays made up to £340m from food speculation in 2010, as the prices of agricultural commodities such as corn, wheat and soya were rising. The following year, the bank made a smaller sum – of up to £189m – as prices fell, WDM said.
The revenues that Barclays and other banks make from trading in everything from wheat and corn to coffee and cocoa, are expected to increase this year, with prices once again on the rise. Corn prices have risen by 45 per cent since the start of June, with wheat jumping by 30 per cent.
Barclays makes most of its “food-speculation” revenues by setting up and managing commodity funds that invest money from pension funds, insurance companies and wealthy individuals in a variety of agricultural products in return for fees and commissions. The bank claims not to invest its own money in such commodities.
Since deregulation allowed the creation of such funds in 2000, institutions such as Barclays have collectively channelled an astonishing $200bn (£126bn) of investment cash into agricultural commodities, according to the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
Barclays’ dominance in commodities trading is thanks to its former chief executive Bob Diamond, who was Britain’s best-paid banking boss until he was forced to resign last month following a £290m fine for attempting to manipulate the Liborinterest rate. As boss of Barclays Capital he boosted trading in agricultural products.
Dealing with the reputational headache associated with high levels of food speculation will be yet another item in the already-bulging in-tray of Antony Jenkins, who was promoted to become Mr Diamond’s replacement on Thursday.
Christine Haigh, policy and campaigns officer at the World Development Movement and one of the analysts behind the research, said: “No doubt the UK’s biggest player in the commodities markets is hoping it will do better this year by cashing in on rising food prices. “Its behaviour risks fuelling a speculative bubble and contributing to hunger and poverty for millions of the world’s poorest people.”
Banks and hedge funds typically argue that speculation makes little or no difference to food prices and volatility and argue, correctly, that no definitive link has been proved. Barclays declined to comment on the amount of money it makes from trading in agricultural commodities yesterday.
The bank defended its actions, pointing out that trading in so-called futures contracts – an agreement to buy or sell a certain quantity of a product, at a given price on an agreed date – helped parties such as farmers and bakers to hedge against the risk of rising or falling prices. “Our clients include investment companies, food producers and consumers who, among other things, seek our help to manage risks.”
Barclays also declined to comment on whether it thought large amounts of speculation pushed up prices and volatility. A spokesman said: “We recognise there is a perception held by some stakeholders that participation in agricultural futures markets by some participants can unduly influence the prices of commodities. As a result, we continue to carefully monitor market trends and any research produced on this subject,” a spokesman said.”
Barclays Capital analysts admitted in a note to clients in February that speculation did push up prices. Barclays said: “The second key driver is that commodity investors have begun allocating to commodities again after beginning 2012 heavily underexposed to the sector.” The other drivers were the “health of the global economy” and “weather and geopolitics”.
A satirical look at environmental criminal Enbridge
We came across this video recently, which does a nice job of altering an Enbridge commercial and inserting their own animation and voice over.
The video was made in response to the new Tar Sands pipelines that Enbridge is contracted to operate in both Canada and the US. The video was made by folks in Vancouver and the spot was originally posted online at “The Province,” a Vancouver newspaper, but under pressure from Enbridge the satirical video was removed.
Enbridge has a long history of environmental crimes, with hundreds of oil spills/leaks all across North America, including the disastrous spill in the Kalamazoo River two summer’s ago.
This Day in Resistance History: the First Labor Day – September 5, 1882
On this day in 1882, an estimated 30,000 people marched in New York City in the first US Labor Day event.
Organized by the Knights of Labor, the event was meant to celebrate the accomplishments of labor unions and to draw attention to the ongoing struggles that workers faced at that time.
The first Labor Day parade was taking place amidst the struggle for an 8 – hour work-day, the right to organize in the workplace and the fight against child labor.
Labor Day celebrations then began popping up all across the country. In 1887, Oregon became the first state to make Labor Day an official holiday and by the time the federal government made it a national holiday in 1894, 23 states had already made it official.
Closer to West Michigan, there is evidence that Labor Day was being celebrated as early as 1886. There is evidence that Labor Day was celebrated in Grand Rapids in 1886 and in Kalamazoo, as is reflected in this picture of workers dressed for the parade.
However, as the years went by, the significance and origin of Labor Day became an issue that reflected the tension between the more radical unions and what some scholars refer to as “business unions.”
Most sources credit the Knights of Labor for organizing the first Labor Day events in many cities across the country, but by the time Labor Day became a federal holiday, there was a dispute about its origin.
The American Federation of Labor (AFL), under the leadership of Samuel Gompers, was claiming that the first Labor Day parade was organized by a member of the AFL in New York. Gompers wanted to give credit to his union for the founding of Labor Day as one more means to demonstrate to the US capitalist class that he was not anti-American.
Gompers believed in the American Capitalist system and never wanted to overthrow it, unlike some of the more radical, international unions of the late 19th and early twentieth century.
The AFL approach most often meant negotiating with company owners and focusing on wages, instead of making stronger demands and using tactics such as strikes and sabotage. This history is well documented in Paul Buhle’s book, Taking Care of Business: Samuel Gompers, George Meany, Lane Kirkland, and the Tragedy of American Labor.
This tension between radical and business unions was also reflected historically as the business unions would not celebrate or commemorate the 1886 Haymarket riot and its holiday on May 1, despite the fact the May 1st had become an international labor holiday.
As union continued to win gains such as the 8-hour work-day, ending child labor, worker compensation and the right to collective bargaining, Labor Day continued to be a celebration of those rights and gains.
After WWII, with the push for greater nationalism in the US, the anti-Communist Red-Scare and the merger of the CIO with the AFL, most of the radical sectors of the labor movement were all but repressed or co-opted. It is at this point that we begin to see a great alliance between big labor and the Democratic Party, which was eventually reflected in the inclusion of partisan politics into Labor Day celebrations.
It is important that we understand this history, not just in some nostalgic sense, but as a framework to move forward and reclaim the radical, independent power of working class people to make change. All of the gains that have been made by labor unions over the years have come about because of direct action – strikes, pickets, boycotts, sabotage and an independent labor press. The victories of organized labor never came about through electoral politics.
Afghanistan’s Base Bonanza: Total Tops Iraq at That War’s Height
This article by Nick Turse is re-posted from ZNet.
Afghanistan may turn out to be one of the great misbegotten “stimulus packages” of the modern era, a construction boom in the middle of nowhere with materials largely shipped in at enormous expense to no lasting purpose whatsoever. With the U.S. military officially drawing down its troops there, the Pentagon is now evidently reversing the process and embarking on a major deconstruction program. It’s tearing up tarmacs, shutting down outposts, and packing up some of its smaller facilities. Next year, the number of International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) coalition bases in the southwest of the country alone is scheduled to plummet from 214 to 70, according to the New York Times.
But anyone who wanted to know just what the Pentagon built in Afghanistan and what it is now tearing down won’t have an easy time of it.
At the height of the American occupation of Iraq, the United States had 505 bases there, ranging from small outposts to mega-sized air bases. Press estimates at the time, however, always put the number at about 300. Only as U.S. troops prepared to leave the country was the actual — startlingly large — total reported. Today, as the U.S. prepares for a long drawdown from Afghanistan, the true number of U.S. and coalition bases in that country is similarly murky, with official sources offering conflicting and imprecise figures. Still, the available numbers for what the Pentagon built since 2001 are nothing short of staggering.
Despite years of talk about American withdrawal, there has in fact been a long-term building boom during which the number of bases steadily expanded. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) claimed that it had nearly 400 Afghan bases. Early this year, that number had grown to 450. Today, a military spokesperson tells TomDispatch, the total tops out at around 550.
And that may only be the tip of the iceberg.
When you add in ISAF checkpoints — those small baselets used to secure roads and villages — to the already bloated number of mega-bases, forward operating bases, combat outposts, and patrol bases, the number jumps to 750. Count all foreign military installations of every type, including logistical, administrative, and support facilities, and the official count offered by ISAF Joint Command reaches a whopping 1,500 sites. Differing methods of counting probably explain at least some of this phenomenal rise over the course of this year. Still, the new figures suggest one conclusion that should startle: no matter how you tally them, Afghan bases garrisoned by U.S.-led forces far exceed the 505 American bases in Iraq at the height of that war.
Bases of Confusion
There is much confusion surrounding the number of ISAF bases in Afghanistan. Recently, the Associated Press reported that as of October 2011, according to spokesman Lieutenant Colonel David Olson, NATO was operating as many as 800 bases in Afghanistan, but has since closed 202 of them and transferred another 282 to Afghan control. As a result, the AP claims that NATO is now operating only about 400 bases, not the 550 to 1,500 bases reported to me by ISAF.
This muddled basing picture and a seeming failure by the U.S. and its international partners to keep an accurate count of their bases in the country has been a persistent feature of the Afghan conflict. Some of the discrepancies may result from terminology or from the confusion that can result from communications in any international coalition. ISAF, NATO, and the U.S. military all seem to keep different counts. Mainly, however, the incongruities appear to stem from fundamental issues of record-keeping — of, in particular, a lack of interest in chronicling just how extensively Afghanistan has been garrisoned.
In January 2010, for example, Colonel Wayne Shanks, an ISAF spokesman, told me that there were nearly 400 U.S. and coalition bases in Afghanistan, including camps, forward operating bases, and combat outposts. He assured me that he only expected that number to increase by 12 or a few more over the course of that year.
In September 2010, I contacted ISAF’s Joint Command Public Affairs Office to follow up. To my surprise, I was told that “there are approximately 350 forward operating bases with two major military installations, Bagram and Kandahar airfields.” Perplexed by the apparent loss of 50 bases instead of a gain of 12, I contacted Gary Younger, a public affairs officer with the International Security Assistance Force. “There are less than 10 NATO bases in Afghanistan,” he wrote in an October 2010 email. “There are over 250 U.S. bases in Afghanistan.”
By then, it seemed, ISAF had lost up to 150 bases and I was thoroughly confused. When I contacted the military to sort out the discrepancies and listed the numbers I had been given — from Shanks’s 400 base tally to the count of around 250 by Younger — I was handed off again and again until I ended up with Sergeant First Class Eric Brown at ISAF Joint Command’s Public Affairs Office. “The number of bases in Afghanistan is roughly 411,” Brown wrote in a November 2010 email, “which is a figure comprised of large base[s], all the way down to the Combat Out Post-level.”
If the numbers supplied by Olson to the Associated Press are to be believed, then between November 2010 and October 2011, the number of foreign military bases in Afghanistan nearly doubled, from 411 to about 800. Then, if official figures are again accurate, those numbers precipitously dropped by nearly 350 in just four months.
In February of this year, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs told me that there were only 451 ISAF bases in Afghanistan. In July, the ISAF Joint Command Press Desk informed me that the number of bases was now 550, 750, or 1,500, depending on what facilities you chose to count, while NATO’s Olson and the Associated Press put the number back down at the January 2010 figure of around 400. TomDispatch did not receive a response to a request for further clarification from a spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan before this article went to press.
Reconciling the numbers may never be possible or particularly edifying. Whatever the true current count of bases, it seems beyond question that the number has far exceeded the level reached in Iraq at the height of the conflict in that country. And while the sheer quantity of ISAF bases in Afghanistan may be shrinking, don’t think deconstruction is all that’s going on. There is still plenty of building underway.
The Continuing Base Build-Up
In 2011, it was hardly more than an empty lot: a few large metal shipping containers sitting on a bed of gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence at Kandahar Air Field, the massive American base in southern Afghanistan. When I asked about it this spring, the military was tight-lipped, refusing to discuss plans for the facility. But construction is ongoing and sometime next year, as I’ve previously reported, that once-vacant lot is slated to be the site of a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center.
The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility under construction is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway there. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing down or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing, as well as a plan for the withdrawal of American combat forces, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram, a gigantic air base about 40 miles north of Kabul. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication, last year. “We’re transitioning… into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”
According to contract solicitation documents released earlier this year and examined by TomDispatch, plans are in the works for a Special Operations Forces’ Joint Operations Center at Kandahar Air Field. The 3,000-square-meter facility — slated to include offices for commanders, conference rooms, training areas, and a secure communications room — will serve as the hub for future special ops missions in southern and western Afghanistan, assumedly after the last U.S. “combat troops” leave the country at the end of 2014.
Thus far in 2012, no fewer than eight contracts have been awarded for the construction of facilities ranging from a command and control center and a dining hall to barracks and a detention center at either Kandahar or Bagram. Just one of these contracts covered seven separate Air Force projects at Bagram that are slated to be completed in 2013, including the construction of a new headquarters facility, a control room, and a maintenance facility for fighter aircraft.
Improvements and expansions are planned for other bases as well. Documents examined by TomDispatch shed light on a $10 to $25 million construction project at Camp Marmal near Mazar-e-Sharif in Balkh Province on the Uzbekistan and Tajikistan borders. Designated as a logistics hub for the north of the country, the base will see a significant expansion of its infrastructure including an increase in fuel storage capacity, new roads, an upgraded water distribution system, and close to 150 acres of space for stowing equipment and other cargo. According to David Lakin, a spokesman for U.S. Forces-Afghanistan, a contract for work on the base will be awarded by the end of the year with an expected completion date in the summer of 2013.
Base World
Even before the new figures on basing in Afghanistan were available, it was known that the U.S. military maintained a global inventory of more than 1,000 foreign bases. (By some counts, around 1,200 or more.) It’s possible that no one knows for sure. Numbers are increasing rapidly in Africa and Latin America and, as is clear from the muddled situation in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has been known to lose count of its facilities.
Of those 505 U.S. bases in Iraq, some today have been stripped clean by Iraqis, others have become ghost towns. One former prison base — Camp Bucca — became a hotel, and another former American post is now a base for some members of an Iranian “terrorist” group. It wasn’t supposed to end this way. But while a token number of U.S. troops and a highly militarized State Department contingent remain in Baghdad, the Iraqi government thwarted American dreams of keeping long-term garrisons in the center of the Middle East’s oil heartlands.
Clearly, U.S. planners are having similar dreams about the long-term garrisoning of Afghanistan. Whether the fate of those Afghan bases will be similar to Iraq’s remains unknown, but with as many as 550 of them still there — and up to 1,500 installations when you count assorted ammunition storage facilities, barracks, equipment depots, checkpoints, and training centers — it’s clear that the U.S. military and its partners are continuing to build with an eye to an enduring military presence.
Whatever the outcome, vestiges of the current base-building boom will endure and become part of America’s Afghan legacy. What that will ultimately mean in terms of blood, treasure, and possibly blowback remains to be seen.
