Dan Froomkin: Obama's War Supplemental: Recent Reports Strengthen The Case Against It

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Obama's War Supplemental: Recent Reports Strengthen The Case Against It
Dan Froomkin

First Posted: 05-24-10 01:19 PM | Updated: 05-24-10 06:50 PM

Members of Congress with any inclination to balk at President Obama's massive emergency war-funding request have found their case strengthened by two recent reports that question many of the administration's key premises and assumptions.

The reports from the Congressional Research Service and Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction raise concerns ranging from the existential to the procedural.

Just for starters, there's the lack of an exit strategy, signs of a slipping timeframe for troop drawdowns and the mixed results thus far of the troop "surge." There's also the matter of seemingly unrealistic goals for training Afghan security forces, poor planning of infrastructure projects, pervasive corruption within the Afghan government and the lack of contracting oversight. Finally there's the concern that some of the individual funding requests seem inflated, in certain areas the Pentagon isn't spending the money it already has and billions of dollars in requests don't appear to genuinely qualify as emergency spending -- the only thing Obama vowed he would ever use an emergency spending bill for again.

The Senate is expected to vote on the budget request this week, and possibly even as early as Monday. The House is expected to vote after the Memorial Day break.

The supplemental is primarily intended to pay for the 30,000-troop surge that Obama announced in December, after he had already submitted his Fiscal Year 2010 budget. The defense-related parts of Obama's supplemental consist of $33 billion for the Pentagon and $4.5 billion in war-related foreign aid. Of that $37.5 billion total, $32 billion would go specifically to Afghanistan, with the rest going to Iraq, Pakistan and to defray the Pentagon's increased fuel costs.

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Meanwhile, as HuffPost's Ryan Grim reported on Friday, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) is working to persuade his colleagues to vote against the supplemental if it isn't paid for, "threatening to rebuild a left-right coalition that nearly took down the last war funding measure Democrats pushed through Congress."

On the House side, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has warned that getting it passed will be a "heavy lift."

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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/05/24/obamas-war-supplemental-r_n_587325.html

[NodQuestion]

1. One problem

Terrorism still exist. I'm not really a war monger, but we have a history of doing things like this, namely fucking up countries and leaving them in tatters. A decade from now maybe even a year later there will be another attack on the US. I really wish we could get th ejob done in the region, at least to slow down a future attack, but this war seems utterly un-winnable. Maybe asking Pakistan to step up and drawing down to a few thousand advisors for training might work, but probably not. Karzai is trying to make a deal, but he really only controls a city block at most. This doesn't even address how the country is becoming a narco-state that we're implicitly condoning. This is really just one big cluster fuck that will result in my generation having to deal with a future attack because everyone over forty sold out and did nothing why the country fell apart. Enjoy your tax cuts you fucks.

[msongs]

2. thanks for sharing. have a nice day. nt