Democracy for Vancouver

Things are rapidly devolving in Afghanistan back to the bad old days of Taliban-Northern Alliance violence, with the added target of U.S. troops in the middle:

Insurgent attacks have put US and NATO forces on the defensive in eastern Afghanistan, an area recently touted as a counter-insurgency success but now a focus of spreading insecurity, analysts say.

In the latest attack, at least nine US soldiers were killed Sunday when insurgents stormed a remote combat outpost in Kunar province near Pakistan.

It was the deadliest attack against US forces since 2005, but it followed a trend of bolder and more capable insurgent operations…

And funnily enough, coalition casualties have increased every year since 2004, when the impact of Bush’s starving our military in Afghanistan to feed the maw of the illegal Iraq war began to do its worst. From iCasualties.org:

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Increasingly concerned about the rising violence, the Pentagon has begun shifting the weight of its combat operations to Afghanistan but within constraints on available forces imposed by the war in Iraq.
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Currently there are 36,000 US troops in Afghanistan, and 150,000 in Iraq, the Pentagon said.

So not only has BushCo put our troops in harm’s way killing them by the thousands, and Iraqis by the hundreds of thousands (for political capital or oil or greed or pick your cynical Machiavellian motive), but it’s negligently killing and maiming our troops in the one place we did have a legitimate motive and opportunity to arguably* stop another 9/11 and perhaps change things for the better.

And things will just keep getting worse as long as we’re in Iraq:

The sense that the war is shifting in the Taliban’s favor in the east also undermines support for NATO forces in the area, [Sam Brannen, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies] said.

“The tribes in that region are notorious for shifting allegiances. And the winning party, whoever is on top, enjoys their support,” he said.

“I think you’re seeing a growth in the number of recruits of young men who are joining up for the jihad…”

Rep. Dennis Kucinich is asking for your support on his single impeachment count, on the illegality of the Iraq war, that is currently before the House (and which Nancy Pelosi and John Conyers have said might get hearings). Please add your name to his impeachment petition here, and Rep. Kucinich will send a copy with signatures by their district to each of his fellow 434 Congress-men and -women. Perhaps when each Rep. sees how many of their constituents want impeachment, Pelosi will pull her head out of … the sand.

Bush is bound to pardon anyone and everyone involved in the criminal enterprise that is BushCo as a Christmas gift to his supporters this December. The only way to stop him is to have him under impeachment before he begins the pardon parade (as impeachment strips the president of his pardon powers).

Maybe we’ll be able to see some justice after all.

*I say arguably because obviously some believe this particular government could never have done well, or done good, no matter what the legitimacy or motivation, and others believe that our invasion of Afghanistan was simply punishing the populace for the blowback from our own actions in Afghanistan in the 80s.