Ideas to Help Afghans/Refugees Here in Wisconsin and Beyond

Wisconsin Department of Children and Families

“Refugees arrive with little beyond the clothes they are wearing and often are very unfamiliar with American ways of life. You can make a real difference by offering your time, skills and gifts to help welcome new Wisconsin residents from a refugee background. ”

How you can help refugees from Afghanistan

Refugee Programs

Online Resource Center for Afghan Refugees and SIVs

No One Left Behind is the only nationwide nonprofit committed to ensuring that America keeps its promise to our allies and their families

“If you are interested in volunteering to assist with wellness activities for children and their families or know an attorney who is interested in providing pro bono legal assistance, please contact… Lisha Loo-Morgan at [email protected], call (732) 642-9031

Afghan Refugees Humanitarian Crisis

for more information try About Face: Veterans Against the War or Veterans for Peace

Uninvited: Sen. Baldwin Denies Access to Constituents Who Oppose the War Machine

Tammy Baldwin Denies Access to Fundraiser Ticketholders Who Have Been Vocal Against the F-35 Bomber Deployment in Madison
By Amy Anderson, Aug 26, 2021

[pictures & links – bottom]
The latest battle to stop the planned F-35 bomber deployment to Air National Guard’s Truax Field in Madison took place at the entrance to Senator Tammy Baldwin’s annual summer BBQ fundraiser last Sunday, August 22^nd. Held at the picturesque Fields Reserve reception barn on a wooded hill near Lake Kegonsa, some residents came to express their alarm and dismay about the harm to the Madison community that they say the stationing of these jets would bring.

However, several constituents who had paid for entry to the $50-$1000 fundraiser received email cancellations and refunds of their donations from the event staff just one day prior to the event. The seven constituents were all members of Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin, a group calling for the halt of F-35s coming to Madison.

These seven individuals came despite the cancellation but were not allowed in as eight security officers and three Dane County sheriff deputies guarded the driveway. So instead they joined the picket organized by the No F35 Action Faction, who brought 35 local residents to picket and pass out flyers. Donors attending the event waited in lines in their cars, sometimes for 15 minutes or longer while a single event staff person checked tickets against a list of names to determine if each passenger was on the approved list for entry.

One of the most vocal members denied entry was Tom Berman, a northside
homeowner for 37 years who has also operated a small business there for 32 years.
He expressed desperation that his beloved home and place of business will be
officially condemned as being within an “uninhabitable” zone once the F-35 jets
arrive and the frequent practice drills begin.

He quotes the Air Force’s Environmental Impact Statement that there are already 6222 sorties planned each year for the F-35s once they arrive in 2023. This is a 27% rise over current flights from Truax Field. He explained that the noise levels from takeoff of F-35s are traumatic to humans and more than four times louder than the F-16s which currently regularly practice over Madison’s east and northside.

David Williams from the No F35 Action Faction called the blacklisting of Madison residents from the event a sad but unsurprising disappointment in light of the Senator’s continued stonewalling against the growing voices from her own hometown against this deployment. “Our original picket slogan was We should not have to pay to be heard. But now we realize that even for those purchasing a ticket, we still don’t get to be heard.”

Mr. Berman reports that after the event was over Senator Baldwin did stop and let him give her his letter on her way out, saying she would have one of her staff get back to him.

The Safe Skies and Action Faction groups have been working for over two years to raise public awareness and to pressure Senator Baldwin, who has been a supporter of deploying F-35s in Madison rather than a sparsely populated area where it would be easier to mitigate the impacts.

Objections to the F-35 deployment include:

regular traumatic and unhealthy noise levels for Madison residents
the expense and hardship of relocating multiple Madison residents
decrease in property values for east and northside residents
impacts will affect low-income and minority populations the most
increase of PFAS “forever” chemicals commonly used in firefighting drills at Truax which have already contaminated local waterways and many municipal wells
the well-documented dubiety of the F-35s as a military investment
the danger of bringing these nuclear-capable planes to Madison
the escalation of out-of-control military spending and endless war

Find Safe Skies Clean Water Wisconsin and sign up for updates.

Like No F-35s Action Faction on Facebook, and they welcome people to join the cause.

America’s Afghan War: A Defeat Foretold? by Adam Nossiter

August 21, 2021 | Adam Nossiter | New York Times

Adam Nossiter is the Kabul bureau chief for the NY Times.

original link …

America’s Afghan War: A Defeat Foretold? by Adam Nossiter

Intercept: Top Defense [War Crime] Profits

Open Secrets: Last Afghan Contracts

“It was 8 a.m. and the sleepy Afghan sergeant stood at what he called the front line, one month before the city of Kunduz fell to the Taliban. An unspoken agreement protected both sides. There would be no shooting.

That was the nature of the strange war the Afghans just fought, and lost, with the Taliban.

President Biden and his advisers say the Afghan military’s total collapse proved its unworthiness, vindicating the American pullout. But the extraordinary melting away of government and army, and the bloodless transition in most places so far, point to something more fundamental.

The war the Americans thought they were fighting against the Taliban was not the war their Afghan allies were fighting. That made the American war, like other such neocolonialist adventures, most likely doomed from the start.

Recent history shows it is foolish for Western powers to fight wars in other people’s lands, despite the temptations. Homegrown insurgencies, though seemingly outmatched in money, technology, arms, air power and the rest, are often better motivated, have a constant stream of new recruits, and often draw sustenance from just over the border.

Outside powers are fighting one war as visitors — occupiers — and their erstwhile allies who actually live there, something entirely different. In Afghanistan, it was not good versus evil, as the Americans saw it, but neighbor against neighbor.

When it comes to guerrilla war, Mao once described the relationship that should exist between a people and troops. “The former may be likened to water,” he wrote, “the latter to the fish who inhabit it.”

And when it came to Afghanistan, the Americans were a fish out of water. Just as the Russians had been in the 1980s. Just as the Americans were in Vietnam in the 1960s. And as the French were in Algeria in the 1950s. And the Portuguese during their futile attempts to keep their African colonies in the ’60s and ’70s. And the Israelis during their occupation of southern Lebanon in the ’80s.

Each time the intervening power in all these places announced that the homegrown insurgency had been definitively beaten, or that a corner had been turned, smoldering embers led to new conflagrations.

The Americans thought they had defeated the Taliban by the end of 2001. They were no longer a concern. But the result was actually far more ambiguous.

“Most had essentially melted away, and we weren’t sure where they’d gone,” wrote Brig. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, as quoted by the historian Carter Malkasian in a new book, “The American War in Afghanistan.”

In fact, the Taliban were never actually beaten. Many had been killed by the Americans, but the rest simply faded into the mountains and villages, or across the border into Pakistan, which has succored the movement since its inception.

By 2006, they had reconstituted sufficiently to launch a major offensive. The end of the story played out in the grim and foreordained American humiliation that unfolded over the past week — the consecration of the U.S. military loss.

“In the long run all colonial wars are lost,” the historian of Portugal’s misadventures in Africa, Patrick Chabal, wrote 20 years ago, just as the Americans were becoming fatally embroiled in Afghanistan.

The superpower’s two-decade entanglement and ultimate defeat was all the more surprising in that the America of the decades preceding the millennium had been suffused with talk of the supposed “lessons” of Vietnam.

The dominant one was enunciated by the former majority leader of the Senate, Mike Mansfield, in the late 1970s: “The cost was 55,000 dead, 303,000 wounded, $150 billion,” Mansfield told a radio interviewer. “It was unnecessary, uncalled-for, it wasn’t tied to our security or a vital interest. It was just a misadventure in a part of the world which we should have kept our nose out of.”

Long before, at the very beginning of the “misadventure,” in 1961, President John F. Kennedy had been warned off Vietnam by no less an authority than Charles de Gaulle. “I predict that you will sink step by step into a bottomless military and political quagmire, however much you spend in men and money,” de Gaulle, the French president, later recalled telling Kennedy.

The American ignored him. In words that foreshadowed both the Vietnam and Afghan debacles, de Gaulle warned Kennedy: “Even if you find local leaders who in their own interests are prepared to obey you, the people will not agree to it, and indeed do not want you.”

‘We can’t bomb our way out of a pandemic’

John Nichols | ‘We can’t bomb our way out of a pandemic,’ says Pentagon critic Mark Pocan

24 August 2021
Cap Times

Original Link

“U.S. Rep. Mark Pocan is a voice of sanity amidst all the partisan wrangling over the messy withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan.

Of course, he’s been frustrated by the disorderly evacuation process, and he has been outspoken in arguing for the rapid resettlement of refugees.

“The United States has a duty to honor its commitment to the Afghanis who helped our efforts, such as guides and translators,” he said. “We must ensure these refugees are allowed to reach our shores as safely and as quickly as possible.”

Yet he remains a thoughtful supporter of the decision to end the U.S. mission in Afghanistan.

A longtime critic of U.S. military adventurism, Pocan supports the withdrawal as an acknowledgement of the reality that nation building of the sort that was initiated almost two decades ago by the administration of Vice President Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush was never going to work.

“You can’t go into a country like Afghanistan and expect to leave it with Dunkin Donuts and Disneylands,” he said. “And too often I think that that is what we try to do.”

What should we do?

While neocon hawks like Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney argue that the United States must remain a global police officer, occupying distant lands — including Afghanistan — conservatives of a more isolationist bent, such as Tucker Carlson, are warning against welcoming refugees from Afghanistan with the crude claim of, “First we invade, then we’re invaded.”

Pocan rejects each approach as wrongheaded and proposes an enlightened internationalism. He wants to use this moment to begin shaping a new approach to foreign policy that moves the United States away from reactive militarism and toward the diplomatic and humanitarian responses that forge a safer and more secure world.

The former Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chair, who now co-chairs the Defense Spending Reduction Caucus, has introduced the COVID Defense Act, a plan to transfer 1.3% of U.S. military spending to global vaccination efforts.

The $9.6 billion shift in spending priorities, while small in the context of the Pentagon’s $740.5 billion budget, would more than double the amount of money available for vaccine production, procurement and distribution internationally. This move, Pocan explains, could enable perhaps another 30% of the world’s vulnerable population to have access to a COVID-19 vaccine. Doing that would curtail the spread of variants that threaten everyone.

“We can’t bomb our way out of a global pandemic,” the congressman said. “Right now, COVID is the greatest risk to our national security, as well as the world’s security. Shifting funds from weaponry and military contractors to producing COVID vaccines will save hundreds of thousands — if not millions — of lives around the world. At a time when America spends more on its military than the next 11 closest nations combined, we should be able to sacrifice a little over 1% of that to save lives, build global goodwill and actually make the world a safer, healthier place.”

Yes. Cut the spending on profiteering waste and fraud. It is wrong for the US government to violate the rights of other people.

The US government is a gangster, not the world police. Murdering people to steal their resources or other reasons is a violation of their natural rights, human rights and likely their legal rights. Americans are not the only people who enjoy liberty.

#WarIsARacket

#Accountability for all.

~ Ratified Treaties have the POWER of US law ~

“This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

~ Charter of the United Nations ~

Chapter VII — Action with respect to Threats to the Peace, Breaches of the Peace, and Acts of Aggression

~ Convention II Article 2 Geneva Conventions ~

Shatter the Myths of Empire – Matt McKenna