Karzai Orders All Private Security Disbanded

Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai has ordered that all private (read: voluntary funded) security forces are to be disbanded. This amounts to some 40,000 personnel!

According to antiwar.com,

President Karzai insists he literally objects to the competition that these security groups pose to his government.

“We cannot tolerate these companies, which are like a parallel structure with our forces. We cannot have police, army and — at the same time — another force as private security companies,” Karzai said in a statement.

Realism, taken to its logical end, is non-interventionist.

I have a new piece up over at the Daily Caller about why I believe a realist foreign policy is in fact heavily non-interventionist, despite what many advocates of our current wars in the Middle East might say.

...when followed to its logical end, the realist school of internationalist relations which so many use to justify the American presence all over the world is in fact one of the greatest arguments against our current foreign policy.  I do not argue against America’s wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan because I think that we would all just get along if these wars ceased to happen.  I argue against these wars because I come from a perspective that sees the people we are fighting as human beings with the same base motivations as myself, and when these people see their livelihood threatened, they take the best course of action that they can find, which unfortunately often involves siding with whatever group holds the most regional power.

Number of Troops in Afghanistan Surpasses Iraq

For the first time since the 2003 U.S invasion of Iraq, the number of troops in Afghanistan has officially surpassed than those in Iraq, according to Pentagon officials. I guess the Iraq War is now officially the forgotten war.

Whether we do agree with Obama's policies or not, we can most definitely say he was finally kept one campaign promise: escalating the War in Afghanistan (and extending further to Pakistan, some could say). Since Obama took office, there are more troops now in those two regions then there were when he first came in office.

Even though the current administration has been withdrawing some troops in Iraq, there are still about 92,000 troops currently based there -- of course this does not include civil servants, private contractors, and other significant peoples.

Amid the military strains in result of these two wars, both  Iraq and Afganistan still remains to be extremely corrupt and dangerous countries to live in. It is no doubt that the current approach to peace in Central Asia and the Middle East is a joke and will remain to be a joke. As violence escalates in Afghanistan and political chaos in Iraq, there is little hope for Afghans, Iraqis, and of course our wounded GIs.

Petition to End the Wars Month: Wichita State

Wichita State held a Petition to End the Wars event this past Wednesday and Thursday.  They were able to interact with a number of students; Wichita State YAL's president, Andrew Cranmer, wrote an account of the event here.

Here are some highlights:

File Attachments
Wichita_State_Report.pdf	67.48 KB