President Obama has committed himself and his Administration from the beginning of his presidency to a foreign policy that ensures the safety of the American people. But he also refuses the false division between our values and our security; the United States can be true to our values and ideals while also protecting the American people. We will use all elements of American power to achieve objectives, and consult closely with the Congress so that our policies may have the broad and bipartisan support that makes them most effective. Finally, while there are instances and individuals who can be met only by force, the United States will be prepared to listen to and talk with our adversaries in order to advance our interests.

Refocusing on the Threat from al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan

Following an intensive 60-day interagency review, on March 27, 2009, the President announced a new strategy with a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. The strategy is comprehensive and flexible and will need to be fully resourced. In addition to the new troops the President has chosen to deploy, the strategy calls for significantly more resources to the civilian effort and frequent evaluations of our progress.

Responsibly Ending the War in Iraq

On February 27, 2009, President Obama announced a plan to responsibly end the war in Iraq.

By August 31, 2010, our combat mission in Iraq will end and Iraqi Security Forces will have full responsibility for major combat missions. After August 31, 2010, the mission of United States forces in Iraq will fundamentally change. Our forces will have three tasks: train, equip, and advise the Iraqi Security Forces; conduct targeted counterterrorism operations; and provide force protection for military and civilian personnel. The President intends to keep our commitment under the Status of Forces Agreement to remove all of our troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Keeping Nuclear Weapons Out of the Hands of Terrorists

On April 5, 2009 in Prague, President Obama presented an ambitious strategy to address the international nuclear threat. He proposed measures to: reduce and eventually eliminate existing nuclear arsenals, including negotiations on further nuclear reductions with Russia, ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, and completion of a verified Fissile Material Cutoff Treaty; halt proliferation of nuclear weapons to additional states, and prevent terrorists from acquiring nuclear weapons or materials.

We have pledged to work with our partners to achieve the denuclearization of North Korea through the Six-Party process. And we will present a clear choice to Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations, including its right to peaceful nuclear energy, or continue to refuse to meet its international obligations and fail to seize the opportunity of a positive future.

Promoting Peace and Security in Israel and the Middle East

The President believes that we cannot afford to wait to work for peace in the region, so he appointed a Special Envoy for Middle East peace on his second day in office. In the Middle East, we share the goal of a lasting peace between Israel and its neighbors. The United States strongly supports the goal of two states, Israel and a Palestinian state, living side by side in peace and security. The President has committed himself and his Administration to actively pursuing this goal.

Re-energizing America’s Alliances

The United States seeks to engage in dialogue that is honest and grounded in mutual respect, as the best way to resolve disagreements and work towards shared interests. We are committed to strengthening existing partnerships and building new ones to confront the challenges of the 21st century.

• On his first trip overseas, the President visited Europe to begin this process, with the G-20 Summit, the 60th Anniversary NATO Summit, and the U.S-E.U. Summit.
• The President made clear in his speech to the Turkish Parliament that America’s relationship with the Muslim world will be based on more than our shared opposition to terrorism. We seek broader engagement based on mutual interest and mutual respect.
• The United States seeks to strengthen our historic alliances in Asia while developing deeper bonds with all nations of the region, so that we might work together to confront the challenges of the 21st Century, including proliferation, climate change, pandemics and economic instability.

Maintaining Core American Values

Every challenge is more easily met if we tend to our own democratic foundation. This is why the President ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed, prohibited — without exception or equivocation — the use of torture, and set up a Special Task Force to thoroughly review detainee policy.

Sudan

Ending the crisis in Darfur and ensuring Sudan’s long-term stability through the implementation of the Comprehensive Peace Agreement is a top priority for the Obama Administration. The humanitarian crisis there makes our task all the more urgent. The President has appointed a Special Envoy for Sudan as a strong signal of his commitment to support the people of Sudan. We are committed to working with the international community to end the suffering, seek a lasting settlement to the violence, and ensure a stable and secure future for the region.

Restoring American Leadership in Latin America

The future of the United States is inextricably bound to the future of the people of the Americas. We are committed to a new era of partnership with countries throughout the hemisphere, working on key shared challenges of economic growth and equality, our energy and climate futures, and regional and citizen security. We are committed to shaping that future through engagement that is strong, sustained, meaningful, and based on mutual respect.

Ensuring Energy Security and Fighting Climate Change

The President has committed to put America on a path to a clean energy economy that improves our energy security, reduces our use of fossil fuels, and drives a new era of American innovation. The United States recognizes the need to break from old ways that threaten our economy and our planet and the President has committed to investing $150 billion in clean energy research and development over ten years. The United States will be a leader in addressing global climate change both by making contributions of our own and engaging other countries to do the same.

Source:  http://www.whitehouse.gov/issues/foreign_policy/

Mahek is one of five Pakistani students on an exchange programme here. But it’s her second visit to India and, in her own words; she is ‘enjoying every bit of it’. |

‘We reached India day before yesterday and went to Mumbai. I find Mumbai very much like Lahore. It’s a great city. Same is with Delhi,’ the young student of King Edward Medical College in Lahore, told IANS.

Mahek was part of the student exchange programme organized by Seeds of Peace, an organization that aims to empower young leaders in regions of conflict in the Middle East and South Asia. It was formed in 1993.

All praise for the nature of the initiative, Clinton said: ‘I am very happy that students of Seeds of Peace are here today. Students of India and Pakistan can sow seeds to transcend boundaries.’

From the day he took office six months ago, however, Obama has made the search for peace between Israelis and Palestinians a priority, appointing George Mitchell as special envoy, seeking to engage Arab states more closely in the peace process and traveling to Cairo to deliver a major address to the Muslim world.

The president’s efforts have already produced results, notably Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s explicit acceptance, for the first time, of a two-state solution and a significant improvement in popular attitudes to the US in the Arab world.

Obama’s initiative moved into a new phase this week with Mitchell’s second visit to Damascus, promising Syria an easing of US economic sanctions and the arrival in Israel of some of the administration’s top national security officials, including defense secretary Bob Gates and national security adviser Jim Jones.

Obama views the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a US national security interest that could help Washington realize other policy goals in the Middle East. These include preventing Iran from developing a nuclear weapons capability and securing the stability of Iraq after US forces withdraw.

Administration officials believe the window of opportunity for agreeing a two-state solution is a narrow one, making the push for a comprehensive settlement an urgent priority.

“Our goal is to bring to this region, and to all of its people, an opportunity to live in peace and dignity,” Mitchell told reporters in Damascus on Sunday.

“If we are to succeed, we will need Arabs and Israelis alike to work with us to bring about comprehensive peace.”

Publicly, the diplomatic effort has been dominated by a noisy dispute between the Obama administration and Netanyahu’s right-wing government over Washington’s demand that Israel freeze the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank. A settlement freeze is one of Israel’s obligations under the 2002 “road map” agreed with the international quartet made up of the US, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations.

The US administration’s tough line on settlements, which Netanyahu has rejected, has contributed to a perception among some Israelis that Obama is abandoning Washington’s traditional support for the Jewish state. One recent poll found that just 6 per cent of Israelis considered the Obama administration to be pro-Israel, while 50 per cent said its policies are more pro-Palestinian than pro-Israeli.

At a pro-settler rally in Jerusalem this week, Rabbi Eliezer Waldman told more than 1,000 demonstrators that Obama was a “racist” who was picking a fight with Israel to enhance his standing in the Muslim world.

“How dare he tell the Jews where they can or can’t live? The era when Jews were banned from living in different places has ended,” the rabbi said.

Far from being hostile to Israel, Obama stands firmly within the US political mainstream that views Israel as Washington’s indispensable ally in the Middle East. He remains hugely popular among American Jews and when he hosted Jewish groups at the White House this month, none expressed outright opposition to his policy on the settlements. Mainstream Jewish and pro-Israel groups in the US, including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have never campaigned in defense of settlement activity, which the international community condemns as illegal.

Obama remains unequivocally committed to Israel’s national security but he has been more willing than his predecessors to acknowledge the legitimate aspirations and grievances of the Palestinians.

Source: IRISHTIMES.COM – by DENIS STAUNTON  Thursday, July 30, 2009

But now 87,000, or 36 percent, of those weapons are missing and unaccounted for, largely because of a lack of accountability guidelines and weak safe-keeping practices, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report.

The GAO said the U.S. Army Security Assistance Command and the U.S. Navy have spent about $120 million to buy 242,203 weapons, including rifles (117,163), pistols (62,055), machine guns (35,778), grenade launchers (18,656), shotguns (6,704), rocket-propelled grenade launchers (1,620), mortars, and other weapons (227).

In addition to the 87,000 missing weapons,  the serial numbers or other records of an estimated 135,000 weapons donated by 21 other countries also were nowhere to be found, according to the GAO.

On Jan. 30, the GAO released a report that scrutinizes the abilities of the Defense Department and ANSF to fully account for U.S.-obtained weapons as well as the ability of Afghan forces to safeguard those weapons.

The U.S. donated its share of weapons as part of the Defense Department’s Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A), which aims to provide training and equipment to ANSF. The U.S. Department of State played a role in supporting this effort as well.

“Our point that we’re highlighting is the fact that there is insufficient accountability to ensure any of the weapons,” Charles M. Johnson, GAO’s director of international affairs and trade, told CNSNews.com. “We’re raising accountability over quite a few weapons.”

On Feb.12, Johnson testified about the Jan. 30 report before the House subcommittee on national and foreign affairs – part of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

OF the 135,000 weapons donated by the international community, valued at about $103 million, probably “80 or 90 percent of those were AK-47s,” Johnson told Congress.

Insurgents in Afghanistan commonly use the Russian-designed AK-47 assault rifle to attack U.S. troops.

Weapons that are not accounted for have the potential to end up in the wrong hands, posing a threat to the U.S forces in Afghanistan.

“If these weapons were to end up in the hands of our enemy forces, it would create a war situation,” Johnson told CNSNews.com.

Source: cnsnews.com.

Villagers in some districts have taken up arms against foreign troops to protect their homes or in anger after losing relatives in airstrikes, several community representatives interviewed said. Others have been moved to join the insurgents out of poverty or simply because the Taliban’s influence is so pervasive here.

On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. The Marines are part of a larger deployment of additional troops being ordered by the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, to concentrate not just on killing Taliban fighters but on protecting the population.

Source: www.nytimes.com.

The Defense Department cannot account for 14,030 weapons — almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003, according to a report from the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The missing semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns and other weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided — less than 3 percent.

The Pentagon spent $133 million on the weapons with the aim of helping Iraq’s ministries of defense and interior restore some badly needed security and public order to the country. Military officials insisted the weapons either had to be new or never issued to a previous soldier.

By December, the U.S. military had planned to put those weapons in the hands of 325,500 personnel.

Missing from its inventory books were 13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns, according to the audit requested by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

The audit says there was no way of knowing whether the missing weapons were ever issued to Iraqi security forces, which also lack many needed spare parts, technical repair manuals and arms maintenance personnel.

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com.

Pressing weapons firmly into the wrong hands

The U.S. sells weapons or training to almost 90% of the countries it has identified as harboring terrorists… with as much as 1/3 going to human rights violators.  more

Source: http://www.globalissues.org/article/74.

A World Policy Institute (WPI) report found that the majority of American arms sales are to governments that have been declared undemocratic by the U.S. State Department. A majority of the world’s active conflicts have also been supplied by U.S. goods and services. “Billions of U.S. arms sales to Afghanistan in the 1980s ended up empowering Islamic fundamentalist fighters across the globe,” states William D. Hartung, director of the WPI’s Arms Trade Resource Center. “Our current policy of arming unstable regimes could have similarly disastrous consequences, with U.S.-supplied weapons falling into the hands of terrorists, insurgents, or hostile governments.” The U.S. government also has a consistent record of supporting governments with histories of serious human rights abuses, such as Colombia, Turkey and Uzbekistan.  more

Source: “Lords of War: U.S. Arms Trade,” the Rutherford Institute, July 17, 2006, http://rutherford.org/articles_db/commentary.asp?record_id=418.

Here’s how the U.S. troops who witnessed the looting described it to the Los Angeles Times:

“We were running from one side of the compound to the other side, trying to kick people out,” said one senior noncommissioned officer who was at the site in late April 2003. “On our last day there, there were at least 100 vehicles waiting at the site for us to leave” so they could come in and loot munitions.

“It was complete chaos. It was looting like L.A. during the Rodney King riots,” another officer said.

The soldiers said about a dozen U.S. troops guarding the sprawling facility could not prevent the theft of the explosives because they were outnumbered by looters.

The only consolation was that while al Qaqaa did contain massive quantities of materials suitable for nuclear detonators, Iraq didn’t have a nuclear weapon to detonate. Nor, it would turn out, did it have a program to develop such a weapon. But presumably Donald Rumsfeld hadn’t known that. And that’s just one of the reasons why it was so infuriating that he didn’t give the military the resources it needed to secure the site. As one weapon expert said of al Qaqaa:

“This is not just any old warehouse in Iraq that happened to have explosives in it; this was a leading location for developing nuclear weapons before the first Gulf War. The fact that it had been left unsecured is very, very discouraging. It would be like invading the U.S. in order to get rid of WMD and not securing Los Alamos.”

Source: Al Franken:  The Truth (with Jokes) page 246.

United States soldiers now fighting the remnants of Saddam’s regime can look back to the early 1980s for the start of a relationship that fostered the rise of the largest military in the Middle East, one whose use of chemical weapons set the stage for last year’s invasion.

Reagan, determined to check arch-foe Iran, opened a back door to Iraq through which flowed US intelligence and hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees – even as Washington professed neutrality in Baghdad’s war with Tehran.

It was complemented by French weaponry and German dual-use technology that experts say wound up in Iraq’s chemical and biological warfare programmes.

Donald Rumsfeld, then Reagan’s special Middle East envoy, is credited with establishing the back channel to Saddam on a secret trip to Baghdad in December 1983.

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/general/news/newsprint.php, By Jim Mannion.

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About Time

Imagine a global economy offering fair opportunities to everyone and hope of a better future for all of our children. Efforts to attain that dream will do more to stop terrorism and avoid war than would any homeland security system or deadly weapon.

The United States’ oldest secular pacifist organization, the War Resisters League has been resisting war at home and war abroad since 1923. Their work for nonviolent revolution has spanned decades and been shaped by the new visions and strategies of each generation’s peacemakers. Their political influences span the globe; central are the teachings of the Indian leader, Mohandas Gandhi, and of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., pacifist-feminist activist and theorist Barbara Deming, labor organizer Cesar Chavez, and peace agitators A.J. Muste and Dave Dellinger.

What do they Do?

Today, as one of the leading radical voices in the antiwar movement, The War Resisters challenge military recruitment, organize and train for nonviolent direct action, and offer on-the-ground education. They believe that, in the words of A.J. Muste, “There is no way to peace — peace is the way.

How can you help?

A major part of all of their programs is to help people organize in their own communities, where real change begins. The War Resisters staff and members offer nonviolence and direct action training that helps groups develop strategic nonviolent campaigns and the skills they need to create change. We train people in civil disobedience, war tax resistance, and other ways to put revolutionary nonviolence into action.

For more information please visit www.warresisters.org.